
Having tried the threads feature on Slack, my experience is that it is overly complex, counter-intuitive and not functionally scalable.
Any (non-trivial) team will build up hundreds, or thousands, of conversations over time. The simplest way to support this need on a collaboration platform is to allow members to respond to any message in a channel — in other words, you can either post a message in a channel or reply to a message that’s already there. It’s so simple and intuitive! (That’s why popular social media sites like Facebook, Yammer and LinkedIn have implemented it that way.)
However, this is not possible in a Slack channel; all you can do is post a new message in the channel or create a thread off of an existing message, and this thread, for some weird reason, does not — or is not supposed to — exist in the channel but has to remain outside of it! You can make a thread appear in the channel, but the recommendation from Slack seems to be that you must do it only sparingly lest you clutter your channel with too many “side conversations”. But the reality in most teams is that there are going to be many threads of discussions that they want many members, if not everyone, in the channel to see. The design does not align to this need, which is a major reason it is counter intuitive and not scalable.
Slack lists all of your threads across all channels in one place. This will work only when you have a small number of threads. The thread was created in the channel, and the conversation that it represents logically belongs in the channel, why then should its primary tracking be done outside of it? Also, how do you sift through them to locate the one you are interested in and still maintain sanity when you have hundreds of them from all your channels all in one big list?
The way threads are designed now is indeed meant for side conversations within a channel and it works for that purpose (other than that the natural location of threads must be within the channel). It does NOT support the need to have open conversations on a multitude of topics in the channel — a very important need for teams — nor is there any other feature that supports it in Slack today as far as I know. This is a serious drawback of the platform. I do hope the Slack team addresses this gap very soon.
