I'm also confused because almost all of my company's Teams usage happens in unthreaded chats.

We don't use teams feature almost at all because it forces threading. Before wer used mattermost but teams is 100% worse but with video chat...

> I'm also confused because almost all of my company's Teams usage happens in unthreaded chats.

Yeah, having a feature doesn't mean people use the feature.

The unthreaded chats are all private, no? If you want to use the group chat it forces you into threaded (or is there a way to switch out of that?)

Are you talking about threads or channels? It sounds like you are describing what slack calls channels.

Yes, in the places I've used Slack, channels were the default mode of communication.

It has "private" group chats in Chats tab and all meetings auto-create group chats. At various points I've tried to push conversations into a proper Team and threaded chat, but the "convenience" of just sending a chat message in last week's meeting chat or some hand-built group chat rather than just finding the right Team channel seems to keep winning out more often than not.

In chat, just go to New Chat and add as many people as you want. Boom, unthreaded group chat. You can rename it to a topic or group name.

But then what's the point of the "Teams" part of Teams?

I think they’re just saying that teams forces you into using a thread, and make a choice to create a new one if that’s what you want. In slack by default you’re writing a top level message (ie creating a new thread)

Pedantic perhaps but maybe it's worth pointing out that Teams doesn't force you to use a thread. It just makes it the obvious choice since each top level message has a reply button directly on it so it's a single step process. Also when we're talking about Teams there's a big distinction between a Teams/Teams/Channel vs a Teams/Chat which is its own annoyance. They don't even support the same formatting capabilities (e.g. markdown) which is weird.

Indeed, never underestimate the power of defaults. There’s a tendency on HN to say “well, everyone should just use threads on Slack then.” There is, of course, a way Slack could make that happen: make it the default.

(For what it’s worth, I much prefer Slack for communicating, but when I have to find something, I wish I were looking for it in Teams.)

Slacks threading model is super weak compared to other options. I haven’t used teams, but I went from Zulip to Slack a little while ago and it felt like a huge step backwards.

Zulip is in a league of its own, though - I'd say Slack is pretty similar to other non-Zulip options.

Regarding threads I've seen two options (besides zulip state of the art handling of that). Either hide the threads like slack or throw them in your face like Cisco webex teams.

Slack threads are hidden, it is clearly visible that they were added later.

I prefer how they are handled in zulip.

I use Slack currently and used it before. Threads in Slack are "optional", then they are 1st class citizen in Teams.