Threading? God, I hate threads in a live chat. Is it never not awkward to use? Slack is the example I'm thinking of, though I'm sure it's shit everywhere else too. In Slack, rather than display the one threaded reply just below (maybe indented), it makes me go to another window, but then someone else is replying non-threaded, so I have to bounce back and forth for the next 10 minutes.

I completely agree. Threads in Slack should be a great way to make conversations easy to navigate but damn did they fsck up ever part of the UX:

- opening threads in a new window is in some hard to find and hard to remember location

- threads can’t be inlined (like you’ve described). I actually like how they’re in a pane to the right but sometimes that causes issues (as you’ve described). Sometimes it’s just that the view is too narrow.

- there’s no way to shift non-threaded comments into the thread. I’ve lost count of the number of times conversations have happened over multiple threads and/or non-threaded replies.

The way they implemented it is a complete clusterfuck.