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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#81

Post by Cthulhu_ »

greenyoda wrote: post #67

"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…

Doesn't any IRC server ever do this? I mean 8500 users... isn't actually that much. Even if the free IRC servers don't support this amount of users, you could just set up a reasonably cheap server (for way less than half a million (!) a year) to do exactly the same thing.

And that's just the thing. Most people will see Slack as IRC chat, but a bit better. And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month. Doubly so if your chat channel is open for everyone and you don't know who your users are.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#83

Post by Cthulhu_ »

briandear wrote: post #54
eli wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's plenty of IRC servers (which is probably the closest analogue to Slack) with more than 5000+ users. Sure, most of them have a #general channel, but nobody will see that one as the main channel; most will go to a more topical / relevant channel. That's how IRC works, that's how Slack should work.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#84

Post by nadams »

greenyoda wrote: post #67

"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…

> Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free?

There are several service I can think of that have a large user base and support for free (github comes to mind). However, I have to play devil's advocate and say that even some paid services have horrible (or non-existent) support and service.

> How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this?

Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#85

Post by fredkbloggs »

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…

(a) Use screen or tmux. Log.

(b) Post links. Everyone in IRC has been doing this for 30 years. Works fine.

(c) Have your client log, or have a bot log to something with HTTP access. You can then use grep or a fancy web app or anything in between to search.

I'm with the parent. Scalable chat is a solved problem; it was solved in the open, via open source and open networks, over 20 years ago. Everything since has been focused not on the technical problems of chat but on the business problem of making money from chat. The fact that someone out there wants to make money on chat does not mean you need to give them money to solve your chat problems. Paying for things of value is fine, but in this case you simply don't need to. Sometimes the best things really are free.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#86

Post by spdionis »

philippnagel wrote: post #50
olso wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Given their pricing model i don't think they expected anyone to try to have 5000 users...

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#87

Post by voltagex_ »

mtrpcic wrote: post #27
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 logg…

The slow demise of IRC is sad. Clients like WeeChat excel on the text side of things, but where's the knockout web, desktop and mobile client? Something with the UI of Gitter would go far.

I always feel like IRC is a few protocol extensions and a few clients away from being relevant again.

/me goes back to Freenode

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#88

Post by fredkbloggs »

fleitz wrote: post #53
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…

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?

It's difficult to argue that the limit is essential to their success if only a single user has ever hit it, and that only recently. Of course, we don't know that's the case.

There's nothing wrong with limits. Every piece of software has them, and even learning what they are is a major step. Known or explicit limits should be documented, however. It seems that in this case they were not. That's an error on Slack's part.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#89

Post by jonty »

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…

Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but IRCCloud.com almost exactly fills these use cases (search will launch soon).

Disclosure: I work for IRCCloud :P

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#90

Post by detaro »

sergiotapia wrote: post #80
detaro wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have thousands of users working together on other platforms for free (e.g. Github) and Slack clearly advertises "$0 - no limits on time or users". It still would be a very good idea to contact them before and ask "We're considering moving a few thousand users to your free plan. You sure you mean what you write there?", but they are sort-of saying that it is ok to do. (EDIT: especially since they say that the…

So I go to an all you can eat buffet, and stuff my face until I literally burst. "Hey it was written there clear as day!"

Yes, that is the idea behind an all-you-can-eat buffet.

And I don't complain about restaurants that don't offer them anymore or are not putting out unlimited amounts of expensive food (just like I can totally understand Slack not spending much effort to support these guys), but in the same way a restaurant offering them made the choice to do so and has to live with people stuffing their face.

To stay with the restaurant examples, for me OPs situation is more like they turned with a large wedding party to a pub and are now surprised not everybody gets a place at the bar and people have to wait for their beers.

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