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Review: Slack Threads are great, but have a few big usability issues

I’m a Slack junkie, so I was excited when they recently announced they’d finally be rolling out a Threads feature. I was particularly keen to try it out since I recently launched a Slack community for the /Filmcast podcast. Would threads make it easier or more confusing to organize conversation in a freewheeling channel with hundreds of users?

Slack threads allow users to essentially convert any message into a thread, and then add replies to that thread. Replies are only one message deep (they cannot go further), and show up on the right-hand pane, which is otherwise used for giving info on the thread as a whole.

Slack also compiles all threads into a handy “All Threads” view that lights up whenever someone responds to any of your threads.

This feature is particularly beneficial for replying to earlier messages in channels. If a message appeared hours ago and the entire channel has moved onto a different topic of conversation, it’s a lot easier to make a thread and reply — the original user gets a notification, and the conversation can continue on that topic while the channel is blissfully unaware.

Overall, I think the threads work really well and help to declutter conversations when they are used correctly. However, there are a few issues with threads right now as they are currently implemented:

Converting messages to threads – The ability to convert any message into a thread doesn’t work too well with how people typically use Slack. In many of my Slack Teams, thoughts come out in a series of incomplete messages, often with crosstalk. A single one of these messages would be inappropriate to start a thread with. Thus, being able to group multiple messages into the start of the thread would be helpful.

Moreover, it would be really useful if the user could give some kind of cue (via the UI or otherwise) when they want to start a thread. In our Slack, we’ve taken to putting “Thread: [Topic here]” or something similar. But it’s not always clear what’s better as a thread, or what’s better as further conversation in the channel. Sometimes people use both to respond, creating confusion.

Ways to resolve
– Develop some kind of usage convention, or educate users on proper etiquette when it comes to creating threads
– If possible, allow users to group multiple consecutive messages into a thread

The “Also send to #channel” button – Slack offers you the ability to send any message in a thread back to the general channel. Let me be clear: This button is an abomination and must be changed or destroyed. It’s not that the concept of sending a thread message back to the channel is a bad one; it’s more that the messaging around it is very confusing.

Most people, when they see that checkbox, are going to want to send the message back to the #channel. Why wouldn’t you? Your message is important and the channel should read it, right? We have a lot of first-time users in our Slack and initially, every single one of them clicked on this checkbox. This resulted in exchanges like the one below in the channel itself:

The threads were making the actual channel much more difficult to read. Thus, we had to lay down a ground rule about not checking that checkbox. The results have been much better since.

In short, “Also send to #channel” is terrible messaging. It should say something like, “Do you think this message is important enough that you want to barge into the main conversation with it, interrupting everything else going on over there? Then check this box.” But I understand why they didn’t put that there. Maybe a happy medium would be appropriate?

Ways to resolve
– Do more to explain the dire consequences of sending a thread reply back to the channel
– Remove the button completely

Other thoughts: In addition to blanket “no sending threads back to channel” rule, our Slack has also developed some channels that are “thread only.” This means every single message must be a thread-starting message. This has led to much more organization and readability in channels like #oldermovies, where you can just scroll up and see a bunch of movie-specific discussions to dive into. It would be ideal if there was some way to “force” people into threads for certain channels, or get them to understand that by posting a message, they are actually starting a thread.

Overall: I really like the Threads and I hope Slack continues to take steps to improve their usability. But I  think that a lot more education could have gone into the roll-out, which would’ve saved a lot of confusion and headaches.

Despite its marketing, Slack’s free tier limits your total number of users

I recently launched a Slack group for my podcast, the /Filmcast:

I used Slack’s free tier, which lets you view 10K of your team’s most recent messages. After just a few days, we’ve already accumulated about 600 members and even crowdsourced a neat spreadsheet with all their podcast recommendations.

As the group has continued to expand, I’ve started to wonder about what the group’s maximum size could be, so I went looking for whether or not Slack’s free tier had a user limit. I was dismayed to find freecodecamp’s blog post, So Yeah We Tried Slack… and We Deeply Regretted It, which points out that yeah, there is a limit, despite what Slack’s marketing says:

I woke up this morning to a mountain of tweets and emails from new campers saying they weren’t receiving our automatically sent Slack invites. Not exactly what you want to happen three days after your open source community is featured in Wired Magazine.

Slack’s support team was enthusiastic about helping, and kept saying the email notifications had gone out. In my desperation, I tried to manually send out the invites. That’s when I was confronted with an ominous message: “You have reached the maximum number of users”.

My heart sank. Our contributors had sunk so many hours into building Slack features. We’d endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media. We were heavily dependent on their service.

In a cold sweat, I started googling. There was literally nothing on web saying anything about Slack having a maximum number of users — only marketing material saying that free tier organizations could have as many users as we wanted. Apparently, we were the first community to ever hit Slack’s undisclosed limit.

Sounds like the service starts struggling at around 5,000 users and poops out completely after 8,500. This is still a pretty healthy number for any community — I think it will be more than sufficient for my needs — but it’s still a limit that Slack’s marketing does nothing to disclose, despite the fact that the above blog post was written more than a year ago.

So, users hoping to build a massive 10K+ sized community on Slack should look elsewhere before investing a ton of resources into this thing (or until they update their marketing to be more clear on how many users they actually allow).

Update: Evidently the limit has been raised since the above articles were published.


Still no word on what the new limit is. I guess there aren’t any communities that invested into Slack’s free tier long enough to find out?

Building Slack Threads

Very interesting behind-the-scenes piece by Harry McCracken for Fast Company, on Slack’s new Threads feature:

Threads aren’t just a major new Slack feature. They’re also a case study in how its designers approach product development. The company has never operated under the guiding principle that Mark Zuckerberg once famously summed up as “move fast and break things.” Instead, it has thrived in part because it aspires to offer tools that feel fully baked from the get-go. Its fit and finish resemble those of the slickest consumer apps, in a world in which many business-centric tools still don’t feel like they were designed for use by human beings.

Even by Slack standards, threaded conversations got extra TLC, because their impact is so great and so many people had been asking for them for so long. “Threads are so close to the heart of what Slack is that they might be an escalated case,” says Joshua Goldenberg, head of design.

The key decisions: Allowing threads to only be one reply deep, and placing them on the right-hand “flex pane.”

Do not back drones on Kickstarter

The Lily drone wowed people with its concept video (above) and raised millions in crowdfunding. Now, it’s closing its doors and getting sued by the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.

Ryan Mac, writing for Forbes, on the making (and unmaking) of the failed Lily drone:

The lawsuit alleged that Lily did not have a single prototype that functioned as advertised at the time of the launch video’s filming. Instead, it claimed Balaresque and Bradlow brought non-functioning models to the shoot for “beauty shots,” while the first-person angles that supposedly came from the Lily Camera were actually shot by GoPro units that had been strapped to the robot.

This is yet another high-profile failure in drone manufacturing. Zano, also funded by Kickstarter, went spectacularly wrong, and the GoPro Karma was recalled within its first few weeks of launch after the devices started falling out of the sky.

The lesson could not be more clear: Don’t back drones on crowdfunding sites. And if the company is new in the drone space, wait a few months to see how things play out. In the meantime: DJI all the way.

301

I’ve always wondered why Youtube stops counting views publicly when videos hit around 301 views. Presumably it’s for some sort of verification process, but how does that work? And why 301? Numberphile has the answer after speaking with Youtube’s analytics team, and it’s fascinating:

The Life and Times of an Apple Store Retail Employee

How can Apple manage to pay its retail employees about the same amount as those of other, much less profitable companies? Because they believe in the cause:

The phrase that trainees hear time and again, which echoes once they arrive at the stores, is “enriching people’s lives.” The idea is to instill in employees the notion that they are doing something far grander than just selling or fixing products. If there is a secret to Apple’s sauce, this is it: the company ennobles employees. It understands that a lot of people will forgo money if they have a sense of higher purpose. That empowerment is important because aspiring sales employees would clearly be better off working at one of the country’s other big sellers of Apple products, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, if they were searching for a hefty paycheck. Both offer sales commissions.

Why Facebook Stopped Using Facebook Credits

When Facebook first introduced its Facebook Credits system in 2009, some pundits that believed it foretold one of Facebook’s future line of business. Those sorts of prognostications ended this week as Facebook announced it’d be phasing out the virtual currency, although it would continue to facilitate payments.

Peter Vogel explains why Facebook ended its Credits experiment:

Ironically, it’s the enormous potential of Payments as a revenue source that is causing Facebook to phase out the Credits currency. Payments as a revenue source is too important to Facebook’s future to take the risk of promoting an untested and unproven currency. To establish Facebook Credits, Facebook would have had to spend significant resources educating the public and building the brand of Credits. It’s a much easier solution to simply transact in an already established currency that users understand and utilize.

The First 30 Days

What is one year like in the life of David Chen? We’re all about to find out.

Earlier this year, a woman named Madeline released an interesting video on Vimeo. She had shot one second of video for every day of her life during the year 2011. I found the result to be unexpectedly inspiring and moving.

Several months later, /Filmcast listener and all-around awesome dude Cesar Kuriyama took to the stage at TED to unveil his own “one second every day project“, which he’d been filming every day for the 30th year of his life.

Kuriyama is passionate about the project and believes everyone should engage in it. I think the final result is fascinating, a seemingly endless series of context-less images. Context-less, that is, to everyone but the filmmaker. It’s a compelling snapshot of one’s life, a video that is evocative for the creator and intriguing and enigmatic for the viewer.

So, I’m pleased to announce that I am also undertaking this project. My birthday this year was May 20th, right around the same time I uprooted my life from Boston and moved to Seattle. Starting on that day, I have filmed one second of video every single day. Around this time next year, I’ll plan to publish the result, a chronicle of my first year here.

In doing this project, I’ve made a few observations about how best to approach it. First of all, I think this project works best when the second that you record is somehow representative of the day that you had, or at least, how you want to remember that day. In practice, this can get a bit tricky; often times the most interesting that happens to me is an interaction I have with someone else. While I can frequently “anticipate” when a good “second” will arrive, it’s often inopportune to whip out a camera and start recording. Secondly, it’s useful to record multiple seconds for each day, giving you the option to choose from a number of them. As a result, it’s also important to have a robust cataloging system for all of your “potential seconds.” Finally, I don’t have experience with this yet, but it sounds like it’s useful to create a master file for the final video, then stitch the videos together intermittently and continuously add them to that file, as opposed to doing them all at the end. Alternatively, one could also create videos for each month, then bind them all together in the end. I may end up going this path because it will allow me to release regular video content, but it also robs the final video of some of its uniqueness. We’ll see. 

As a proof-of-concept, I’ve stitched together my first 30 seconds, representing my first month here. You can find this video below:

When I began working on the project, I asked Cesar Kuriyama, “What if you do this every day for a year and the resulting video ends up being incredibly boring?”

Kuriyama responded, “That’s good! Because then you’ll look back on how boring your life was and you’ll resolve to change things.”

Not a bad point, that. I don’t know what the end result will motivate me to do. I can only hope it will show a life lived full, with love, laughter, and friends, a humble aspiration for the beginning of my new life.

[I am indebted to Cesar Kuriyama for his counsel and for helping me to establish a workflow for pulling these clips together. Be sure to check out his other work.]