Improve the experience when threads and replies are used simultaneously. What happened: A person wrote a normal message. A second person responded to that first message. A third person responded to the response of the second person. Afterwards, another person responded to the initial message in a thread (this is a mistake, but it simply happens too frequently). Now we have 3 messages in the channel. Initital message (with a thread visually emphasized). Below that is a message that replies to the initital message. Clicking that second message opens the thread. The third message, a reply to the reply, can be clicked but the thread does not open anymore. Consequentially, people are likely to miss the thread.
Why would you like to do it?
Whenever people confuse to respond in a reply in a thread (i.e. start a topic?) and simply reply, things get confusing rapidly. Occasionally I get notification for responses that I cannot find, as they are responses to a thread. However, if a prior post was a simple reply to a post, we now have a situation where threads and replies are used simultaneously. Even though I understand how this can be great, I am not convinced that it is necessarily user friendly and leads to problems down the line.
In MS Teams, for example, we only have threads. I can respond to a topic or I can start a new one. The UI supports that properly, too (in the beginning of 2021 they even changed some bits to make it less likely that people try to respond to a topic by starting a new one).
How would you like to achieve it?
To be honest, I have no real solution to this problem. However, I tried looking whether this issue has been addressed in the past and I did not find it. It could be interesting to see how "only threads" is maybe the better paradigm. A downside would be that one is losing the option to "bump" a thread by replying to it. On the other hand, maybe adding the necessity to give a thread a name whenever "replying in thread" and then visually emphasizing that threadname whenever a thread is active. This might just be a UI design issue. Looking at slack, this seems to be an issue sometimes, too.
Your use case
What would you like to do?
Improve the experience when threads and replies are used simultaneously. What happened: A person wrote a normal message. A second person responded to that first message. A third person responded to the response of the second person. Afterwards, another person responded to the initial message in a thread (this is a mistake, but it simply happens too frequently). Now we have 3 messages in the channel. Initital message (with a thread visually emphasized). Below that is a message that replies to the initital message. Clicking that second message opens the thread. The third message, a reply to the reply, can be clicked but the thread does not open anymore. Consequentially, people are likely to miss the thread.
Why would you like to do it?
Whenever people confuse to respond in a reply in a thread (i.e. start a topic?) and simply reply, things get confusing rapidly. Occasionally I get notification for responses that I cannot find, as they are responses to a thread. However, if a prior post was a simple reply to a post, we now have a situation where threads and replies are used simultaneously. Even though I understand how this can be great, I am not convinced that it is necessarily user friendly and leads to problems down the line.
In MS Teams, for example, we only have threads. I can respond to a topic or I can start a new one. The UI supports that properly, too (in the beginning of 2021 they even changed some bits to make it less likely that people try to respond to a topic by starting a new one).
How would you like to achieve it?
To be honest, I have no real solution to this problem. However, I tried looking whether this issue has been addressed in the past and I did not find it. It could be interesting to see how "only threads" is maybe the better paradigm. A downside would be that one is losing the option to "bump" a thread by replying to it. On the other hand, maybe adding the necessity to give a thread a name whenever "replying in thread" and then visually emphasizing that threadname whenever a thread is active. This might just be a UI design issue. Looking at slack, this seems to be an issue sometimes, too.
Have you considered any alternatives?
No response
Additional context
No response