Been using Circuit [1] for a while and have to say I've been impressed, if the people over at Free Code Camp are reading this. The document sharing and solidly built iOS app sold me on it. Switching teams on the iOS app for Circuit vs Slack was far faster too which I always found frustrating on the Slack app. Document searching was really well built on Circuit too.
We Tried Slack and Regretted It
141–150 of 192 posts
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#143I'm very disappointed with the level of comments here - the emotional attachment to Slack is just not neccessary; same for the ad hominem comments. For sure they have a great tool that I love and use but they have been slow to act upon the fact that many communities are using their free option with huge numbers. Rightly or wrongly. Slack just simply need to decide whether they are supporting this model or are happy t…
I think now it is time for Slack to make a "paradigm shift". It seems Slack, like GitHub, is filling a place that was reserved to free open source offerings in the past (e-mail, IRC, newsgroups, etc) so they need to expand their freemium features.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
$5/mo for an IRC client? That's just silly.
Geek cultured called -- they want their technology back. Apparently startup culture has corrupted our industry to a degree that people think $5/mo for a hosted IRC client is a fair exchange of value.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#145Slack's "sticker shock" is pretty big. I'm not sure if it's autodetecting and giving me Australian dollars in it's pricing, but in the first paid band it's showing me $6.67/user/mo for annual (who knows how many users a small team will have in a year?) or $8/user/mo for month-to-month (the usual pricing). $8/user/month for chat. And it's double that to get business-level SLAs. With 25 users in the account, including external teams and contractors, that would mean we're paying $200/month ($400 for business SLAs). Per month. For chat. Crazy.
And slackbot keeps on claiming any "thank you" that someone says, even if specified @someone, the greedy little bugger.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#146Look what I found: Slack's free tier pricing page explicitly states "There's no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp/status/612758062214950912
With many freemium services capping free accounts at single-digit numbers of users, "no limit" is a reasonable way to let people know that they can stop looking for the catch. It would be more confusing if they said "up to 5,000" users, which sends the wrong message about who their service is targeting.
Everyone understands that "unlimited breadsticks" implicitly means "lots and lots but not infinitely many"
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#147Here'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…
Cut'n'pasting a perfectly relevant answer (that gives reasons to use both stacks) from a previous question is hardly 'an agenda'.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#148Earlier 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…
Scalable chat itself has been solved, but the features the GP wanted were not part of that solution. For example "post links" means you now have to add an external service - that's not a "solved" feature. Likewise, screen/tmux is not a solution for non-techies like the stereotypical 'marketing guy'. Most people don't even know what a terminal is.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Your opinion on my understanding is not important to me. Sorry.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I saw that too, and I had to laugh. I like node.js, I use node.js, I've shipped large projects with node.js as part of the stack, and I'll very likely select node.js for elements of future projects. But... ...someone has been drinking way way waaaay too much of the koolaid. All it was missing was the phrase "web scale". Edit: Heh. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-Slack/ans...
Wow.And here I've been starting to get worried about future employment prospects if I keep accepting LAMP+jQuery jobs. Reminds me of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352)