<story><title>Braid – A team-chat app with a novel UI for better conversations</title><url>https://github.com/braidchat/braid</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rafd</author><text>Hey HN! One of the creators of Braid here.&lt;p&gt;We started Braid internally in the pre-Slack days (we were using HipChat then), because we felt that &amp;quot;chatrooms&amp;quot; didn&amp;#x27;t promote good async team workflows. They would lead to a lot of FOMO and constant checking, because if you didn&amp;#x27;t participate in a conversation at the right time, the topic in a channel would have moved on to something else. We liked the async nature of email more, but, email has it&amp;#x27;s own baggage.&lt;p&gt;Our team has been using Braid internally for several years and we&amp;#x27;re very happy with it. But, compared to Slack, it&amp;#x27;s best thought of as a prototype &amp;#x2F; experiment &amp;#x2F; UI-proof-of-concept, because we don&amp;#x27;t have the polish and maturity of features that Slack has.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had interest from some individuals who &amp;quot;get it&amp;quot;, but it&amp;#x27;s often been hard for those individuals to convert the rest of their teams. If any team here is interested in the Braid concept and wants to give it a serious go, I&amp;#x27;m at your disposal, and I&amp;#x27;d love to get your feedback so we can keep morphing the product.&lt;p&gt;The use of &amp;quot;hashtags&amp;quot; in our demos is a bit overdone compared to what happens in practice. It makes it seem like twitter #hastags, but, it&amp;#x27;s really more like Gmail labels. Braid tags serve the same purpose as Slack&amp;#x27;s channels, except a given thread can exist in multiple channels (ie. go to multiple teams &amp;#x2F; individuals) and tags can be added over time (ie. more people can be invited to the conversation).</text></comment>
<story><title>Braid – A team-chat app with a novel UI for better conversations</title><url>https://github.com/braidchat/braid</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sleepinseattle</author><text>I appreciate that the UI is fresh. I&amp;#x27;m tired of the trend of desktop apps not taking advantage of larger screens and instead just shoe-horning mobile &amp;quot;feed&amp;quot; designs into a floating window.&lt;p&gt;Not convinced that tagging is better than channels for large teams. Seems like there would be an explosion of tags to keep track of.&lt;p&gt;Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on Teams.</text></comment>