Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 192 posts

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#41

Post by metasean »

andmarios wrote: post #11

I think you should have ran the math before switching to Slack. A max limit of 10,000 messages history for your 8,500 free users, premium cost at $60/user/year. An engineer designs a product for the specifications she/he is given. Slack's engineers were given the specs above and obviously designed and optimized their product for much smaller teams than yours.

They do mention in the write-up that, "We also held our breaths as we waited for Slacks' teased support for large open source communities like ours." and show the FAQ addressing their use case - https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8...

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#43

Post by dmourati »

Two things.

1. The decision making process here was unsound. You need to follow the one, some, all approach of rolling out changes. Jumping in on multiple thousands of users was irresponsible.

2. Slack should provide some guidance earlier in the process about user limits. They are known for their friendly UI/UX. An email to the admin saying: "Hey, we've noticed you reached 50% of our maximum users for your instance, are you sure you are on the right path?" would have gone a long way.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#44

Post by olso »

philippnagel wrote: post #38

Does Slack really use LAMP?

Why are you surprised? LAMP stack, only at this scale is not a bottleneck. Who knows, maybe they are not even using HHVM, yet. I would be blaming actual code, not the stack for the current trouble.

P.S. LAMP != shitty developers automatically

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#45

Post by ksk »

OK sure, I get that Slack wants to make money and doesn't want too many 'free' users. The restrictions themselves are acceptable to me.

However, their platform seems super brittle and janky if it can't handle the users in the first place. Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now? Sending out emails without fucking up needs "engineering"? Um. OK. Personally, I would be embarrassed if I put my name on a product that couldn't handle such an extremely light load for a platform that basically transmits text.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#47

Post by _hadrian »

derefr wrote: post #24

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 t…

very well said! I've worked in a team and we used slack, exactly as you explained... we knew each other, it worked great with Hangouts, Bitbucket and Asana integration. But for this use case in the post, it's obviously not such a great choice.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#48

Post by detaro »

metasean wrote: post #41
andmarios wrote: post #11

I think you should have ran the math before switching to Slack. A max limit of 10,000 messages history for your 8,500 free users, premium cost at $60/user/year. An engineer designs a product for the specifications she/he is given. Slack's engineers were given the specs above and obviously designed and optimized their product for much smaller teams than yours.

They do mention in the write-up that, "We also held our breaths as we waited for Slacks' teased support for large open source communities like ours." and show the FAQ addressing their use case - https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8...

Where did Slack tease support for open source communities with thousands of members? Because seeing that FAQ makes me think "oh, hey, cool, potentially cheaper plans for open source teams", not "move a GIANT group over in anticipation".

I agree though, Slack probably could have communicated that a bit better, at least if they contacted Slack beforehand. Even if the answer had been "We actually have no clue what happens if you try to join 10k people.", the problems certainly sound like that's the case.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#49

Post by detaro »

fredoliveira wrote: post #25
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.

Is there any web client you can easily deploy that comes close to Slack in comfort for the users? IRC is cool, but getting thousands of users comfortable with it sounds like quite a challenge.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#50

Post by philippnagel »

olso wrote: post #44
philippnagel wrote: post #38

Does Slack really use LAMP?

Why are you surprised? LAMP stack, only at this scale is not a bottleneck. Who knows, maybe they are not even using HHVM, yet. I would be blaming actual code, not the stack for the current trouble. P.S. LAMP != shitty developers automatically

I was merely asking a question, not referring to the obvious downsides of LAMP.

However Slack seems to be really unstable for being an enterprise product. Communication is a backbone of any business and should therefor be rock-solid. 5000 user maximum? Seriously?

Post reply on HN