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Slack was down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack was down

#211

Post by abhchand »

hartator wrote: post #107
nixgeek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

We pay for Slack and I’ve lost some time this morning coordinating with my team. 2 weeks ago it was screen sharing that was down. It’s infuriating. Not sure why you think OP can’t say “Slack sucks”.

Some reasons, playing devil's advocate:

1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable.

2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work.

3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has shades of ignorance, and of course subjectivity.

4. Why be rude at all? Even if you don't buy into any of the above, is it that hard to be nice in making a point?

Re: Slack was down

#212

Post by Slartie »

conradfr wrote: post #203
jdormit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...sounds like you need to revisit your CI pipeline. Your build shouldn't fail when your chat tool is down.

Yep, made a ticket about it :)

Sure that didn't fail too because its creation could not be announced on Slack? ;-)

Re: Slack was down

#213

Post by dkarl »

nixgeek wrote: post #68
anaphor wrote: post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

Lindsey Graham, a 64-year-old conservative U.S. senator, just said China's ability to influence the U.S. film industry "sucks," so I don't think the language has the swear-word power it used to.

Re: Slack was down

#214

Post by allana »

mh- wrote: post #195
allana wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is CPU and I/O use on the newest version?

About the same, for my usage.

Ooof, I'd hope they would have improved CPU use when handling lots of GIFs. Tusky and Mastodon's web frontend handle pausing offscreen GIFs pretty well, my fan doesn't spin up at all (unlike Slack's desktop client last I used it).

Re: Slack was down

#215

Post by aantix »

dudul wrote: post #71
aantix wrote: post #57

Slightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything? E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made available to the chat room. I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible with text. There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in orde…

I think it's a terrible idea. Writing things down, is the first step towards really thinking it through, making sure it makes sense, etc.

True, when in isolation.

I'm thinking more of collaboration - when the solution isn't necessarily known and there's a lot of back and forth.

Re: Slack was down

#216

Post by [deleted] »

elwell wrote: post #46
anaphor wrote: post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

But... we pay managed solutions like Slack so we have 100% uptime...

[deleted]

Re: Slack was down

#217

Post by graphememes »

qaute wrote: post #152
anaphor wrote: post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Some other open Slack alternatives I know about include: Matrix[1]: maybe the most impressive. A chat _protocol_ with multiple server and client implementations, gateways to everything, and just out of beta. Zulip[2] (as mentioned), Rocket.Chat[3], Mattermost[4]---Slack clones. open source, developement open to pull requests to various degrees, can pay to have hosted in cloud or get support. Non-free or qualitatively…

None of these will:

- "replace email"

- "increase productivity"

- "centralize communication"

None of them. Not a damn one. I've worked at over 20 startups, there has never been a single case where any of these claims are true. They purchase one of these damn chat clients, and it becomes the biggest timesink the entire organization has every. single. time.

But, you know what? You can't get rid of it. Everyone has it. Nobody wants to change off of it. So what do they do? Introduce other methods of communication through other apps. So no. It doesn't reduce it. If anything it increases the noise.

Also, you think you make the right choice in the beginning. It seems great, your 7-50 people organization works fine. Wait until it's over 300 people, 1000 people. It becomes an absolute nightmare.

Slack is probably the worst for 1000 people organizations. It was horrible at 150, then at 300 you start seeing people fight each other over rooms.

Re: Slack was down

#218

Post by hartator »

abhchand wrote: post #211
hartator wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pay for Slack and I’ve lost some time this morning coordinating with my team. 2 weeks ago it was screen sharing that was down. It’s infuriating. Not sure why you think OP can’t say “Slack sucks”.

Some reasons, playing devil's advocate: 1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable. 2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work. 3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has…

Playing the devil's advocate's advocate:

> 1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable.

Screen sharing and video have not been reliable in the past month. With several public incidents.

> 2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work.

I feel very little sympathy for an engineer who make couple of hundred thousands per year. Not accounting stock options, vacation, and work environment. And Slack won't fire the culprit.

> 3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has shades of ignorance, and of course subjectivity

We invest our own time building integrations. Why should be doing that for Slack and not for the competition?

> 4. Why be rude at all? Even if you don't buy into any of the above, is it that hard to be nice in making a point?

I don't think OP's "It sucks" is dismissive or rude. You can be nice and still thinking something sucks. It helps no one to lie by choosing less explicit words.

Re: Slack was down

#219

Post by IggleSniggle »

scott_s wrote: post #210
IggleSniggle wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah see the people that are caring about this are caring because it has used up all of their available RAM, has pushed stuff into Virtual Memory, and it is causing performance problems for their system. Or, if they are IT, it is causing performance problems on their users' systems. This is a pretty reasonable complaint when you're talking about a system with 2gb, and a chat application that uses 1.5gb of memory...or…

"Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597

Thank you for the gentle correction. I will now also start using "thrashing" more accurately.

Re: Slack was down

#220

Post by timdorr »

MisterTea wrote: post #135
timdorr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually just fixed that in 4.0: https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-deskt... I'm currently sitting at 400MB total usage (including helpers) for 4 workspaces.

400MB? Not bad for a chat client that sends a few bytes of text.

This is on my Mac, whose apps aren't exactly known for memory efficiency.

Fantastical, a calendaring app, is sitting at 333MB.

1Password is taking up 168MB in the background.

Finder, which I don't even have a window open for, is eating 127MB.

I'm not saying 400MB is amazing or anything, but it's a significant drop from the gigs of memory wasted by previous versions.

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