The ideal thread implementation is in Flowdock (which not many people have heard of or use), but it's really the best of both worlds. Everything is a single stream of messages, and you can optionally group things as threads. There is a really nice blending of the two. Here's their implementation and you can see how well this works in practice. http://blog.flowdock.com/2017/08/31/the-1-customer-request-h...
Far far better than other abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.
> abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.
I'm not usually a defender of Slack but this is one of the things I _like_ about Slack threads. Typically in our rooms every discussion is a thread and if I'm not concerned with that particular discussion there's only ever one message and notification I need to dismiss. If I _am_ concerned with it I can opt in to reply notifications with two clicks.
I like how Slack hides threads. But I do have a few complaints.
I don't like that you can't come back later, select a bunch of messages or threads and say "Group into a thread" to clean up people not using threads.
Also I kind of hate when it's a week later and someone responds to a thread and you get pinged, but can't find where you got pinged from without clicking the dynamic group to see all thread activity.
Also, it really annoys me that threads open on the right with the text entry on the lower right when toast notifications on Windows pop up on the lower right, too. Great, now whenever someone replies I get a toast popup blocking me from seeing what I'm typing. Thanks, guys. Sure, that only happens on one monitor, but that's also the same monitor that I want my toast notifications and my Slack to be on because it's where I'm often looking.
I wish Slack had a notion of Threadmaster(s) on a channel who could drag other people's messages into and out of threads. Because with people who aren't familiar with Slack or aren't committed to threading, you end up with a split brain between the conversation in the thread and the conversation at the top level. I get that it's hard from a permissioning perspective since anyone can create a public channel, but this should be a solvable problem.
They fixed your second problem with the thread tab, which shows all threads you are part of. I find that pretty convenient since it sorts threads by the latest message added, not sorted chronologically by the first message like it is in the normal view.
I also think it's problematic (and, granted this might be more on users than slack) - that a thread off an @here comment pings everyone in existence on every reply. Maybe I just wish our admins would turn off @here for general usage though ;P
Same here, if you don't hide the thread then what's the point? Some technical discussions in our team board last for hundred of messages, without threads it would be really hard to follow the channel, especially with multiple discussions going at the same time.
If you've used Flowdock, the point is that you can
focus by going into the thread, by but you can also just view all the messages as they come in so that you're not missing anything on a channel.
People also learn to use threads quite fast. You can rethread comments if they don't have a reply yet (they are not in any thread yet).
I'm sure this is an atypical use case, but I found the hidden threads really useful for creating spoiler threads about TV shows/movies/etc. All discussion about the topic can stay inside the thread, and folks who want to avoid spoilers can simply avoid clicking on the thread.
I'm not familiar with the accessibility, but this seems more like Slack needing to make the feature more accessible than saying that the feature is bad.
Indeed! So good to find someone else who had this experience. We went from Flowdock => Slack on a fully distributed team of ~20 engineers, total staff size of ~40. Flowdock threading was night-and-day so much better than Slack threading. It was such a stark difference, everyone noticed. What's so maddening about this is that I'll bring it up to anyone who will listen, and they'll think I'm just nostalgic, or a curmudgeon against all new things. But no, Flowdock simply did threads better. And you had to use both, for awhile, on real teams, to "feel" the difference. (Screenshots can't really convey it.) If you were on a scaled team using Flowdock before adopting Slack, it would have been totally obvious to you.
And yes, to the point of someone else on this HN thread, the closest thing to Flowdock threads on the market today in a semi-popular chat product is Zulip "Topics", as described here: https://zulip.com/help/about-streams-and-topics -- the difference is that Zulip forces threads to be labeled (similar to an email subject: line) whereas in Flowdock, all threads were anonymous, given a thread-id (permalink) automatically, and also automatically color-coded.
So I decided to do a search on Flowdock, turns out it is very old. And they have been down for two days [1] last year. Their last blog post are from 2018.
Flowdock was and still is a great product. Sadly, it was acquired way back in 2013 by Rally Technologies, which in turn was acquired by CA, which in turn by Broadcom. I think a majority of the original authors exit'ed at some point, and the product has seen rather little feature development ever since.
Lack of competent engineers in the product might also explain the extended downtimes last year. One of them apparently included a full-fledged database corruption where all conversations for a day or so were permanently lost.
I know at least one organization that is so deeply ingrained and accustomed to Flowdock that they haven't even considered migrating to Slack. I, too, still think that Flowdock is a superior product to Slack for the core chat feature. Adding simple video-conferencing would pretty much bring it up to speed with the modern day.
It does. Zulip calls what Discord and Slack refer to as "channels", "streams", and what Discord calls "threads", "topics".
Zulip's superior topic UX was why I went with it over Slack & Discord. Now Discord has feature-parity there and even more with 'private' topics/threads. I have to create a separate channel/stream if I want some topics to be private.
So now, since my users love Discord so much, I'm going to be fending off requests to move over to Discord, where the conversation data is locked in and cannot be self-hosted or exported.
Good for Discord, but I admit I'm not looking forward to said conversations.
I guess I would have to use Flowdock to understand -- those gifs were confusing and unclear to me. I'm not sure what I was looking at.
Personally I find slack threads perfectly usable and helpful for keeping things organized for the most part. What's the issue with them? I found them a revolutionary step forward in chat UX to be honest, something that had been missing for 20 years or more.
My experience is from ~2 years ago so things may have changed a bit.
Essentially there is a default view which contains all messages as usual. Each message also has a symbol next to it. If it's grey message bubble, it's a message that is not tied to any thread (it can be replied to to start a new thread. Previously if no other messages have appeared on channel so far, it can be dragged & dropped to another thread). If it's colored message bubble, it's the first message in the thread. A colored arrow means it's part of the thread with that color.
This allows you to mostly just stay in default view with all of the channel's messages. As long as people are putting the messages in the thread itself, you could quickly use the colors to see which thread the message is on (color collisions did happen, but they were fairly rare). You would need to open the thread only if you needed more context or wanted to reply to it, though replying can also be done by writing to channel & dragging the message to thread.
Some people - like myself - prefer to see all the messages go past and mentally thread them. It’s a skill I learnt from many years of irc use. Others prefer to click through and not think about thread content until they choose to.
> Also I’d rather not grab my mouse to see things.
Use the up and down arrows to navigate to the message you want and hit T to switch to the thread side view. Similarly, you can do the same to find your own messages and use E to edit them.
One thing that I don’t like is that I have to click a checkbox every time I want to submit a reply to a thread to the channel that the thread is in. Not everyone in the channel is notified in the same way when additional replies are made within a thread within the channel.
Which, indeed, is the point. Threads are primarily useful in very busy channels with multiple conversations happening. The point of a thread is to get the conversation out of the main channel so it doesn't disrupt other discussions. If you want every message to go to the main channel, just post it there, not in a thread. IMHO that checkbox shouldn't even exist.
Tell me how to (a) identify an interesting thread, (b) view its contents, (c) contribute to it, and (d) return to it after closing the app, without using the mouse.
I'm not sure if this is appropriate, but getting conversation representation and message sorting right is the largest focus of my passion project, Ametha.
It would be amazing if I could have a 15 minute voice call with you to hear about your experiences with online communication & collaboration?
The offer is obviously open to anyone else here as well, but no pressure at all, and apologies if HN is not the right avenue for this.
Another really good implementation is Quill (quill.chat). It has a "room type" option where a room is either threaded or free for all. In a threaded room it's a little more message-board like, every top-level post has a topic and such, so it starts a thread. In a free-for-all room it's basically the same as Slack.
Being a heavy whatsapp user (Brazilian) I use Slack's forward function, inside the same conversation window (group or DM) as a "reference keeper" to what message I'm replying to, pretty much like whatsapp's "reply" feature.
I understand the "also send as direct message/to group" mimics this. This, for me, is a good thread implementation for a chat tool.
I actually feel that MS Teams is the best thread implementation (I haven't used Flowdock, but I have used Zulip). The app performance is a little slow which makes it feel slightly clunkier to use, but the UX for a normal Team channels makes everything be in a thread by default, and makes it completely intuitive.
I think you're underselling just how much slower and clunkier Teams is. It genuinely overshadows every supposed UX improvement for me, and it's nigh unusable on Linux / Firefox.
I hated when Slack brought them in, but slowly realised they're really useful when used appropriately & the responsibility is less on Slack itself & more on people using the feature appropriately; threads in 1:1 PMs are just utterly stupid though.
I’m not so sure I like people “rewriting” history. Edits past a certain time also break comment chains (which is why people call out their edit). Moving posts in and out of threads would make it very hard to find things, as well break timelines for troubleshooting.
The Rust developers largely use Zulip as an IRC replacement, and I find its UI to be excellent for my use cases: keeping up with advances to conversations that happened while I wasn't present, fully ignoring conversations that I'm not interested in, and focusing on individual conversations that are happening in parallel. An extremely good experience for such a thoroughly-distributed operation. The only downside is the slight friction for extremely minor conversation; it's good to have side channels just for idle, non-topical chitchat, which isn't a great fit for the Zulip UI.
Well, Discord is much more of an abomination due to its hostility towards user privacy and freedom. Slack has the excuse to appease bosses too. Discord takes data from children.
They granted create threads to everybody by default but granted manage threads to nobody by default.
So we had moderators who could delete channels, delete create and modify roles and role permissions, and delete messages as well as ban/kick users, but couldn't manage or delete threads.
"public threads" show up in the main channel list to everybody as a sub channel, and everybody had permission to create and name them what ever they wanted, but nobody could delete them until i logged in and gave it to my mods.
This happened to me, moderating a server, while our only admin was on vacation.
I was able to remove "create thread" permissions from the default role, effectively turning threads off. But first I had to add a new role to grant myself those permissions. I also had to ask people who had created threads to please delete them because I still can't.
This is obviously bad and I agree that they should have put a better default in place, but this bit isn't true: ""public threads" show up in the main channel list to everybody as a sub channel". In fact, you have to join a thread for it to show up in your channel list, so there's an opt-in interaction required. (or somebody could @mention you or manually add you to the thread, leaving a system message indicating they did so)
It's in the process of being rolled out. I own like 5 servers, 2 of them normal, non-community ones and none of them have gotten the feature yet while I'm in at least 4 servers which have already gotten the feature
Threads are great for helping you to actively ignore a discussion, but discord is a casual discussion app. Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying. Channels are used to group conversation topics that some people might want to ignore. I’d rather not have threads
> Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying
I’m of the completely opposite opinion.
If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. With a thread, I can respond to who I want without interrupting anyone else. Without threads, you’re reading through all the messages and trying to figure out which are relevant.
Most of the Discords I’m in are game or mod related, and I’m often using their help/questions channels. There’s usually only one or two of these channels, so if multiple people need help at the same time you get scattered conversations and it’s confusing to follow, especially if you step away for a second.
Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through. With threads, you can have multiple questions asked simultaneously and each one has all their discussion in their respective threads, making it very obvious which messages are meant for which question and making it easier to navigate.
Forgot to mention: at my job, Slack threads have been super useful. Three or four people can discuss one topic in an open channel (so others can join in and we can search history) without spamming notifications against everyone else.
E.g. someone could put a message in #engineering about a bug. All the engineers get that notification so anyone who knows more details can chip in immediately. They then reply in a thread on the original bug message so they can discuss without everyone else getting bothered with irrelevant notifs AND without locking the conversation into a group DM where nobody else can chime in nor can we all easily search for it later if it’s relevant.
> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream.
Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat. The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic.
What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality.
> Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through.
This isn't clutter, it's literally the point of the tool.
> Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat.
Discord can be real-time, it can also be slightly-slower-than-realtime; maybe as slow as a forum at times, but with different expectations (namely being closer to real-time.) Personally, that’s most of the Discords I’m in.
> The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic.
Channels are a broad demarcation. Example from my experience, a #general-development-help channel in a Discord about using mods for a game, developing them, and chatting with mod developers. Threads then become useful for a person asking a particular question to whoever’s online and anyone interested gets to discuss it in an openly accessible but politely/quietly aside fashion.
> This isn't clutter, it's literally the point of the tool.
It does serve the useful job of “hey everybody, this message is a direct reply to this other message, not necessarily the one(s) right above me!” In smaller groups this is cool and good, and I like the replies as they are. In larger scale chats where there may be multiple discussions simultaneously within a channel (and they can’t reasonably make enough channels to break them all up), I think threads help contain the discussions.
> What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality.
There are a lot of Discords that do function like faster-paced forums. It has grown beyond a real-time text/audio/video chat app for a small groups of people.
> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream.
This is also a feature that discourages a bunch of side conversations. If I've participated in conversations on 5 different topics that have moved on, it can sometimes be tiring to have those old threads reopened with more discussions. It's like having 3 text conversations while also being out to dinner with friends.
> If I've participated in conversations on 5 different topics that have moved on, it can sometimes be tiring to have those old threads reopened with more discussions.
I reckon that’s more due to reopening old conversations regardless of whether it’s threaded or not. In fact, I feel threads make it easier to return to those conversations again: your message is there in that side-chats history and not in some global history where now people are scrolling back-and-forth to remember the prior conversation.
> It's like having 3 text conversations while also being out to dinner with friends.
Threads are like 3 text conversations + a vocal conversation. Not having threads is like 4 vocal conversations all over each other.
> I reckon that’s more due to reopening old conversations regardless of whether it’s threaded or not. In fact, I feel threads make it easier to return to those conversations again
I think we both agree there. My hypothesis (with no supporting data) is that the threaded format makes it easier to reopen old conversations, which makes it more likely that people will do so. In the vocal conversation analogy, the difficulty of having multiple vocal conversations at once naturally prevents people from starting more. Depending on the context that might be desirable or undesirable in a chat app.
One way to keep that reputation is to not deploy features that enable more professional use cases. Perhaps they want to be more than a casual app?
I personally like threads, they are a very minor bump in app complexity that can significantly improve context reassembly - the primary issue with chat apps.
Counterpoint: I wish that feature would go away on Discord, it gets used a lot by very low information users to pester other people all the time.
And its just annoying to see all the duplicated text. If you have several people in a discussion or there's two threads of conversation going on I sort of get the idea that you want to respond to a specific comment -- but there are ways to use the English language to indicate clearly what you're responding to. Even if its just "re: whatever, ..."
It's less "seamless", but also more flexible. The Discord reply feature only works within the same channel while you can share slack messages anywhere, including in threads by linking. Linking to discord messages works, but there's no inline preview.
Will Discord changes their single account system/policy? It's very annoying to use single account for various use other than only gaming community. I think this policy is a bigger blocker than lack of threads.
Is there really no better design for "aside" conversations than this? People lean on Slack threads too much, leading to a confused flow of conversation that makes it extremely difficult to piece together how the discussion was ended or resolved.
I’m always surprised by how practically every single opinion regarding personal communication is the opposite in hacker news to the mainstream opinion of my “real life” circles.
Use of social networks, slack, emojis, messaging apps, sync vs async communication…
Its not a criticism of any kind, mind you, it’s just very surprising to me.
I would be a bit slower on the hasty generalizations. I’m here on hacker news and I love using threads and am happy they’re coming to Discord there’s also multiple comments below this saying the same thing.
That's because it was designed to be a real time chat. When you're having a group conversation, there are no threads. You just keep track in your head what the topics are and who said them and then figure out how the next sentence applies.
Discord was modeled after this interaction (and IRC, which was modeled after this interaction).
When you're having a large-group "stream of conversation" in meatspace (in the lobby of convention hall, say), subgroups within the conversation will break off temporarily to form smaller "huddles" that step slightly away from the group, focusing on one-another rather than the group, to have a temporary "sidebar" conversation.
Content from a "sidebar" conversation is usually taken far enough away from the larger group that it's not bothersome/interrupting the topic of the larger group; but—unlike a whispered aside—these temporary sidebar conversations are still public conversations, and they leak enough signal to the larger group that if someone in the larger group focused on the sidebar conversation, they could pick up the general topic of what's being discussed, and choose to join the sidebar discussion themselves.
It's not the same thing though - the sidebar usually gradually merges back into the main conversation, and certainly you can't resume a sidebar from a week ago and have it magically reemerge with the same group of people.
None of the Discord servers/channels I'm involved in are that active so that sort of real time chat aspect is much less significant.
I agree with that you're saying but it's also not the only way one interacts with Discord. I might only visit a server once a week and try and catch up on the messages posted in that time.
That might be the initial model, but it's not the current model. People use Discord for far more than real time chat. It's effectively replaced forums for many communities. While real time chat is still important, it's not the only use case.
Nah, lots of us here love threads. Threads was one of the reasons our large private friends-only Slack server didn't move to Discord. This has reignited that conversation, as we like Discord more for certain things, and threads were one of the things holding us back.
The difference is we just aren't really saying anything.
I kind of feel similar. I already thought that the Replies feature was a better compromise for a chat room than Slack's threads (which I hated because so much conversation would just "disappear" from channels only to find out it was still happening in a thread from days or weeks before), but I'm also in several Discords that migrated from Slack and I know how many of my friends have been complaining that they missed Slack style threads for whatever reason.
I'm going to give this a shot a bit: an in depth reading of this blog post has given me some appreciation that Discord is trying to keep it better than Slack's. They have moderation mentioned front and center, so that feels good to me that they kept it strongly in mind. I also like that they will be visible in the channel list as "sub-channels" and that they will auto-archive with a time limit (defaulting to 24 hours to start). Those two things do try to address things I disliked about Slack's implementation, so I'm hopeful to give it a shot.
Maybe my remaining criticism here is I think I'd prefer the default time limit to be something smaller and related more directly to activity. Maybe something like "after an hour or maybe two hours of silence" to keep them to "active conversation sidebars" only. I also don't like that currently changing the time limit is a Level 2 Boost server feature if I wanted to explore options on smaller servers I control/moderate. On smaller servers your main option is just to turn them off entirely. (Though I sort of understand that it is a Level 2 Boost because from their perspective servers are going to want to increase the time limit as a perk. I wonder if they could make it free to decrease it, if it's not a "perk".)
> They have moderation mentioned front and center, so that feels good to me that they kept it strongly in mind.
What's annoying about this is it was sprung, default on, with no warning. I'm a mod (not the owner) of a server that got them, and we weren't given the permissions to disable them from @everyone, only the admin can do that at first. And he's not currently been on because of time zone differences. Which means it's just an easy open vector for someone to come in an raid and just cause chaos. They should've had it off by default, at least for a few days to let server owners experiment and play around with it.
They've given that choice to servers that are labeled "Community Servers" at least (giving them until mid-August before it is forced on by default) which will help some of the largest servers, but yes they maybe should have given that a wider option to the medium/smaller servers too.
Yep, we're a small server (~2700) that just randomly had it turned on. We've currently got about 10, just from random members thinking to test if they can create them. 10 that we can't delete. Thankfully nobody has tried to abuse it by naming any anything offensive, or mass creating them yet. Hopefully they won't before the admin gets back on when he wakes up.
2700 users? I'd classify that as more than a "small" or a "medium" server myself. That's definitely in the range where setting it as a "Community Server" could be beneficial for a lot of other reasons.
What are these reasons? It's a pretty niche server, focusing on a specific language family, and I doubt the admin or the other moderators would really want it to be super available. We also have probably <20 really active users, which is probably why I would consider it small.
Yeah, 20 active users would still feel small. That's fair. I probably wouldn't recommend a Community Server with only 20 active users.
To answer your question, though: Community Servers get a couple more security and safety features that help with moderation. They get a "Welcome Screen" for helping new users not feel quite so lost on first joining the server. Discord is generally better about notifying Community Servers of upcoming updates and slower about rolling out new features to them (such as Threads).
Of all the chat apps I have used, Mattermost's implementation of threads/replies [0] has felt the most natural. That said, all implementations I've tried leave something to be desired.
In Zulip you can make a "general" topic thread, and then move messages to a new topic when you feel like it's warranted. The normal stream (channel) view shows all threads simultaneously. There's also a view of all streams combined. The UI would be more confusing if Zulip had to display un-threaded messages, because then you wouldn't have a way to view only un-threaded messages without threads being interspersed. If you use the "general" topic method you can just focus on that.
Slack threads don’t (or at least, didn’t; it’s been a couple years) show in the main message feed, they show when you expand the thread into the sidebar. In the feed, it shows the original message with an “n replies” text below it.
In Mattermost, new replies show as normal messages in your feed with a bit of context for what they’re replying to, and clicking on the context expands the full thread in a sidebar.
I find the Mattermost implementation more ergonomic because you can read replies without expanding the whole thread every time, and stale threads will get bumped by new messages.
You might not have noticed but your link goes to the new design (in beta) of collapsed threads which are much more similar to Slack's and I think this has caused some confusion in this thread
It's worth noting that the design you prefer isn't being deprecated; Slack-style threads are being added as a user display option.
Slack has the option to "reply in main channel" as well as have it show up in the thread. This allows people to surface something important in the thread that should also be in the parent channel.
I think we need to scrap the concept of a channel, and everything should be a thread instead.
You can categorize/tag threads (why not automatically based on groups of users) and they can show up as a feed similar on HN/SO/Reddit, but in a sidebar so you can easily swap between them.
If you're imagining how that would look, no need to look further than an email client. The advantage of it being threads with tags/categories is that it makes it easy to move one thread from one category/tag to another (for example moving the conversation from DEV to SRE) without loosing context/history.
Then there's no aside conversation, because everything is an aside.
I love having threads on Slack, but I absolutely hate that it always open in the right corner, instead of showing in the center. I always have to drag the border all the way to the left so it's not just a small column on the side
I agree. The Slack thread UX is not ideal, but the flow of conversation is so much better than it was pre-threads. I always end up closing the side bar and navigating to the thread in the "Threads" view. They should make it easier to maximize a thread.
At least this UX of Discord's makes it easy to do that: the article points out that opening the thread from the list below a channel will open it in the main chat view instead of the sidebar. At least from the article it does seem that Discord was paying attention to flaws in Slack's UX.
I genuinely hadn't realised you could resize threads to be wider and found it really annoying how narrow they were. I don't think I'd noticed any visual cues you could resize them either (assuming the cues exist).
The only other type of thread design I know of is Reddit-style threads in a chat app. The negative of that is that the threads cannot be directly incorporated into chat itself after creation because they become things of their own, just like Reddit threads, but the positive is massive: threads are entities of their own and they can be infinitely nested and referred to indefinitely into the future.
An example of this design is Aether. (Disclosure: I work on this, aether.app) If you have issues with Slack-style threads or curious about alternative solutions to this issue, it might be worth checking out.
Zulip is the only decent implementations of threaded chat I could find, although it’s solution to “aside” conversations is that all conversations are “aside” (or none are), since you are using channels. It does wonders for discoverability though
I feel like threads are a solution to having an enormous continuous channel. Zulip solves this by not having an enormous continous channel. I think it makes sense to have topic-oriented discussion threads, and then have discussion within those threads all in the same continuous stream.
Forum threads/email convos for focused convos, stream-y chat otherwise. Mixing the two ends up being really messy IMO.
It does mean you gotta kinda move around, but I would kill for Slack to implement an "inbox-y" form of conversations, so I can actually keep track of open loops
Off topic but here's another feature that really shouldn't take 2 years to implement - only showing "In game" status on some servers, vs the current all-or-nothing approach.
Running two instances of Discord is not too complicated (at least on Linux) and might work well to separate your professional and gaming accounts. You only have to be careful of invite links, which will open in the first Discord you run.
Be aware that Discord treats this as a fraud indicator - the reason Ripcord does not support Discord multi-account is that it puts you at higher risk for a ban
It wouldn't be a problem, except that Discord takes over your fucking computer and doesn't let you sign into different accounts via private browser windows when you have the client running
Another problem with Discord is that its anti-spam measures are making it harder and harder to create an anonymous account
There's no point in having an anonymous Discord account if you have to use the same account for everything in your life. (Reddit and Facebook have the same problem as well)
> doesn't let you sign into different accounts via private browser windows when you have the client running
What do you mean here? I have multiple discord accounts that I have logged in at once. One on the client, one in browser window, and another in a private window, working just fine.
> Another problem with Discord is that its anti-spam measures are making it harder and harder to create an anonymous account
Haven't made an account in a while, what has changed? Used to take only a couple minutes to get an account up and running.
> What do you mean here? I have multiple discord accounts that I have logged in at once.
It seems this has somehow changed. Historically, the web app connected to the webserver of the locally running client, so it was impossible to be logged into more than one account on a device with native app running.
They have a pretty extensive black list of email providers from what I can tell. Throwaway email accounts or services like Trashmail are pretty much completely blocked from what I can tell.
I just wish I could just have a list of favorite channels. There already is a forum post on their website.
Servers have an obscene amount of channels, while IRC has a single channel per topic, and sometimes has one or a few more (ubuntu, for example).
I honestly have a hard time using discord because of that. Discussions are atomized. Some channel are just pointless and often silent. The notification system is stupid and you just mute everything because of it (the tray icon is always red while you have nothing to read, and you are not going to scroll all channels you're not really interested in).
Oh yeah, and displaying the user list is pretty pointless when there are more than 40 users. Just my opinion.
These look like a weird mix of Slack threads (temporary (though not enforced in Slack), written in sidebar) and Zulip threads/topics (named, available in the channel list), though... with downsides compared to both (for example, you can't forward messages to original channel like you could on Slack). Feels a bit awkward, but time will tell.
My main concern right now is with discoverability and moderation - it seems a bit difficult for moderators to see recent activity across all threads, unless I missed something.
As a Discord moderator (discord.gg/wilbur, 310k+) who's used Threads for a few months now while testing, there's a specific Threads button that lists all open threads - even private ones, although behind a toggle - and that works pretty okay. Most large servers only use Threads internally within staff teams, not in the wider general channels yet, though!
> there's a specific Threads button that lists all open threads
I can see there's a Threads button next to the search bar, but it appears to be scoped to the channel I'm in; I don't see a way to see threads across all channels.
Given they show up in the channel list as "sub-channels", discoverability and moderation should be straight forward and this blog post devotes an entire section to Moderation tools, so I'm cautiously optimistic on that part at least. (Especially in comparisons to Slack's Thread moderation which was rough in what little I tried to do of it.)
The catch is that they only show up in the channel list if you've "joined" the thread. They're otherwise just hidden behind the button up top (or you need to hit the backscroll).
This seems nice. I'm not a huge Discord user but one thing that always bugs me when I'm occasionally using it is when there's 2 topics of conversation going on at once. It especially happens a lot in help threads, where 2 people are needing help at the same time and people have to keep replying to the previous message in that conversation.
Though at the same time, it seems a bit weird that it's almost like a sub-channel? Does that mean in this scenario you'd have a whole list of threads down the side underneath the channel for every question?
I see people complaining about Slack threads but I personally find them perfect for what it needs to do. Creating a short thread from a message doesn't seem as big of a deal as what this looks to be doing.
I may be mixing up my chat apps, but isn't Google Chat 100% threads? I know one of the things under MS Teams is like that too and don't like it either.
I like the idea of having temporary side conversations with a time limit. There should never be an "eternal" thread, just things that come and go.
In my opinion the best app similar to Slack but organised around the thread communication is Twist (https://twistapp.com/).
It's disappointing that it's so hard to convince the companies "management" to switch from chaotic Slack communication to something better for async and organised communication because clients are used to Slack...
The same applies to Discord as it's just the most accessible way, everyone uses and it's just largest common denominator regardless of the chaos in most of the channels, hope the threads will clear some things up when people use them, and not like in the Slack where everyone just paste response in the channel instead of the threads.
I tried to switch our company over to Twist, but just found it lacking in a bunch of management/control functionality that's offered in Slack (data retention, fine-grained control over permissions, etc) and some UI polish.
I hope they'll improve though, would love to switch to Twist. Their model for async work and threads is awesome!
This makes me so happy. My group of friends migrated to Guilded a while ago specifically because threads are so useful. However, Guilded is too janky to recommend on it's own merits. I'm so stoked to return to Discord
Threads are great, and I've been working with them in testing for a few months now. One issue is that many major API libraries (such as discord.py) don't support them in a stable version yet. I'm not going to enable Threads fully in my 300k+ member server until our custom moderation bot supports them. This isn't Discord's fault really though, I know library devs have had a lot of heads up too, it just takes time. Apart from that, Threads are great and I use them for so many things, from temporary but long threads for specific members to join for staff training, to busy threads for events like streams. They've been built with community in mind, and feedback from moderators has been gathered every step of the way. If only more companies developed features while in touch with the people they'd affect...
Slack threads are, without a doubt, the worst UI I can imagine for this feature. This Discord implementation looks only slightly less bad. Threads are not necessary for this product category - we have channels for that.
For threads, channels, messages, posts, whatever you call them. It’s really a question of how much nesting do you really need?
If your conversation channel flows like a blur and is “chatty” then there’s probably not a subject line for each one. If it’s more like a forum with divergent topics then you need some nesting, and every solution for nesting has the same essential function just with a different UI.
It’s like implementing, tabs, pages, sheets, screens, windows, or layers, in the end you’ve done the same thing - boxed content and made it selectively displayed.
Depends on the server, imho. The range of activity in discord instances varies wildly, you need different tools to make sense of it depending on the server.
When will one of these chat services finally allow me to open a thread in a new tab? Sure it won't solve every problem but I'd sure find it more useful than the mess we have now.
They are charging $75/month for private threads, I understand they need to make money but that's a lot of money for small community servers. I own a support server and was excited for threads as they would allow me to pop out a private chat in the server to handle things rather than speaking in public or direct messaging the person, so this price point sadly makes this feature not very useful to every server I am currently in.
$75 is a notable monthly fee for this, but its also important to remember all the other stuff that comes with Level 2 Boost for a server, and that its not a sole cost just for threads.
As for managing a support server and the channel clutter, have you used any of the various "Support/Ticket" bots for discord. TicketTool[1] is probably the most popular. I've used it, and its pretty nice.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Discord or TicketTool, just opinions.
Yeah it does seem to be a problem with the "bundled perks" approach to monetization, if I only need one of the features in the high tier bundles I need to pay for it all to get it. It's less of a genuine complaint and more of a "oh well" reaction to it.
Remind me the difference between Slack and Discord at this point? "Default theme" is the big one that comes to mind
It's fine, not every product needs to be super original I guess, but it's gotten to the point where choosing one over the other is barely even a statement about your identity anymore. Although I guess most people do both: Slack for work, Discord for friends. It's boring when those two experiences are so similar, tho
> Remind me the difference between Slack and Discord at this point?
Discord: you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service
Slack: the Customer [...] grants us and the Slack Extended Family a worldwide, non-exclusive, limited-term licence to access, use, process, copy, distribute, perform, export and display Customer Data and any Non-Slack Products created by or for the Customer, only as reasonably necessary (a) to provide, maintain and update the Services; (b) to prevent or address service, security, support or technical issues; (c) as required by law or as permitted by the data request policy; and (d) as expressly permitted in writing by the Customer.
Absolutely loathed this feature in Teams. It made discussions impossible to follow for me and I just stopped using Teams altogether. Discord and Teams ostensibly cater to different crowds, but I just do not see the value prop at all in threaded chat.
Threaded discussions boards feel like the opposite to me, where flat threads are nearly incomprehensible (i.e. classic internet forums where quoting is the only message hierarchy).
The admin tools available at launch seem quite robust:
- Enabling/disabling threads on a per-channel basis
- Enabling the creation of threads only for specified users/roles
- Administrative locking/unlocking of threads
- Automatic archiving
So one could setup a server with a mixture of threaded conversation and more IRC-like chat.
Really happy for this, threads are a life-saver and a completely required tool for conversations. The linear conversation works, but then when you have 10+ people all vying to speak to each other and you have six different conversations it become a mess to keep up with. This is a happy change.
Does Mattermost also have "uncollapsed" threads like Flowdock? Personally, I think hiding conversation in a group channel is terrible UX. I don't know why people are aping Slack's functionality when I hear almost universally that it sucks.
I'm not that familiar with Flowdeck so I don't know if this is what you mean, but "collapsed threads" in Mattermost is just a personal view setting that can be turned on/off according to your preferences.
Discord seems to have executed fairly well so far overall. And its client apps don't seem quite as awful as Electron apps usually are. I wish that Teams did chat channels as well as Discord does. Actually I wish that Teams would just be less clunky and buggy overall.
Automatically archiving threads after a short time period seems like a good idea, it naturally pushes long form conversations and collaborations into flows designed to handle them (private channels, e-mail discussions, etc)
Really hate this. It's going to give me a bunch of anxiety about missing out on conversations because they were in a thread I didn't notice instead of the normal channel. Would love to be able to turn off the feature for an entire server.
My IRL friends and I are in a server where we all have admin permission, so even if I turn off the threading permissions for @everyone, we can still make them.
Finally! I've been using Discord as a place to field support issues for playit.gg and it's becoming a big burden now that we have ~800 active users. I've started stepping back and letting community members help eachother out as it's been too crazy for me to manage. With threads I might actually be able to help people again :).
I know this is being downvoted, but I find it genuinely interesting how much negative fervor there is towards threads. So it's a useful contribution to me!
I use Slack threads everyday. I've only heard of one person in our org (or in any org I've been in prior that used slack) who had strong opinions about threads.
Thanks for the very genuine opinion. Perhaps I'll start refining my own opinions about chat app threads.
I've banned threads on our work Slack in conversations I'm expected to be involved with because they overwhelm me. Chat is already cleanly two dimensional (by channel and time) - threads add a whole third dimension to the mix meaning I have yet more places to check that I didn't miss something important.
They suck because Slack's implementation of them suck. It's basically a feature MVP that hasn't been touched in years. Hopefully this Discord feature release will put some fire under them.
I struggle to see how people are being effective with them because I do not see it personally and so much ends up slipping through the cracks especially in slack because it is impossible in the UX to keep up with the fact you might be:
- @-ed in a new thread and channel you've never heard of without context. e.g. '@yourname ^^'
- @-ed in a new thread in a conversation that has long since passed where all the discussion was done at the top level of the channel in a normal stream and you now have to deal with two paths of context.
- responded to in a thread that happened months/years ago with the expectation of immediate reply
- multiple people taking a linear conversation and starting their own threads thinking they are talking about different things which end up being the same conversation and having no way to merge these flows back together, then getting @yourname'd a month later and having to somehow find this adjacent thread where the actual conversation is happening.
- trying to catch up from vacation and having to try and mentally or actively serialize some number of days of communication temporally
Every Slack user in a business setting quickly becomes a power user if you are in orgs of 500+. I have no idea why the UX designers feel like everyone works on one thing at a time instead of being in a constant context switch hell which Slack's current UI does nothing to help. The thread views Slack provides are only the 'side view' and the 'thread list view' but you can't break it out into more windows if you need it. I am constantly in situations where I need to look at channels and two or more threads a the same time when trying to figure something out and I end up having to copy chat out of Slack into text editors just to stash a link/context/system output. Searching is also terrible- are you going to match the head of a thread or are you going to match the message right after it? You also can't look at a channel with 20 threads and see what you haven't read between last time you looked and this time. The best I have been able to do is keep a mental count in my head which only lasts a short while and not days. The thread list view is also terrible because it is a push and pull battle between unfolding threads so you can see what the heck it was about and then having to do it all again because you ended up having to switch contexts to answer a more immediate issue.
There is the restrictive protocol channel where every top-level message is distinct and any related message should be a thread message and that mostly/kind of works. I've seen that work OK as more of an ask-for-help situation, but it tends to also obscure what is happening if it there happens common cause outage. Everyone sees a different effect, but the root cause even if there is a pinned post added becomes not obvious because you can't actually visualize all threads of the conversation at once even if the person with knowledge is leading someone to water. Either way every channel with a restrictive protocol I participate in that uses this style loses a lot of its dynamic culture. You don't see who's regularly asking questions or follow-up questions that are actually of interest to you, you only see the bland post unless you click on every single link. I would enjoy watching channels on IRC because you'd find people who were answering questions and responding to follow-ups where the solid advice ended up being. Instead you can't passively find these things without clicking on every single thread and hoping you somehow infer this instead of it being plain and obvious. To that end even when I see that it is used effectively it is not something I think that helps people.
I lose context for 10% of all threads I end up needing to follow a week minimum (note *need* not want). I rarely lose context for anything that's posted to an actual channel because I can start at the top and scroll to the bottom and ensure I didn't miss anything. I don't want to click on every thread because often these threads have links to other threads and on other/same channels that I also can't quickly read through and find what I need to know. I always know when a channel hasn't been read and now that the Slack UI allows me to group channels in a sane way I now can efficiently loop through all the channel contexts I need to at the appropriate frequency of engagement. I also can't easily copy a block of channel messages and their children threads with just a quick copy and paste- and I end up needing to do that frequently.
After only two days this week of being buried in thread hell I would cry for joy if we went back to linear chat and using a ticketing system for any actual threads you need.
At my org, any given Slack conversation includes from two to six people. With that many participants, and given low volume, threads only present an extreme UX annoyance. I have to assume that the use case intended for them was high volume channels with lots and lots of users.
I don't know how it's possible, but I cannot wait for the day where I don't have to deal with "chats". Telegram, iMessage, LinkedIn, emails, discord, this app, that app. I simrace with a 60 year old man and no matter how much we try, he cannot wrap his head around how to use discord.
I don't think that's reasonable and it's very unlikely that "chats" are going away. I've been using chat apps since that person was in their mid-to-late 30s. Newsgroups were around a decade before that. The relatives I have in their 90s know how to use Hangouts. Being 60 isn't an excuse in my opinion
Back about 18y ago there was, er, Trillian (?) and you could have all your chats in one UI at least. If I were in charge chat apps would have to use federation with an open interchange format (RIP XMPP).
I think XMPP and Trillian might still be going but once Facebook, Microsoft and Google stopped playing nicely ...
Oh, man, the good old days of Trillian. Yeah, you could be signed into multiple AIM accounts, MSN, ICQ, maybe others later on. It was a total game changer.
You're probably right. I think I will honestly just get a landline phone with a few different extensions and a tape recorder. 1st extension for closest family, another for friends, another for business and so on. Corded of course. Patiently awaiting the day I see "Launch HN: <Company> (YC 2030) – never have to deal with text messages again"
edit: After my initial response (above) I was thinking I don't remember chat systems having 'proper' threads implemented, while forum software and commenting systems do have. Why is this?
What amazes me is these Slack-like chats cannot ever look outside the box. How about... A tabbed interface? So that I can easily switch between rooms and threads, and not cram them all into a single screen?
This looks non-terrible, unlike Slack threads or the abominations that are MS Teams and Google Chat. The thread is moved out of the main conversation view and gets its own entry nested under the channel.
I see other major differences. Discord and other chat-apps invite much more real time participation than the other two you just mentioned. Also discord you have to be logged in to be part of a server, not much casual lurking going on.
Forums were 1000x better. You could actually browse most forums without logging in, and they were search indexable. I feel like there is a lot of information locked behind unsearchable discord that I will never see. If trying to build a community everything that goes to discord that could have been a forum post is tying your community to some company that makes messaging software instead of your own forum.
yeah discord is comfy but bloated and I rarely miss it.. something is heavier in the social feel it creates (I keep saying that people are ban-happy on discord, discord makes tiny realms, not freeform convo chans like on IRC)
Cool. Still waiting for proper / modern / real parental controls. My 13 y/o nephew wants to chat with his buddies but there’s no real way to make sure he’s not getting weirdos contacting him.
What would parental controls on Discord look like to you?
The scenario is that you typically join someone else's server or provide them with a link to one you are already a part of.
Would you want some client-side assurances that a young user doesn't interact with someone who says something you dislike, or would you want this on the server-side?
What does the interaction with people who do not have those controls look like?
There is already a setting which prevents people not on your friends list from contacting you, as well as a setting limiting who can request to add you as a friend. What more do you need?
I think it's a case of "I don't want this kid to change these features unless there is direct parental approval". Sure those settings exist, but unless there's some policy way to prevent them from being changed it's pointless.
I think traditional parenting is the control you're after - worked in our house so far. "Weirdos on the internet will send you disturbing images that give you nightmares, try and encourage you to do stupid things that will hurt you, try and get money of you, or damage our computer; I've set it so you can't make friends with them nor receive messages - if you want to add anyone, like school friends, that you know in real life that's fine, ask me first. If you mess with the settings I'll have to uninstall it (block it, whatever)."
If you're worried about weirdos peeping and poking on him, you shouldn't consider Discord in the first place, with its massive data and metadata collections.
Far far better than other abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.