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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#161

Post by kolev »

Lazare wrote: post #109
kolev wrote: post #91

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 nic…

Having used HipChat and Slack, I prefer Slack as a much better designed product. It's more stable, less buggy, and has more features. > did I mention "noisy" You did, but I have no idea what you mean. > it's coming from Atlassian One more reason to prefer Slack. I've had a lot of experience with Atlassian tools, and it's almost all been negative. Everything about Atlassian is slow: Their products, their support, and…

People use JIRA and Confluence, because they are fully-featured, and complicated. It's easier to created a dumbed-down faster tool. Plus, they've been around for years. I'm sure one day they will rewrite them from scratch, but HipChat is not slow at all.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#162

Post by brobinson »

nodesocket wrote: post #125

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…

Are you talking mostly about users of your free tier? Have you considered getting rid of it in lieu of a free trial on the paid plans?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#163

Post by swhipple »

teacup50 wrote: post #144
Lazare wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I pay shy of $5/mo for a VPS to run a BNC with my preferred config and serve a few files.

If someone prefers IRCCloud or Slack's features and support, it can absolutely be worth more than the sum of bandwidth, storage, and CPU.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#164

Post by greenyoda »

teacup50 wrote: post #144
Lazare wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The market determines prices based on what people are willing to pay. Apparently the companies who are paying Slack $5/month think it's a good value, since they've chosen Slack over all the alternatives. They may even buy it for purely intangible reasons, like their employees enjoy using it and thus communicate more effectively.

If you think you can offer the same services that Slack does for $1 a month, maybe you have an opportunity to start a business that successfully competes with them.

You talk about a "fair exchange of value". Is it fair for Apple to charge you a 50% markup on an iPhone? Is it fair for Starbucks to charge $4 for a latte? Do you know of any for-profit business that sets its prices based on an abstract notion of fairness rather than supply and demand? If your company was fortunate enough to make a 50% profit next year, would you offer to return some of it to your customers?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#165

Post by mikekchar »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #128
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.

Although I don't necessarily disagree with you, none of these things are particularly difficult to implement. In fact, most of it could be done very easily if you had a client that could render/inject markdown. Git and trello bots are very easy to write -- almost kata level scope. Famous last words, but surely this is not hard given that there are 3rd party libraries for everything you need... I'm almost tempted...

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#168

Post by MetaCosm »

plorkyeran wrote: post #126
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81

Earlier 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…

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.

What makes you believe that? 1,000+ user channels are common on Freenode.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#169

Post by nullrouted »

pbreit wrote: post #156
pavedwalden wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every shared web hosting company out there. Just giving you an example. They have been doing this for 10+ years.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#170

Post by hox »

nodesocket wrote: post #125

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…

I'd argue that "unlimited users" not really being unlimited is a pretty big detail that matters.
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