Just to check that we are on the same page: when we say "threaded conversation", be we both mean the ability to visually group the messages in the conversation in hierarchical trees[0], right? Because I don't recall ever seeing anything like that in Slack, nor being taught how to do that. I haven't used it in quite a while though.
Even if it is there, the affordances of the UI[1] don't seem to encourage this style of conversation. There is a huge difference between something being theoretically possible for expert users, or intuitively embedded it in the mode of conversation.
Mind you, I'm not saying that hierarchical trees are a panacea. I think human conversation is much more similar to the way branching and merging works in distributed version control systems, but I can't see how one would easily make a conversational UI based on that.
Even if it is there, the affordances of the UI[1] don't seem to encourage this style of conversation. There is a huge difference between something being theoretically possible for expert users, or intuitively embedded it in the mode of conversation.
Mind you, I'm not saying that hierarchical trees are a panacea. I think human conversation is much more similar to the way branching and merging works in distributed version control systems, but I can't see how one would easily make a conversational UI based on that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance