Amen. It's deeply ironic that email threads actually work better at this use case than Slack does, despite it being Slack's alleged raison d'etre.
I try to think from the 'regular user' perspective and often assumed that they just don't care. I figured they'd have Slack open on their desktop all the time at work, or just not care about load times or battery drain. I figured that was just one of those '(web) developer things'.
But I've been surprised at how much friction there is to using Slack with various non-nerdy clients I have. They'll constantly send me messages via WhatsApp or even Telegram. The ones that I've convinced to use Trello often start using it for their own stuff.
But Slack is a slog to them. Mostly the desktop clients, but I've heard a number of them complain about mobile (which I don't use much, but I thought was native?).
Whatever Slack is doing right, whatever its other problems, surely the fact that 'regular folks' feel friction using a chat app that one is supposed to regularly use is a cause for concern!
What it needs now is someone who can add (for want of a better term) "knowledge management". The search sucks; it is just garbage. But beyond fixing search, it needs... something. I started sketching an idea involving users tagging comments as a baseline something to try to make it more than a realtime stream of undifferentiated business info.
Your Slack history contains a ton of info your company needs. Too bad you can't find it if someone said it last week.