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We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

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Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#41

Post by johannes1234321 »

Svip wrote: post #9
saas_sam wrote: post #7

Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 50…

If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?

Aside from what others already mentioned: One key issue with IRC is the mobile or multiple device story.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#42

Post by mcintyre1994 »

erelde wrote: post #23
__jal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be confusing the message archive limits with the number of user limits. The first is (loudly) disclosed. The second, apparently not.

Slack doesn't advertise as a chat for thousands of users, but teams of 5 to 50, worse case 100 people. It's "lucky" they didn't hard code a limit.

They did hard code a limit, the API has a specific error for that. They just choose not to disclose it, and to advertise with the phrase "Slack is free to use for as long as you want for teams of all sizes."

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#44

Post by jorge-fundido »

Svip wrote: post #9
saas_sam wrote: post #7

Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 50…

If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?

All the yak shaving around: room history, notifications, security.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#45

Post by Insanity »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #41
Svip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?

Aside from what others already mentioned: One key issue with IRC is the mobile or multiple device story.

Only if you use plain IRC. If you use something like irccloud, that is prevented. Which can be thought of as a "webwrapper" for IRC. I have been using it for some time now and I enjoy it.

(I'm not affiliated with irccloud in any way)

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#46

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #28
Svip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?

IRC lacks a well designed UX that works cross platform (desktop cross os, mobile, web) and an easy API to integrate and play with other services like Github.

[deleted]

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#48

Post by budu3 »

dahart wrote: post #13

The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending. Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the advertising and economics only mak…

I think he's being a little bit to hard on Slack. He was really stretching a free trial offer beyond its limit. If he was a paying customer then I might have cut him some slack.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#49

Post by Svip »

onion2k wrote: post #24
Svip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?

There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup. There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar busi…

I contend that my question was slightly snarky. As someone who moves from computer to computer a lot, having a unified client is quite critical. With IRC and Bitleebee, I can combine a lot of protocols in one client, keep it running in a screen, and access it via SSH.

I realise my setup is hardly common, and I contend that the main issues with IRC are the clients and the account systems. However, both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.

Message logging and account management can be done server-side (e.g. closing connections on users if they don't log in), and with a dedicated client to this server, the logging in-part could be done rather seamlessly, even if posing slightly more 'troubles' for other IRC clients.

But as implied in the other replies to my post, but is there any money in that? Maybe licencing the servers? I dunno. I'd love to do something like that, but it would be a full time effort, I fear.

Re: We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

#50

Post by DanHulton »

Hm. Well, that made me a bit concerned to start, as I'm working on a Slack-based hack-and-slash RPG [1] that I'm planning on running entirely on their free tier, but I'm pretty sure that their use cases differ from mine significantly. I'm not worried about message archives (as it's just game history), and I have @here/@all locked down significantly.

The "max user size" thing is a bit worrisome, but MMOs have a history of sharding to solve that problem anyway, so hopefully that shouldn't be a problem either. (Players will be able to chat together in a shared Discourse forum, so sharding shouldn't really hurt community-building.)

I wonder if any progress has been made since then to support larger teams, though? It's been quite a while, and Slack's engineering team has been cranking out a lot of great features and improvements lately.

[1] http://www.slackandslash.com

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