To me team chats always felt horrible, email felt tolerable and the HN-like tree view always felt the best, near-perfect form of communication. I hope people are going to move this way occasionally.
Technologically email indeed supports proper thread trees. But modern, most commonly used clients don't. The email world would be a better place if people stopped quoting entire threads in every message they send and would rely on message IDs and response relations but they don't.
What people really want is to type their reply without having to include the original message in their response. That's how most people comment on places like Hacker News and Reddit.
> What people really want is to type their reply without having to include the original message in their response.
Who said they have to? I doubt many people even care, previous messages are just included recursively by all the major email client apps by default. I suspect most of the people don't even know.
Email clients have moved over to conversation view, which is supposed to make email threads look like conversations you see in a chat client. The message itself still quotes all previous messages, but it's all hidden unless you look for it.
The interesting thing is that if you use a conventional email client that supports actual threading using the Message-Id and In-Reply-To and References header values, and you edit the email message to trim quoted content and reply inline, the conversation view implementation in their email client breaks and it shows a blank message.
