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How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

blog.railway.com

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Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#31

Post by jasonkester »

defanor wrote: post #27

> It gives us 50x better engagement than email and 8x better response times to customers. Does it mean that it forces the customers to send 50 messages instead of a single mail message? > However, developers hate email. Always feels awkward when there are general statements about the group you belong to, which are certainly false at least for you, and possibly for most others you know in that group. If anything, I wo…

Yeah, I'm with you. I'll take email over Slack any day. Especially for something I may need to refer back to in the future.

I had experience from the customer side of this situation, when Segment set up a Slack channel for an integration I was doing a few years ago. Lots of back and forth with their team (that would probably have been better as email), with some good, important stuff about how to work around particular issues.

Then one day, I get a message from a Success Engineer of some description saying that now we're up and running, they're going to "Archive" the channel. No worries. That must mean it'll go read-only, but at least I'll still have access to that good info in there. Better go copy/paste the whole thread somewhere safe though, just in case.

No. "Archive" is Slack for "Destroy Permanently". By the time I got the email, the Slack channel was 404ing. No more record of a conversation having ever taken place.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#32

Post by eastbound »

thombles wrote: post #19
floating-io wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That gets an instant unsubscribe from me. Sometimes it even works...

If I never subscribed I always report spam. It only takes very small percentages of recipients to do this for mailer services to start getting agitated about bounce rates.

Do you ever subscribe to any form of mailing list? Email is not the place where I read content.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#33

Post by thuanao »

simonkubica wrote: post #28

This will probably sound like an ad, and is probably not super HN-friendly (given it can be more fun to just hack a custom tool together), but we just use Pylon for this and was surprised OP didn't do the same

Same thought. Pylon is exactly this but in a polished SaaS app.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#34

Post by [deleted] »

eastbound wrote: post #32
thombles wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I never subscribed I always report spam. It only takes very small percentages of recipients to do this for mailer services to start getting agitated about bounce rates.

Do you ever subscribe to any form of mailing list? Email is not the place where I read content.

[deleted]

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#35

Post by wiseowise »

gleenn wrote: post #24
culi wrote: post #22

I apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?

Markdown is a technical, not business tool? Gamers tend to be technical?

[flagged]

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#36

Post by andai »

eastbound wrote: post #29
defanor wrote: post #27

> It gives us 50x better engagement than email and 8x better response times to customers. Does it mean that it forces the customers to send 50 messages instead of a single mail message? > However, developers hate email. Always feels awkward when there are general statements about the group you belong to, which are certainly false at least for you, and possibly for most others you know in that group. If anything, I wo…

> However, developers hate email If there’s one thing I hate more than email, it’s not being able to mark an item as unread, and put it in a folder to address it later. Slack is synonym of stress. The Slack stress compounds with being pinged all the time, on various topics. It transforms a developer role into a manager role.

Tangential, but you might want to look into GTD, I've found it very helpful for handling stuff I know I'd forget otherwise.

Here's a good intro https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747703

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#37

Post by belter »

culi wrote: post #22

I apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?

Slack might be billed as a professional tool, but it also has one of the worst interfaces I’ve ever used, riddled with non-intuitive workflows:

- Endless channel creation that buries crucial info...

- Confusing side-panel threads that are easily missed, leading to fragmented discussions...

- Notification overload that bombards you with pings...

It's success it's a mystery, I can only attribute to fashion or the hype of chasing the latest trend.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#38

Post by culi »

pinoy420 wrote: post #26
culi wrote: post #22

I apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?

I would love to use discord at work

It would also cost companies a fraction of what Slack costs. And there's a thriving bot community for Discord as well

I worked at a startup where our single biggest cost was the Slack bill. It's crazy to me what companies will go through to "seem professional"

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#39

Post by naught0 »

culi wrote: post #22

I apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?

It sorta supports syntax highlighting with text snippets (cmd-shift-return iirc), just not in regular backticks like Discord. It's not great, though. Copying directly from Slack rather than downloading may give you invisible characters in the data

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#40

Post by dijksterhuis »

culi wrote: post #38
pinoy420 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to use discord at work

It would also cost companies a fraction of what Slack costs. And there's a thriving bot community for Discord as well I worked at a startup where our single biggest cost was the Slack bill. It's crazy to me what companies will go through to "seem professional"

on the free tier discord also has some more useful functionality which, iirc, slack doesn’t have on free tier or has a lot of limits on

- free voice/video channels (persistent meeting rooms)

- put text/voice channels into categories

- RBAC for channel categories, text and voice channels (only engineering role can see engineering stuff)

- mute notifications from specific channels or categories

probably some more but can’t think of them off the top of my head.

straight up, if i were starting something tomorrow, i’d use discord and not slack.

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