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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#171

Post by libraryatnight »

I really like Slack. Where I work each team has its own Slack chat with various channels. I work in IT, our more general team is about 30 people and my more focused team is 7 people. We have specific channels for each focus group, and then a general channel for the entire team.

Since we've used Slack I feel more up to date and more in the know because I can keep up with what everyone is talking about. I have keywords that give me an alert when someone mentions my name or specific things in which I specialize. I've been able to quickly offer help to those who might not have immediately thought to bring their issue directly to me as a result, and have had the same happen in regard to problems I bring up in channel. It reminds me very much of hanging out on IRC when I was a teenager, but an IRC built for business.

Sharing files, code, screencaptures, etc is easy and intuitive. The integrations are useful: GitHub, Zoom video conferencing, Dropbox - having these items easily available only make Slack blend more seamlessly into my day.

I like Slack, and reading this blog post I couldn't help but feel this was more a mismatch for the author's use-case than a problem with the application.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#172

Post by pbreit »

nullrouted wrote: post #169
pbreit wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you point to one and explain the discrepancy?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#174

Post by not_with_retard »

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…

> hosting provider sysadmin

You should kick them out for repeated DDoS attempts on their IPs, like any sane host does.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#175

Post by vsl »

nadams wrote: post #138
morgante wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes. Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that? It's 100% clear wha…

> Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that? Marketing? That's another stamp they can put on their list of users. Now look at what happened - instead of making slack look good now this blog post will show up showing how unprofessional they are. > Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus? If they can't handle an arbitrary…

The impossible-to-miss headline says "small teams". I interpret the more detailed description in that context: no arbitrary limit on small team members. No sane person would argue that 500+ is small team.

The limit in place seems like a technical limitation to me: Slack is for teams, so they figured the number is well above any real-life use and probably applies to paid accounts as well.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#176

Post by vsl »

smm2000 wrote: post #140
jonathanmarcus wrote: post #52

What a hyperbolic post. There is no reason to put a company on blast like this. There is a real team of people likely working exceptionally hard to operate Slack. You could have just written a post extolling the benefits of Gitter, and gone about your day of adding more campers to your project. I'm guessing Slack didn't beg for your business or community endorsements.

Slack is a 2.8B dollar company and not a small scrappy startup anymore. They can handle all the hate in the world and should not get a pass for sleazy behavior (the same is true for Microsoft, Google or Exxon). Not putting max number of users on website or in documentation is not fair to customers.

Did you consider the possibility that it's a technical limit that they didn't even anticipate ever hitting in real life, because Slack is for small teams?

Let's be fair here: the 10k visible messages limit means that Slack is basically unusable when you hit the user limit, as this post also says (messages archived within minutes of appearing). The pricing is clearly insane with this amount of users too.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#177

Post by qznc »

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"

A footnote would be nice. Say "no limit" and then in small print " actually 5000. this is for teams not communities."

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#178

Post by rekoros »

Bahamut wrote: post #7

The one thing that has me mostly abandoning Gitter is that switching channels is incredibly slow on the browser. If Gitter had a standalone client, I'd be willing to give it another shot, but until then, I'm a proponent of using IRC & Slack.

I (and many others) keep up with Gitter rooms and IRC channels (Freenode, mostly) by bridging them to Slack or Kato with sameroom.io.

It's also a good way of merging interesting channels from the 15 Slack teams I am member of into one.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#179

Post by jug »

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…

Slack comes with more features than IRC though, but you raise a good point. Maybe this customer should use IRC.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#180

Post by ex3ndr »

detaro wrote: post #49
fredoliveira wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real mystery here. I'm a huge fan of what Slack has done and was a big advocate for it when it was starting up. But it feels off that people with high realtime chat needs don't just use IRC, which has been around for ages, is super stable, and deals with this amount of users easily.

Is there any web client you can easily deploy that comes close to Slack in comfort for the users? IRC is cool, but getting thousands of users comfortable with it sounds like quite a challenge.

You can try to use ours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243
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