> While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.

We switched from HipChat to Google Chat, which in my mind is pretty bad. Customers are often on Teams, which somehow manages to be MUCH MUCH worse. People kept telling me that Slack is much better than either Google Chat or MS Team, but after using it I can't say that I'd agree. Teams is clearly the worst, Slack is awful in its own way and Google Chat manages to be the best of the three, but mostly because the two others are so terrible.

It's clearly not an easy problem to solve, but I do wonder why all of these "enterprise" messaging/meeting/chat platforms are so terrible.

Twist is better still than Slack - they force everything into threads, so it becomes a reasonably browsable experience, and therefore possible to maintain async comms with. Slack still wins on integrations, though Twist has a few (including Zapier).

How do you find the thread with the conversation you need to carry on? That's the problem with Slack. Slack threads is where information goes to hide and die. "Ah, you did answer that two days ago? Where?"

There are two levels of organization - channels and threads, so it's not too bad to browse if reasonably setup. It also gives you an inbox with all of your unread threads, so that you can catch up quickly; and, you can mark a thread unread if you want to punt on it after reading.