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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#61

Post by coldtea »

ksk wrote: post #45

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…

>Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now?

Slack has millions of users and billions of messages -- working alright.

5000 users were seeing slowdonws for a SINGLE team -- not across Slack. And 10.000 is a limit put by Slack intentionally in place as a freemium boundary.

All systems have breaking points, especially if they weren't designed for some specific use. You might as well ask "Twitter can't handle more than 140 characters now, seriously?".

>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.

Your answer doesn't show any understanding of network services at all, including as some guy already pointed out, the "basically transmits text" part, as if that is something trivial at scale...

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#62

Post by TD-Linux »

detaro wrote: post #49
fredoliveira wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A number of people in my company use IRCCloud, which is a web-based client with mobile apps. It also has built in bouncer functionality - it stays logged in even when you don't have the page open.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#63

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

slyall wrote: post #57
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #42

Every 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 minu…

Any technical person in the organization could set those things up and have everyone, even the marketing guy, using it on IRC without any trouble in the course of maybe an hour.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#64

Post by raverbashing »

eli wrote: post #17
cechmaster wrote: post #12

Yeah dude, wtf, 5000 users and you think you can get away for free?

OK, but if Slack has a user limit there's no reason it should be secret.

I'd guess it's not so much "a secret" rather than a natural limitation or just a "put a big number there that should be enough for everybody" (until it isn't)

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#66

Post by andmarios »

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...

The screenshot you quote is about open source projects, not communities. If I understand correctly, even a large project like the Linux kernel has only a few hundred active developers at a time and the rest are one-time small-patch contributors.

It would be interesting though to know how many students used slack for Harvard's online CS50 and how it worked for them.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#67

Post by greenyoda »

"The only way to make this go away is to pay slack's cheapest plan, which is $5 per user, per month. That's $5 x 12 months x 8,462 campers = $507,720 per year, just for our current campers. Until then, Slack aggressively archived messages, sometimes only minutes after they were sent."

Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free? How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this? Usually, "freemium" services are offered so that users can try out the service without having to pay for it, but if you expect unlimited support for 8462 users, it makes sense to have to pay.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#68

Post by coldtea »

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

Not in any place were there is a hierarchy.

In most companies for example, there are CEO, managers, and middle managers, etc. They make a decision and you get to implement it. Ideally they'd like your consent to, but even if you don't consent, you don't get much of a say to what the company will do.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#69

Post by rylee »

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...

Why would you jump ship for something that hasn't even arrived yet?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#70

Post by omni »

dmourati wrote: post #43

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,…

> 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.

To be fair, it does seem here like the failure mode wouldn't have been reached until they moved all of their users over.

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