Google Chat in-line topic threading

[dpavlov]

Hi communty, 

as per this article from 14 June 21, Rooms are becoming Spaces as well as in-line topic threading was supposed to be introduced in spaces. 

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/helping-business-with-new-additions-to-google-works...

So far we this feature is still not available. 

We haev Chat preffered and enabled in our admin console. 

Is anyone actually able to use in-line topic threading? 

[bill_pier3]

And for Chat Spaces that are the migrated users from Currents communities, the conversation-topic paradigm would have mimicked what people were used to in Currents (posts with replies).

[cvigo]

Our first try is being just crazy. But the funny thing is the example that Google shows in their own announcement, which matches, exactly, our experience. 

“We can come back to this”… Ok, to what? The meaning of “this” is probably in the context of the previous messages, which where not included in the thread because is just impossible.

All the times we started a threat, the first respondent forgot to “reply” to the first message (many times is the same person who writes 1st, 2nd and event more unthreaded messages). It’s is always late when you say “I should have started a thread” and you have to select which message will open it and leave the others unthreaded.

[TheValiantFox]

This is exactly our experience. 

Had to create a new space in months and we are now forced to inline-threads. Working with teams of size 15+ someone always forgets to "Reply in Thread" leaving the conversation split between main chat and thread which is utter chaos.

And if you have this happen multiple times you have multiple conversations that leak out into the main chat which doubles the chaos.

Google chat became unusable for teams larger than 5. Guess we have to find a different chat application.

[bill_pier3]

Why not just do some training on Chat?

[TheValiantFox]

If there's a need to train people on a chat application, it's not a particular good app in my opinion. Considering that the thread-based chat did not necessitate any training, I'm viewing this as a significant step backwards.

I'm just wondering why not both ways could've co-existed and let the people choose.

[cvigo]

My teams have just opted to ignore the thread feature. All happens in the main thread, like in a Telegram/WhatsApp group.

Threads are chaos

[hhp]

All our team members prefer the old-style threads to the degree where we are recycling old spaces just to keep using this feature. We find the Slack-style "in-line threads" inferior in UX. Like what some of you are saying, some of the reasons for us are:

• It takes one more click to open a thread to just find out what was the last thing that was said. Likewise to add to the thread.
• When opening a thread, the UI requires you to shift your focus away from the main chat to a new panel on the right - we tend to find this distracting and an unproductive use of cognitive energy.
• The extra physical and cognitive effort tends to mean that people are less likely to use threads properly. Indeed this is what I often see in Slack channels - conversations are hard to follow because some people reply in threads and some reply in the main chat. 

I would very much appreciate if Google can give back the option for us to choose.

[BCBX]

Google chat is so bad now with inline threads, google topic was great for team work. 

If google cant bring back topics to chat, we're going to have to move to a different system. 

Googles just wreaked a perfectly good chat. 

Bring back chat topics please

[bill_pier3]

Really now?  MANY other messaging systems use threaded in-line replies as the paradigm.

In my experience with users, it's come down to not wanting to learn a usage paradigm.  Any post to the stream of the Chat Space IS A NEW TOPIC with conversation following in the threaded replies.  When users participate in the Space properly, it's very organized and easy to follow.

And Google didn't wreck anything -- the service has evolved just like every other vendor with their services.  As some here have suggested, Google is chasing Slack with feature parity.  And Slack, who made almost $2B last year ... for just a messaging platform ... must be doing something right!  Perhaps then Google knows what it's doing when it enhances and updates Chat.

[eric-helier]

Maybe the issue is not with inline threads, but the usability of it. We used slack before and we were fine with it.
People in charge of the change keep saying "every other chat works like this", and "it makes no difference as long as people learn to use it correctly"...
The thing is that people should not have to learn how to use a chat, at least the huge majority (there are always people that will need some trainings I agree). A chat application should be intuitive and easy to use. We are talking about google app here seriously, the one google that maintain https://m3.material.io/ which is a reference for all product designers on usability... Arguing that users needs to be trained to use a google chat product is just a failure.

[eric-helier]

This update is causing us a lot of issues, in terms of workflow, collaboration, etc.
We are managing a community chat room of 800+ people and inline threading just does not make it.
We also have some bots and automation that does not work anymore
- ltt : link to threads
- chatfinder : tool to request access to chatrooms
- CICD (continuous integration and delivery) pipelines : was notifying in dev chatroom with a specific thread for each job

Why not keep the choice ? If old threads do not come back, we will have to migrate to another tool.

[BCBX]

Yes, google should give the option of either. We are looking at moving to a different platform as google chat is pretty bad for working on topics now. the chats a mess and unusable. 

[pedrocollares]

This is our experience as well. Teams with 30+ people can't keep information organized with the in-line system.

Whenever a 'thread' gets a reply, it doesn't 'pop out' as most recent thread. So we necessarily need to scroll up a lot to find recurrent threads which were formerly created. And upon the 'update', the topics weren't converted to threads properly. That ruined most of out information database stored in chat, which is now very hard to search. A complete chaos.

I can't conceive how a large team can get along with the in-line system, and we're looking for other platforms while we can't have our topics back. (Not to mention the huge amount of information we're losing in that migration)

[eric-helier]

We are still struggling to try our best to adapt.
What we are thinking of currently before giving up with google chat, is to have separated chat rooms for "important announcements (only by few people)" and "free discussions (where we care less if it's a mess)".
But that means the additional work of onboarding people to two chat rooms instead of one (knowing that in Airbus people are usually following dozens of chat rooms)...
And we also lost 3 years of structured, linked and searchable information. No way back on this, we take this as a lesson that a chat should not serve as a structured database for useful information.

To me it looks like google chat power has been reduced to "unstructured live messaging", where before it was possible and powerful to use it to manage "topics", "announcements", "updates", "automated notifications", etc.

[pedrocollares]

All mentioned about getting used to the new system is debatable.

What caused the complete chaos in our stored information was how the migration occured. TOPICS should have been translated to THREADS, so the conversations remain nested and organized. The migration caused the whole topics to lose their structure. Is there a way to convert them into threads instead?

[steffnh]

Inline threads has caused a full on chaos in our workspace. We need to reverse this..