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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#151

Post by pbreit »

morgante wrote: post #118
nostrademons wrote: post #111

Earlier 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."

The primary complaint is an unpublished limit that is counter to a main selling point.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#152

Post by pbreit »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #129
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…

> 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…

The 10,000 message search limit sounds like a nonstarter as well.

Larger groups are playing with that $5/user/month bonfire.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#153

Post by pbreit »

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…

For instant messaging, possibly.

But there's a huge risk here for larger groups in that it goes from $0 to, in this case $500k/year with apparently nothing in between

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#154

Post by pbreit »

cowls wrote: post #13
evo_9 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to really fault him since he ran into an undisclosed max user limit, no?

No, slack free plan only allows 10000 messages to be saved at any one time. Nothing to do with user limit. Unbelievable that a service like this would change the key part of their platform without even checking the pricing page to see what free plan restrictions were... https://slack.com/pricing EDIT: I stopped reading after the first paragraph, looks like there was a user limit issue too :)

The 10,000 message search limit probably limits this realistically to 5 or 10 person teams. I would think I would want at least a week or even a month's worth of searching (ideally indefinitely, of course).

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#155

Post by crgt »

pavedwalden wrote: post #146
michaelq wrote: post #103

Look 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"

Do you work for AT&T? Unlimited means unlimited. If there are limits, they need to be disclosed in advance. Especially if you are explicitly claiming that there are no limits..

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#156

Post by pbreit »

pavedwalden wrote: post #146
michaelq wrote: post #103

Look 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"

That's a crock. Please show me one other service that explicitly states "no limit" that actually has a hidden limit. The 10,000 message search limit makes it mostly unusable for groups in the 100s or even 10s so why even enforce the user limit?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#157

Post by mdpopescu »

pavedwalden wrote: post #146
michaelq wrote: post #103

Look 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"

Imprecision is fine in informal (face to face) discussion but bad in a business statement.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#158

Post by tchock23 »

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…

Agreed - Slack is awesome for small teams that need to communicate frequently, but it's definitely not ideal for larger "societies" (as you define them).

I've been invited to a bunch of Slack groups recently, from post-conference groups to ongoing groups around a specific topic (SaaS startups) and every single one of them is a ghost town now, often within a matter of days.

It seems few people have the bandwidth to actively participate in these "societies." I much prefer traditional forum-style software for this purpose, leaving Slack (and real-time communication methods in general) for team-based communication.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#159

Post by kzvezdarov »

voltagex_ wrote: post #87
mtrpcic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The IRCv3 work group is making some good progress: http://ircv3.net/ .

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#160

Post by tperson »

jonty wrote: post #92
Lazare wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think IRCCloud is really neat and as soon as the BNC comes along you got my money. Till then I'm hosting my own with ZNC, I just can't give up my weechat client, love it too much.
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