Threads are on the verge of greatness. Instead, they are hellish and clunky. There are simple fixes, let's discuss them
Disclaimer: This is all my opinion, though I often state it as factual in this post.
With this text, I'm hoping to give useful feedback to the Discord team by both providing my own thoughts on this new feature and encouraging discussion of the current downfalls and great points of Threads, as well as how to fix the current problems
Let's start with the biggest problem: Moderation. This is where the "hellish" from the title comes from. Threads are truly complicated to moderate currently.
This is because they require moderators to always be checking for new threads, then join these threads to be able to monitor them.
Ill-intentioned users could create threads in the hope that moderators would take more time to join a thread or pay less attention and then start a conversation that is heavily problematic and against the server's rules and Discord TOS.
This constant need for moderators to check thread creation and to join them potentially decuples the possibility for human error in moderation tasks.
We could also talk about the inherent strain that comes with threads and having to check many more channels in a server where threads are heavily used,
but as this is an inherent trade-off with the basic design of the feature which cannot be fixed easily, it does not fit in this feedback post
The second major problem is that Bots do not work out of the box with threads. This ties into the first problem as Bots can be a major part of the moderation effort of a server.
The fact that Bots do not participate in every thread makes it harder to moderate the server, harder for servers with helper bots to utilise these helpers,
harder for any server to utilise any of the bot features, even though these same Bots have become a central piece of the Discord experience.
Finally, a short list of minor problems that aren't so important but could be the difference between an annoying feature and a great one in the end
- Notifications for threads are "All messages" by default. This, especially for really active community members, could mean many, many pings per minute if not turned off
- The search feature only searches threads you are participating in. This heavily reduces the amount of information the search can get, reducing its accuracy as well. I could understand not wanting to search archived threads, but even then I would actually prefer if it did
- Threads take a lot of space, even when they've been inactive for a while. You can of course leave them, but maybe you have ongoing conversations that you still want to get notified for but don't want to deal with all that extra space taken
All of these issues could be interpreted as non-issues. None of them makes something that was possible impossible, or anything truly major like that.
But, they all make using Threads inconvenient by requiring much more manual labour than they should. In the end, this makes Threads an inconvenience even though they should be a convenience
Now, let's get into my suggestions for how to fix these problems.
The first and probably most important suggestion would be to make both Moderators and Bots join all threads by default. Excepted private threads for bots, maybe.
This would already greatly reduce the strain on Moderators to moderate servers, and make a central piece of using Discord (Bots) be usable in threads out of the box. I believe this is truly a requirement
That would not really fix everything that makes moderating threads so hard, though.
Having to jump between many channels to make sure everything is going ok may be a bit problematic, and I'm not certain how it would be possible to counter that.
We could think of showing all the discussions happening in threads in their parent channel, for example. But this would most certainly flood that parent channel and make conversations in that channel as complicated to follow as the current overlapping conversations happening in the same channel, which is what Threads are trying to solve
Then, the fixes for these minor problems. They should be simple, almost configuration changes, and I really hope they will be accepted.
- Notifications for Threads should really follow the current notification setting for the server the Thread is created in. Adding an option to change the notification setting for yourself when creating a thread would also be great
- The search feature should search all public threads, even those you aren't participating in. Archived Threads should also be searched, in my opinion
- There should be a way to fold threads just like you fold muted channels, making them appear only when new messages are sent in there
Maybe these problems only arise from a misconception of what Threads are supposed to be. Maybe you're not supposed to have more than a few threads in your server at all times.
But for big servers, I don't believe this is an option. I believe these problems are relevant to the intended use of Threads, and that they should be fixed. I hope that they will be
There you go, this is all my thoughts on the new Thread feature.
I really hope this will influence the future development of the feature, as I really believe it could become a great asset and tool
I again encourage you to respond to this post with any thoughts you have on these Threads.
Thank you for reading me!
TLDR:
- Makes moderating more difficult by requiring constant monitoring
- Bots basically don't work in Threads
- Default notification setting for Threads is "All messages", I don't want to get pinged every other second
- Search feature doesn't include threads you aren't participating in, limiting results accuracy
- They can take a lot of space and you can't fold them, only quit or archive them
- Should be a convenience but is actually an inconvenience, but it doesn't need much to be really good
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"would be to make both Moderators and Bots join all threads by default"
imo there should be a channel permission "Join all threads in this channel by default", rather than incorporating it into a server-wide permission such as Manage Server.
5 -
100% this, you read my mind. Mods and bots not being able to see by default is the #1 problem for the reasons you mentioned, and during testing the rampant problems mentioned were too unsettling for my liking.
The feature itself is good, yes, but changes need to be made, as currently there are so many ways it can turn sour it does more harm than good.
(P.S. Hi Asher lol)
4 -
Absolutely agree on your points, and I'd like to add - can we turn off archiving? and/or add a setting where instead of archiving, the thread ungroups? (unravels?) dump all the thread messages into the channel, based on timestamp, maybe with a thread tag or something like we get on reply messages.
Threads can help me overcome the hurdle of "oh my god, so many conversations at once", but my friend discords aren't going to use them if we lose (instant access to) all the messages eventually.
1 -
Yes, this targets my number one problem with threads currently: They totally break the previous moderation flow of the read/unread system for channels. There is no instant visual indicator for a new, newly unarchived or otherwise unjoined thread you haven't read yet. Archived threads could be unarchived, there could be any amount of archived threads, etc. This results in a potentially *massive* amount of time just searching or sifting through threads on a server where users can freely create them for conversation.
In other words, Threads currently take the issue of "too many conversations" and turn it into "too many threads".
Also, the UI for this is just rigid and uncomfortable. You have to hover on a channel to see the thread menu as opposed to clicking a button beside the create invite button. Sure, it's nice that the button at the top of the screen automatically moves back to the top of the "active threads" tab every time you open it, but it's not so nice if it closes every time to try to open or archive or do anything to a thread, even if you hold shift. It might be nice to users that thread lists don't appear unless you subscribe to them, but it's detrimental when you want to do things like cross-referencing (you should be able to see where a thread originated from considering how the thread id is the "parent" message id) and you're forced to join a thread to keep it open, as opposed to, say, having a view that shows a subset of threads you're not subscribed to.
Finally, the wording on the "use threads" permission is a headache. I had to read the Discord help article to understand how its interaction with the "send messages" permission worked.
2 -
Auto-join is actually a neat solution to a couple of problems with threads. I'm not sure about how to implement it well (server permissions? notification setting? some kind of user setting? are all of the options not-good in some way?), but I hope the team at least talks about it.
1 -
I think Asher_Y is right with making auto joining threads a permission instead of a default.
As for threads, there's another problem not mentioned:
You can never truly leave threads, and notifications settings on them being changed, even on the main channel, doesn't stop people from being able to ping you in them, giving you a notification and forcing you back into the thread.
Meaning users could abuse this and troll other members or moderators, by continuously pinging them pulling them back into threads they're trying to leave.
Furthermore, threads have a time you set for them to expire;
However, the catch is, this time extends proportional to the most recent message. If you send a message at 12:00PM, and the thread is for 1 hour, it will archive at 1:PM, but if you send another message at 12:07PM, the timer will extend to 1:07PM. That being said threads could be never ending if people continue to interact in them, which is a problem and can make moderation difficult unless mods actively manually archive threads after a time to stop users from hiding out in past threads and breaking rules. There needs to be a hard set time limit that doesn't keep extending.
Finally, members have the ability to unarchive threads, and as others have mentioned this can be a disaster, even if mods are diligent in archiving manually, users can just reopen any and all threads. Mods need a permission to manually shut down threads without members able to just reopen them afterwards.1 -
- Search feature doesn't include threads you aren't participating in, limiting results accuracy
now they do the opposite and its hellish. thank you community.
why do we even need threads?0
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