Add Reply-in-Line back to Chat in addition to Reply-as-Thread

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Continuing the discussion from Introducing chat threads!:

Adding Threads is great, they’re a useful organizational tool. But I don’t think they should be the only (or in fact the default) way of replying in Chat.

@mcwumbly

Another idea that has come up a few times is to support quote-reply within chat. We’ve opted not to do that yet for similar reasons, but it’s something I occasionally wish existed (and I do reach for > to work around this, but my experience is that few people bother, so I think providing a greater affordance for quote reply would be necessary if it were a behavior we wished to encourage).

This may be very personality/preference-dependent. I personally find threads to be a very “heavy” solution and use them very seldom. But when they’re called for they’re super useful. Far, far more often I simply want to reply in-line to a previous message, and @-ing someone is not the same thing by any means. The purpose is less to notify a specific person than it is to establish a clear context for my message. AFAIK this used to be possible before Threads and I think it should be reintroduced as an option, i.e. “Reply in-line or Create New Thread”. When the only option is to create a new Thread then of course you’ll get lots of thread-use, and conversely if there is no option to reply in-line or quote-reply, well, how do you then gauge the potential use of that vs Threads?

I see plenty of situations where 1-2 in-line replies will address a topic of discussion without having to create a whole Thread which seems overkill for that. Discord handles this well by prompting users to create Threads when replies to each other starte to exceed a certain threshold. And (I think) unlike Discord, Discourse has the theoretical capability to actually (optionally) move all prior replies into a thread retroactively and automatically (i.e. not having to manually select them all).

@Catija

As a Slack and Discord user for several years, I’d argue that the “right” solution is probably the one no dev wants to hear - have both. I’ve found the biggest determiners (for me) of which I prefer are:

Pretty much exactly what this person said

FWIW Discord supports all this very well and is IMO basically a model to emulate here. No need to reinvent this particular wheel, and the fact that Discord has deemed it worthwhile to have both Reply-in-Line and Reply-as-Thread feels supportive of the value of both. The use of these two approaches is more a personal and even cultural thing than a right/wrong/best way. There are Discord communities I’m in where hardly any Threads are used, and others where almost every reply is a Thread.

[jimkleiber]

The irony I find is that Discourse topics fight so hard to be linear, non-threaded, and yet I really want that style even more in chat, with the reply-as-quote option to provide very helpful context. In the beginning of Discourse Chat, I even crested a theme component so chat replies would look and function more like Whatsapp/Signal.

[NateDhaliwal]

I rarely vote on Feature requests, but this one got my vote. Thanks for bringing it up!

I really feel like creating a whole thread for a reply sometimes makes it feel like you’re separating from the conversation in the main thread. Sometmes, 1 reply to a message just isn’t worth opening up a whole thread, but perhaps a whole conversation branched off is.

I would really love for replies to be inline as the default, or at least a way to choose to reply in the chat or in a new thread.