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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#21

Post by pavlov »

jlees wrote: post #10
morgante wrote: post #5

It sounds like they didn't do any research into what Slack's limitations are. Also, frankly, if I were Slack I would not invest in supporting this use case at all. Massive free chat rooms are not a profitable space to be in.

It depends on the community. For this one, it's a bunch of folks learning to code and getting coding jobs; I can imagine many of those ending up working at tech companies who might be great Slack customers, and evangelising because they had such a great experience using it - so the investment of supporting a 'free' chat room could pay off over time.

I don't know if that makes long-term sense.

The OP sounds very entitled: "We'd endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media."

Of course Slack must provide them with free chat rooms in perpetuity, they've even been mentioned in interviews!

It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#22

Post by colbyh »

jlees wrote: post #10
morgante wrote: post #5

It sounds like they didn't do any research into what Slack's limitations are. Also, frankly, if I were Slack I would not invest in supporting this use case at all. Massive free chat rooms are not a profitable space to be in.

It depends on the community. For this one, it's a bunch of folks learning to code and getting coding jobs; I can imagine many of those ending up working at tech companies who might be great Slack customers, and evangelising because they had such a great experience using it - so the investment of supporting a 'free' chat room could pay off over time.

You realize that this one example actually proves the rule, no? In order for the math to work out in this instance you need a large, tech-focused community that might one day turn into a workforce of engineers that might then bring their Slack preference into new companies. At which point assuming the company isn't already using Slack, which is a very big IFF, you then hope that the coder builds enough clout in the company to evangelize Slack and convince the company to move off of whatever they are currently using.

If I were Slack I would generate migration assistants to get organizations like this OFF of Slack and on to something like Gitter ASAP. Seems like the return on that investment (in purely good will) would be much more predictable and scalable.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#23

Post by Axsuul »

Using Slack for communities and groups of people who don't know each other is incredibly clunky. It still feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Slack is made for teams who communicate furiously. Large communities are typically more passive and casual.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#24

Post by derefr »

It's pretty clear that Slack is not, and never will be, built for this use-case. Slack is for teams: small groups where everyone knows one-another by name, can be trusted with one-another's email-addresses and other contact information, can be trusted to only use @everyone triggers for important things, etc. A lot of Slack's features are built to assume this "small group with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to fiddle with things" paradigm.

Slack can handle "communities"—effectively groups with a "team"-sized aristocracy and a bunch of rarely-visiting people who mainly interact in a hub-and-spoke fashion with the team. But it's still not built for that.

Slack is emphatically not for societies: groups big enough that people only know a small percentage of others, groups that must create "laws" to prevent random strangers abusing your shared infrastructure, etc.

In fact, very few pieces of software are designed to cope with use by societies. Maybe Usenet (as a whole), IRC (an entire server, not a single channel), and Reddit (the code-base, run on your own server) are for societies.

If I were to come up with a way to host a chat adjacent to a MOOC, though, I'd still probably use Slack; I'd just have one Slack team for each instance of each course. (The one thing I do think Slack is missing, is a way to easily share your "Slack identity" (username, avatar, client display prefs, etc.) between multiple Slack teams you're concurrently logged into. Then you could be in two "classes" and be sure the same person is the same person in both; or Slack could even consolidate their Direct Message threads into a single one shared between both teams.)

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#25

Post by fredoliveira »

dubcanada wrote: post #15

Why not just use IRC? Is it not made for the sole purpose of having lots of users talk with each other.

This is the real mystery here. I'm a huge fan of what Slack has done and was a big advocate for it when it was starting up. But it feels off that people with high realtime chat needs don't just use IRC, which has been around for ages, is super stable, and deals with this amount of users easily.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#26

Post by saryant »

proksoup wrote: post #9
comrade1 wrote: post #3

Jesus, what a mess. Sounds like someone made a decision without doing even a modicum of research into pricing. Bowing to peer pressure just means someone is managing by consensus.

Sorry slightly off topic. But I need to know this. wait wait wait ... managing by consensus is .... bad? Where can I learn more about this to build consensus at my office that this is bad (because consensus is how all decisions are made)?

> because consensus is how all decisions are made

This is the crux of it. All decisions are not made through consensus and I would wager that's true at most companies.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#27

Post by mtrpcic »

dubcanada wrote: post #15

Why not just use IRC? Is it not made for the sole purpose of having lots of users talk with each other.

I agree that IRC would have been a good fit, and with modern IRC clients like LimeChat and Slate, it's not the "legacy" experience a lot of people remember. IRC also would solve all of the problems this guy faced:

* Free. You can hop onto an existing tech-focused server like Freenode, or if you want your own control, throw it on your own server(s) for pennies. If you do the latter, you have full control over all logging.

* Logging. Every client can choose what they want to log, what format the logs are in, where the logs live, etc. No more archived messages. Some IRC clients are smart enough to pull from the log to "back-fill" the messages.

* Modern Clients. Like a said above, LimeChat is a really nice IRC client. It doesn't have all the features of Slack, but do you really need all the features of slack?

* Bot Surplus. There are hundreds of bots written for IRC, in nearly every conceivable language. This was the first "integration" anyone ever used for chatting, and can integrate with anything if you put the time in. You don't get it for free, but for a community focused on programming, that's not the worst thing.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#28

Post by neumino »

I kind of think that Gitter is a joke and I'm not convinced they can do better than Slack. I mean their Android app has the balls to ask you to write your GitHub credentials.

Maybe Asana/plain IRC is a better solution.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#29

Post by joshstrange »

dubcanada wrote: post #15

Why not just use IRC? Is it not made for the sole purpose of having lots of users talk with each other.

IRC servers are easy to start up but managing them is not a piece of cake. Also clients aren't that great and features like chat sync all have to be built on top of IRC and have no standard implementation. It has similar issues to jabber which "supports" group chat but I've yet to come across a client that exposes this into something as nice as IRC/Slack/Hipchat/etc rooms.
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