They're basically doa. Maybe they'll see a bit of traffic when they are made and like 1 day after, but otherwise they're almost immediately abandoned.
One of our architects posted a diagram in the Files tab in a specific teams channel. 2-3 people actually looked and downloaded it. Everyone else got it when it was posted as an attachment to the group chat we were having.
Most people just gravitate to direct messages, myself included. Its not that threads/channels are hard to understand. Its simply that most people cant be arsed to use them and have no interest in following different topics/channels/threads for what they want, thats why even they do use Teams / Threads / w.e (worked with a client that did), you'll have _a lot_ of duplicate threads ... people would rather make a new one that search for whats there.
For what it’s worth, I personally prefer Slack’s approach over Zulip’s - I think threading is a really important feature, but requiring it for every message creates excessive and unnecessary friction.
Even with that change, though, I’d still rather have threading be opt-in. Not every message fits well into exactly one thread.
However trying to get conversations to actually occur in them seems to be an uphill battle with other (non-techy?) people, and often things 'degenerate' into a stream-of-consciousness series of messages.
Is it just that I'm atypical in preferring them? Do 'normal' people have a hard time with (understanding) them? Other?