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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

They do, hence their recent rebranding that resulted in less of a "for gamers" image :)

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, ..."