A Thread About Threads

I'm sure there will be those who disagree with me, and that's fine, but I'd like to state that Threads so far have accomplished nothing but headaches on the nearly one-hundred servers I am a part of, and most of all for the larger communities that I administrate. Too much was unclear about this new feature, which was fine while it was opt-in, but now it's automatically enabled itself on MANY servers, causing nothing but havoc. Some users could see and use Threads while others couldn't because updates apparently aren't rolled out even regionally anymore, which only added to the chaos as users argued back and forth about "how Discord works" per platform. I'm not sure how or why this feature was chosen to be added to the platform, but I firmly believe it has little to no place on it whatsoever, and while the permissions exist so that we can extinguish the fires it caused, those fires should never have been started in the first place with such an ill managed introduction to said feature.

As a moderator on the platform, and a very present one in many places on it, I catch a lot of flack from users regularly either because they're mad that I reacted to them breaking rules, or they just want to meme the crap out of me for being a moderator (I'm sure we all know the Discord Moderator memes by now), but I still take pride in what I do because I know I do it well and my communities flourish as at least a partial result of it. To be lied to directly by Discord, have my job made suddenly incredibly more difficult by Discord, and subsequently be ignored by Discord when attempting to communicate with them about the issue is a huge slap in the face in addition to what I already deal with on a daily basis. Shame on them for handling the distribution and activation of this feature in the lazy manner that they did with no concern for how it would affect anyone.

This feature is already being used heavily by trolls to create as many Threads as they can so that moderators can't keep up. There's no reliable way to know how many Threads exist at any given point in time besides clicking on the channel and taking a look at the number of Threads the little button on the top right says there are. Is that more than last time for that channel? I don't know, there's a million frickin' channels! On top of that, any bots that are on servers to help automatically moderate small common things are not able to do so within Threads. They don't respond to commands, they don't monitor the chat, they are completely useless now! Sure developers can update them to accommodate for this new feature, but while most public bots are not ready for it yet, you can imagine that custom bots will be even further behind the curve on many servers due to time constraints that don't allow for researching whatever API changes and additions were made and actually implementing the changes into the code. Many servers are sitting in the water, and due to the number of people complaining that the permissions don't work, it seems that the feature was setup in a way that is simply not user friendly to disable. While I managed to disable it just fine on my own servers, it really seems that others are not finding it so easy. The simple act of not forcing this supposedly opt-in beta feature would have been a pretty great help here in allowing folks to properly prepare for it rather than drowning in it.

Users seem to have more control than Admins over Threads in certain ways. They can add or remove members, including members with higher permissions settings than their own. They can create unlimited Threads for the fun of it. They can pull anyone in against their will. Who thought this was a good idea? You literally removed control from moderators and administrators and handed it over to everyone else. It's quite clear this feature was not well thought out prior to launch, and while you can claim it "hasn't launched" because "it's in beta" the damn thing is all over and you're only fooling yourself with that kind of double-speak nonsense. 

The default notification setting for ALL Threads is literally set to All Messages. This setting does not care what the server default setting is, or what the channel the Thread was created off of's setting is. It defaults to All Messages no matter what. Yet another flub on the feature that nobody bothered to think about for ten seconds, and while it's a minor thing, it definitely adds to the already heavy frustrations that the feature has introduced.

Thanks for forcing this on us all and causing today to be quite stressful. I think I'll be keeping the permissions off on my own servers for this feature, but I hope that if you wish to improve it you take a note or two from Slack since they actually managed to implement it fairly successfully.

tl;dr The feature was presented as opt-in and then was automatically enabled while we slept, Discord isn't responding to questions comments or complaints about the feature, the feature enables trolls to do exactly what trolls do, users have more control than admins in ways, default notification setting is All Messages for some ungodly reason. Please do better.