Threads are an extremely important asset in large channels to maintain organization. Less important in ad-hoc quick conversations in small DM groups for sure. I've never experienced any issues with people not using threads and the UX around it has always seemed fairly smooth to me.
Threaded messages arguably allow for less fragmentation into other channels / DMs, and they have the checkbox for a particularly important message to be sent to both the thread and main convo.
I'm a thread fan from the start, and I've observed many who were initially skeptical start using them heavily
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.
Threads are pretty new and also just... not well put in. Slack's threading is much better in that regard. The use of threads in almost every case I've seen seems to be more of a subchannel thing. Example, if your server has a tech channel, but five or so people want to separate out say... keyboard talk, that becomes a semi permanent thread.
I like threads a lot in the way we use it. With 60+ people in one channel, being able to ask a question and get answers in the thread, while not spamming the channel with replies and potentially interweaving multiple question & answer "threads" is really useful.
I think threads, used sparingly, are nice. They're good to have semi-private messages, so you can keep the more irrelevant conversation that would normally go to PM public and searchable, while not spamming the channel.
They're also good for support channels, to have a thread per support message.
If people use threads more, messages in a channel should be less of a mess. From what I’ve seen, only a few use threads and they’re either a moderator or a prominent member.
> Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Threads are kinda horses-for-courses.
If you've got a 3000+ person organisation, they're useful because all-to-all messaging channels don't scale very well. If you've got a 500-member #linux-users channel you can have multiple discussions going on in different threads without them getting mixed up, and when someone posts about wifi issues some people can jump in to help without every single message alerting all 500 members.
On the other hand, if your organisation only has 30 people? Channels alone are probably all you need.
I think the problem is not with threads themselves but with Slack's implementation. Threads provide a much-needed way of creating a discussion around a specific topic that doesn't pollute the main channel. In Slack they seem like more of an afterthought than a primary communication tool.
Just to provide a counterpoint, threads are very useful for channels with hundreds of members, so that anyone can ask a question but the responses don't make other questions invisible. In that case, the lack of threads would hide important information.
They added threads recently (within the last 2 years), so your server can emphasise using threads when appropriate, but the channels are much more focused on IRC-style message chat, not thread-based siloed conversations.
I love threads. They're lightweight channels. In large, busy channels it allows parallel conversations. I see no reason a thread would be strictly asynchronous or real time. That's an organizational expectation. And anyone who expects real-time responses outside of a call needs to come back down to Earth.
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