Google Chat spaces will be in-line threaded by default (opens in new tab)

Discord has only recently added topic-based options & it's taken off like wildfire across dozens of servers I'm on.

Having structured information, having specific places to look, rather than an ever churning sea of chaos, is so helpful.

They say they listened to their users on this one, that it was confusing. Rather than try to create better context & make the option work, they're torpedoing the high-information option. Fucking lame.

It's so obnoxious that we have so much idiot-driven-software-development, that we are contemporarily unwilling to engauge smart active users & that the low end shapes computing.

I'm a heavy user of Google Chat at work. Whenever I encounter a space with in-line threading, I ask the others if we can switch to the topical structure (with separate threads grouped together and brought to the bottom for new messages, but no in-line replies). Usually everyone agrees.

If in-line replies become the only option, I'll have the choice of wasting countless time to dig through past replies, or just stop checking chat altogether.