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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#121

Post by tvmalsv »

nadams wrote: post #84
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 wha…

Even if ads could cover the costs+, they might not want to have a lot of people to get the mindset of Slack==Ads. For many of those users, the ad-laden version of Slack might be their first impression of Slack.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#122

Post by x0x0 »

nadams wrote: post #84
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 wha…

you're almost certainly wrong about the advertising, viz stackoverflow's issues monetizing that way

forum/chat advertising is just not particularly valuable

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#123

Post by x0x0 »

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…

Also, do people really expect to pay sticker price for 8k users? I mean, I have no idea what slack might have offered, but a quick email would have found out.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#124

Post by voltagex_ »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #105
voltagex_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm happy IRC is dying, because it's a giant attack surface. As a hosting provider sysadmin, dealing with IRC servers was among the absolute worst parts of my job -- mitigating DDoS attacks against them, extensive hacking attempts directed at their infrastructure and later, mine , when they couldn't get in, credit card fraud associated with the accounts, IRC networks designed specifically for command and control of b…

I wonder if this is an argument against IRC, or just against EFNet.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#125

Post by nodesocket »

A perfect illustration of the "entitled developer complex". Failure to properly research Slack, a bad use-case, complain about pricing, then publicly bash.

I've seen this repeatedly with my own startup (https://commando.io), and honestly this user profile is the worst. They won't pay, or will pay very little, and expect the most. They complain about the underlying codebase and stack (PHP), and fail to solve actual problems. They get stuck on details that don't matter.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#126

Post by plorkyeran »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81
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. Dou…

A single IRC server can trivially handle 8500 users in total, but most ircds would explode horribly on 8500 users in a single channel. There's probably at least one that can support it, but it's not really a use-case they're designed for.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#127

Post by plorkyeran »

mbesto wrote: post #72

Here's the problem I have with this: 1. You have an organization (can't tell if for profit or non-for-profit) that explicitly states that it helps people "become a Software Engineer". 2. Yet, one of the organizers of the company (?) states "we blithely shepherded 300 to 500 new campers into our Slack every day, hopeful that this messaging company, now worth $2.8 billion, would hire more engineers to flog their LAMP s…

They even explicitly list the fact that Gitter uses Node.js as one of the advantage of them. I really hope they aren't teaching their students to pick third-party SaaS offerings based on whether or not they like the same tech as you do.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#128

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

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.

irc supports pretty much nothing besides text. With Slack, you can format, highlight code, upload pictures and documents, it supports Google Docs out of the box, there are plugins for Trello, git, and who knows what else. And it works flawlessly on all mobile OS (good luck getting a decent irc client running on iOS).

irc is a dinosaur compared to what recent team communication software like Slack and Hipchat can do.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#129

Post by xpaulbettsx »

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…

> So we have no alternative but to switch.

It seems unlikely that all 5000 people are actively using their Slack account - if you started automatically deactivating accounts that haven't logged in after 3+ months (a pretty easy Cronjob using the API), you would most likely stay well south of the limits. You can always Email people with something to the effect of, "Hey! We've turned off your account, if you visit the site again, we'll turn it back on, no big deal".

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#130

Post by timv »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #95
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 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…

While I agree that they had totally unrealistic expectations (and you forgot to highlight the 5 service integrations bit that he also complained about later), slack does also advertise "no limit on users" when they do in fact have a limit.

http://i.imgur.com/kNTkFGT.png

"Small teams" and "no limit on users" aren't really compatible, and it's pretty normal for people to just read the bit they like and ignore the rest.

Slack should probably just put a 100 (or even 500) user limit on the free plan to discourage people from signing up with such unrealistic expectations.

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