I've always wondered why Slack gets so much love from engineers! It's noisy, it's expensive, and did I mention "noisy". It started as a copycat and didn't do much beyond that. The only thing I'm thankful to Slack about is that it's pushing HipChat to innovate. Finally we got multi-account support in there! Yes, I openly do like HipChat better - it's free, it's less noisy, it's coming from Atlassian, it integrates nicely into the Atlassian ecosystem, but there are alternatives like the open-source Rocket Chat [0] and Let's Chat [1], but Gitter is [2] is the best of those (like most of us) who use GitHub most of the day. Not sure why it doesn't get the love it deserves (but Gitter is expensive as well)!
We Tried Slack and Regretted It
91–100 of 192 posts
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Have to second IRCCloud as being a great IRC client. That being said, their pricing is probably no better than Slack's for this purpose ($5/user/month).
IRCCloud staffer here!
Glad you like it, this year is going to be a big one for us - we're actively looking at how we can better serve large open communities, and I would suspect that will result in some nice changes to both free accounts and the pricing of paid accounts.
If anybody is interested in making IRC suck less, we've got a designer-shaped hole that needs filling... https://www.irccloud.com/jobs
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#93Wow, this should be a textbook example of how not to make a decision. Zero forethought of future needs? Check. Picking a solution not designed for the problem? Check. Complaining that something that wasn't designed to do x isn't doing x? Check.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#94Is the author paying for this service? If so - oh boy. Slack should have been more closely monitoring clients this big to ensure they don't reach self-imposed limits. That's just, heh, slack.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#95It'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…
I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making. I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages. The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first commun…
> I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users.
[citation needed]
> Slack does nothing to discourage this
http://i.imgur.com/aXO4IFd.png
> We can't pause our community growth while we wait for Slack to engineer around their undisclosed user limit.
You're popular because you're free. You've transferred that logistical problem to another team who happened to offer a free plan without your use case in mind. You've made your problems the engineering problems of another team, except in the other team's case, they're accountable to investors and a bottom line.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#96It'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…
I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making. I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages. The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first commun…
I understand that you decided to use Slack. Maybe other communities are doing the same thing.
But that does not mean Slack is under any obligation to support your use case, especially when they are pretty clear about what Slack is for.
It's right there on the homepage: "Slack is a platform for team communication."
A course with hundreds of thousands of students is in no way a "team."
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#97"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 wha…
> 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.
Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that?
It's 100% clear what Slack is doing. From their homepage, they're building "a platform for team communication."
Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus?
Startups are about focus. Chasing non-paying non-customers is not a part of that model.
Also, the difference with GitHub is pretty clear. GitHub is the tool for social coding. They don't say it's only for small teams—Slack does.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#98"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. Dou…
> And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month.
Considering they have tens of millions in ARR, the market has proven you wrong.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Semantically, an issue with posting links instead of files is that your users then need to go ahead and upload the file somewhere manually. HipChat takes care of this by adding the file to an S3 bucket when you drag it into the client. Way less hassle, especially for non-technical users.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#100"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. Dou…
Slack is a lot better than IRC when used as intended.
Also, my favourite IRC client (IRCCloud) is, in fact, $5/user/month, and I know I'm not even close to their only paying customer.
I recognise you're engaging in hyperbole when you say "nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month", but when you're saying stuff which is so blatantly wrong (and trivially disproven), it undermines your entire argument.