Ask, don't scoff? Also to be fair, Slack's implementation of threads is awful. Probably their most poorly done feature in my mind.

If there is already a lively topic ongoing in a room and I need to jump in with another topic, I write a message and say "Hey I have a question, can someone help me?" and then I immediately start a thread with myself so people see that it is a thread and click it to respond rather than just spamming the room.

I have always wanted to try out twistapp and see how it is with their "Thread first" UX mentality.

I tried out Twist with my team and I loved it. Much easier to keep up with corporate communications—people tag you on the threads you absolutely should care about, for the rest you can skip entire conversations if they aren't relevant to you instead of sifting through a giant unorganized Slack channel. Searching works well. Idk how scripting bots for it goes but I never really cared for 99% of the bots people write for Slack so I never minded. Highly recommend.

In my current team that uses Slack, I just made it a policy that all conversations have to be in threads. If they're not I just flip a shit until people give up and make threads again lol. Most people don't care enough to retaliate, so that happened a few times and then everybody got used to the system; this is basically an approximation of Twist now (where the destructive behavior is super easy to commit... sigh)

I've definitely found that preemptive threading is a lot more successful than hoping others will cooperatively thread the conversation

That slack is rather depressing I think I have most channels muted.