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We Tried Slack and Regretted It

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#181

Post by w4 »

pavlov wrote: post #21
jlees wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the community. For this one, it's a bunch of folks learning to code and getting coding jobs; I can imagine many of those ending up working at tech companies who might be great Slack customers, and evangelising because they had such a great experience using it - so the investment of supporting a 'free' chat room could pay off over time.

I don't know if that makes long-term sense. The OP sounds very entitled: "We'd endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media." Of course Slack must provide them with free chat rooms in perpetuity, they've even been mentioned in interviews! It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.

> It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.

Agreed. This is more or less an example of patio11's "pathological customer": they won't or lack the resources to pay, have an unreasonable use case and overinflated expectations, and proceed to throw a fit loudly and publicly when they don't get their way.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#182

Post by gambiter »

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…

> Big online courses, for example, routinely draw 100,000s of students, and might make the same mistake we did (Harvard's CS50 class did).

Why would you think all 100,000 of those students would need access to each other through a collaboration tool like Slack?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#183

Post by gambiter »

pbreit wrote: post #151
morgante wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most 'unlimited' things still have some max. Using a BIGINT for your primary key will get you a max of 18446744073709551615. Should we complain that we can't go higher in any application that uses one of these?

Slack's advertisement for unlimited users was based on their product's design. Their hard limit is perfectly reasonable because the interface wasn't really designed to handle 10k users in the first place.

To complain about this is like buying a sailboat and complaining when you sail it into a hurricane.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#184

Post by eli »

raverbashing wrote: post #64
eli wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but if Slack has a user limit there's no reason it should be secret.

I'd guess it's not so much "a secret" rather than a natural limitation or just a "put a big number there that should be enough for everybody" (until it isn't)

Maybe it isn't intentionally a secret, but it should be documented. If you take the time to code a hard user limit (with its own API exception code, etc), you can take the time to mention it in the docs.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#185

Post by nullrouted »

pbreit wrote: post #172
nullrouted wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure...

www.hostgator.com - unlimited disk and bandwidth. Never truly unlimited.

They limit the types of content you can host (no media sites), they set inode limits (http://support.hostgator.com/articles/pre-sales-policies/rul...), they will suspend you if you use too much server resources. Pretty much anything to keep you from using "unlimited" resources.

There are a ton of other examples. I would check out www.webhostingtalk.com if you want to see all the issues with these type of hosts.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#186

Post by angelbob »

gambiter wrote: post #183
pbreit wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most 'unlimited' things still have some max. Using a BIGINT for your primary key will get you a max of 18446744073709551615. Should we complain that we can't go higher in any application that uses one of these? Slack's advertisement for unlimited users was based on their product's design. Their hard limit is perfectly reasonable because the interface wasn't really designed to handle 10k users in the first place. To c…

I would complain if it had that limit and was called UNLIMITEDINT, for whatever that's worth.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#187

Post by nadams »

vsl wrote: post #175
nadams wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The impossible-to-miss headline says "small teams".

Actually when you go to slack.com the first thing you see is:

"Slack is a platform for team communication:..."

and

"Slack is free to use for as long as you want and with an unlimited number of people."

With 2 textboxes for me to sign up for the service. Nothing to suggest that slack is for "small teams" only.

> The limit in place seems like a technical limitation to me:

I don't think you'll get any argument from me - there are only a finite number of CPU cycles, RAM, bandwidth, and hard drive space. But - they should have designed to be a scalable service where all they have to do is spin up some VMs or dedicated systems to increase captivity. Yes - this costs money, but when you offer a free unlimited service - I feel like that's the cost of doing business.

> no arbitrary limit on small team members. No sane person would argue that 500+ is small team.

They need to clearly define what small team means in their terms of service. The carriers were slapped for the "unlimited is not really unlimited"

This is what I found in their TOS:

"The total number of users is limited to the maximum number permitted for your account."

Which is what exactly? What is the limit for free vs paid?

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#188

Post by gambiter »

angelbob wrote: post #186
gambiter wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most 'unlimited' things still have some max. Using a BIGINT for your primary key will get you a max of 18446744073709551615. Should we complain that we can't go higher in any application that uses one of these? Slack's advertisement for unlimited users was based on their product's design. Their hard limit is perfectly reasonable because the interface wasn't really designed to handle 10k users in the first place. To c…

I would complain if it had that limit and was called UNLIMITEDINT, for whatever that's worth.

You seem to be missing the point. I'm saying there's literally NO application that claims 'unlimited' that doesn't actually have SOME limit. There are always going to be technical limitations. Even if it's unlimited in practice (as in, no customer will ever reach the limit we've set) there is going to be SOME limit.

Marketing materials are designed to show the intended audience how they may use something. Slack was created for use by teams, teams that know each other and that need to collaborate. Within that context, a limit of 10000 users is pretty reasonable because it IS 'unlimited' for their target audience who will never need 10000 accounts.

Again, the sailboat analogy. I was sold on my sailboat being 'seaworthy'. Does that mean it can literally handle anything the sea throws at it? No. It's a label used to show the target audience how they may use it. If I choose to sail into conditions it wasn't designed to handle, it isn't the builder's fault, it's mine.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#189

Post by mydigitalself »

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.

Mike from Gitter here. We've improved the performance of this quite a lot over the last few months and will soon start implementing local caching that will make this pretty much instantaneous.

Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It

#190

Post by pbreit »

nullrouted wrote: post #185
pbreit wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to one and explain the discrepancy?

Sure... www.hostgator.com - unlimited disk and bandwidth. Never truly unlimited. They limit the types of content you can host (no media sites), they set inode limits ( http://support.hostgator.com/articles/pre-sales-policies/rul... ), they will suspend you if you use too much server resources. Pretty much anything to keep you from using "unlimited" resources. There are a ton of other examples. I would check out www.w…

They do explain that other limits make it essentially impossible to actually utilize "unlimited disk/bandwidth". And they don't mention unlimited on the home page. But fair enough, you found one.
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