We Tried Slack and Regretted It • Hacker News Board

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#111

Post by nostrademons » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #96

michaelq wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I might be misreading the post, but my interpretation was that the audience is other large communities, MOOCs, and other loosely affiliated organizations that may want to try Slack, not the Slack team itself. They're providing useful information for the former, particularly if several other organizations have made similar mistakes.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#112

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:25 PM UTC

michaelq wrote: post #74

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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#113

Post by partiallypro » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:32 PM UTC

We have adopted Slack recently with a small 12 person (and everyone knows everyone) team and it works great. It really brings down distraction of people coming over to ask questions, they can just ask the question of a group and get it resolved by someone. We have Lync as a company wide (1000s) community messenger but for small teams this works great for collaboration of small groups. I am actually shocked that Microsoft doesn't have a solution like Slack built into Lync (Skype for Business now.) I mean it's possible they could buy Slack...but anyhow Slack is made for smaller teams. If you want a community use IRC (non-corporate), Skype or Google (corporate), etc.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#114

Post by mcguire » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:34 PM UTC

"No way were we going to spread our community across a bunch of disparate Slack instances. The entire point of a chat room app is convenient real time conversation."

5000 users, plus 300-500 new users per day. In a chat.

Convenient real time communication, that is not.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#115

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:37 PM UTC

ksk wrote: post #104

coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

I said that I would be embarrassed. Your opinion does not change that. You obviously seem to have lower expectations than me.

The only embarassing thing is the lack of understanding of fundamentals shown in your critique -- which you conflate for "higher standards".

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#116

Post by coned88 » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:38 PM UTC

Personally we use slack at work and it's a terrible product. Yes it's nice that we can see pictures and gifs inline with the text but the client is not great. The mobile client is even worse. The bloody thing just doesn't work. I'll get a message via the desktop app and 10-15 minutes later get the push notification on my phone. Then I can only see some of the push notification on my phone and when I go to click the notification to read it. The entire channel or DM it came from is not up to date. So if I do have service which I may not have I have to then wait for the messages to download and for it to reconcile what has been read.

Any irc or xmpp clients do not have these issues. products like Whatsapp and telegram don't have these issues.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#117

Post by mcguire » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:39 PM UTC

michaelq wrote: post #74

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…

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…

"Big online courses, for example, routinely draw 100,000s of students, and might make the same mistake we did (Harvard's CS50 class did)."

Any idea what their experience was like?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#118

Post by morgante » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:43 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #111

morgante wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I might be misreading the post, but my interpretation was that the audience is other large communities, MOOCs, and other loosely affiliated organizations that may want to try Slack, not the Slack team itself. They're providing useful information for the former, particularly if several other organizations have made similar mistakes.

The post certainly seems to attempt to lay blame on Slack. If their goal were just to educate large communities, it would be titled something like "What Slack isn't good for."

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#119

Post by nhebb » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:44 PM UTC

michaelq wrote: post #74

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…

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 wrote this post is to provide a cautionary tale to other open-membership organizations who are considering using Slack

I hope for their sake, The Odin Project (http://www.theodinproject.com) heeds this advice. They recently announced that they started a Slack community of 20,000 members, so they'll probably be hitting the message thresholds quickly.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#120

Post by shavenwarthog2 » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:49 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #113

We have adopted Slack recently with a small 12 person (and everyone knows everyone) team and it works great. It really brings down distraction of people coming over to ask questions, they can just ask the question of a group and get it resolved by someone. We have Lync as a company wide (1000s) community messenger but for small teams this works great for collaboration of small groups. I am actually shocked that Micro…

Seconded. I've used Slack at two companies, both with a small, single-purpose team (< 10 people). In each case I and the other users were quite happy with the features available, and the overall design of the app. It isn't for everyone, but I whole-heartedly advocate teams examine Slack for their communication needs.