This was actually a really entertaining telling of a boring old story about capitalist competition. Act I: We tried A, then we outgrew it. Someone said B was better. Act II: We tried B, then we outgrew it. Act III: By this time A had caught up to our needs, so we went back to A. End Credits
We Tried Slack and Regretted It
51–60 of 192 posts
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#52What a hyperbolic post. There is no reason to put a company on blast like this. There is a real team of people likely working exceptionally hard to operate Slack. You could have just written a post extolling the benefits of Gitter, and gone about your day of adding more campers to your project. I'm guessing Slack didn't beg for your business or community endorsements.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#53OK 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…
Have you ever thought that they put those limits in there precisely so that situations totally inappropriate for slack don't occur?
I love how programmers are always "embarrassed" about the limitations of billion dollar companies, have you ever though that these limitations might be vital to their success?
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, slack free plan only allows 10000 messages to be saved at any one time. Nothing to do with user limit. Unbelievable that a service like this would change the key part of their platform without even checking the pricing page to see what free plan restrictions were... https://slack.com/pricing EDIT: I stopped reading after the first paragraph, looks like there was a user limit issue too :)
Except if you read the whole post, he ran into a previously undisclosed explicit user limit. The client was crashing. Slack ideally should warn you if you have too many users, before the point where the client crashes and the backend fails to send messages.
But who runs a chat with 5000+ users? The signal to noise would be insane. If each user posted 1 message per hour, that's 5000 messages per hour. For a group that size it seems like Twitter makes more sense. I can't imagine 5000 people needing real time communication. Kind of the mother of all edge cases for a team chat service.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I really don't think Slack cares about one customer mentioning them in interviews. Especially a freeloading customer. Why not simply have each user pay their own $5 per month?
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#56Drama Queen post of the year, good lord. Why don't you try figuring out what parameters the software you're using is designed to operate in before throwing such a public shit fit?
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#57Every chat system since IRC has been worse than IRC. Without fail. Just use IRC, people, stop chasing shiny things.
I'm afraid not. eg for me the 3 killer features on hipchat have been (a) Ability to scroll back and see what happened when I was offline (b) Ability to post pictures/files (c) search.
Now all 3 of these could be implemented on a ICR server client. But they are not simple, not supported with all clients and not something that your marketing guy can easily use.
With hipchat/slack/etc they are all out of the box on minute-one and easy to use.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#58What a hyperbolic post. There is no reason to put a company on blast like this. There is a real team of people likely working exceptionally hard to operate Slack. You could have just written a post extolling the benefits of Gitter, and gone about your day of adding more campers to your project. I'm guessing Slack didn't beg for your business or community endorsements.
I agree
The title should have been "We pushed Slack for a use case it was never designed for and it broke"
Yes, sorry, sometimes limits are hit
Maybe a better solution to them would have been to use IRC
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They are not customers they are users, and it's important to make sure your users are happy, lest you run out of them before you run out of money catering to their every whim.
This whole concept of a 'customer' sounds very interesting, I hear they appreciate the services companies provide so much that they are willing to hand over actual money, instead of using the service they got for free to bitch about the service they got for free.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#60What did you expect? You can't expect to hit such a ridiculously large number and not pay anything.
Au contraire.. People expect it all the time. They have a hard time getting that these "free" services are built by people that need to get paid and eat. Adding 8000+ users for an implied PR benefit is silly. What's the ROI? Not going to be very high, almost guaranteed. Because these free users might evangelize other free users because the service is "free."