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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)

#61

Post by Tloewald »

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…

There are some very nice irc clients out there. Pick one? But the best thing is you can pick one.

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

#62

Post by arcticfox »

Bartweiss wrote: post #55
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

"For teams of all sizes" is pretty deceptive. Even if the limit was disclosed somewhere deeper, advertising with a fundamentally inaccurate line is unfortunate.

While their language was poorly chosen, I think what Slack meant was that their free tier was under no additional restrictions than their paid tier for team size, which seems reasonable.

And signing people up with an undocumented API that skips a big amount of signup friction seems like a recipe for running into undocumented limits. Would we be upset with Slack for not supporting 1 million user teams? 1 billion? 1 trillion?

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

#63

Post by lmm »

mattmanser wrote: post #32
quirkot wrote: post #3

I'm generally a slack fan, but isn't that just plain ol' illegal false advertising?

To be fair to slack, the quote is "there's no limit to the amount of people you can add to your team". They're saying that as you team grows, there's no limit. Not students or subscribers. Not "public channel", or "chat room", or some sort of phrase that indicates a large mass of people. If someone decided to sue them or something, I'd assume they'd have an easy defence saying they clearly meant a team of work collea…

I have worked for companies with 25000 "team members", so that seems pretty unconvincing.

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

#64

Post by simion314 »

budu3 wrote: post #48
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.

What I understand is that author did a trial and hit technical limitations in the desktop and mobile applications, I think that paying extra would not had help. Probably the slack developers did not tested with such a large number of users, it reminds me when I worked on a rss feed application and we were testing with 40-50 popular feeds, then a client shows up with more then 1000 rss feeds , I end up grabbing his feeds and testing with all of those and optimize the application(We did not expect someone would had so many feeds).

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

#65

Post by a_imho »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #57
mi100hael wrote: post #54

There's a perfect alternative: * Free * Handles thousands of users seamlessly * Archived via bot same as free Slack * No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes * Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from * Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities It's called IRC. Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use…

There are drawbacks, though: * no built-in file uploads * a bot is required for archiving * a bot is required for notifications * no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies * the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking. It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either rolling your o…

Why not just email?

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

#66

Post by dahart »

erelde wrote: post #51
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Well then I guess they expect the word "team" should be self explanatory... Maybe it's not.

This is a completely legitimate point. They are expecting "team" to be self explanatory, and it is a vague term that is not self-explanatory. If there's a size limit, it would be best if they stated that plainly.

But, come on, you have to admit that an online community of thousands of people does not fit even the most charitable interpretation of the word "team".

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

#67

Post by AckSyn »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #57
mi100hael wrote: post #54

There's a perfect alternative: * Free * Handles thousands of users seamlessly * Archived via bot same as free Slack * No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes * Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from * Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities It's called IRC. Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use…

There are drawbacks, though: * no built-in file uploads * a bot is required for archiving * a bot is required for notifications * no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies * the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking. It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either rolling your o…

* file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

* channel services can provide archiving and notifications.

* scrollback can be handled by a bouncer, yes, but it's up to the IT dept to set it up per-user

* there are plenty of usable irc clients for mobile, web, and desktop to satisfy this need.

source: Started using telegram/slack but productivity went down so work launched an internal ircd (inspircd). Internal wiki, git, and sharepoint for documentation/files/code where it belongs. Not the chat client.

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

#68

Post by Insanity »

lmm wrote: post #60
Insanity wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

IRCCloud's free plan is much worse than even Slack's, their paid tiers are more expensive per-user IIRC, and their UI isn't quite as polished.

I was not trying to compare it to slack. I was merely pointing out that IRC does not need to mean "plain IRC".

I have been using Slack for about a year now at work and I think it's great. I don't think irccloud would be a suitable replacement either :-)

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

#69

Post by lorenzhs »

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.

I use WeeChat (https://weechat.org/, running on my server) and Glowing Bear (https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear) to connect to it from wherever I am (desktop or mobile), it works very nicely. Because it's self-hosted, it has higher setup overhead than signing up to slack, of course. But it does solve IRC's mobile and multi-device problems for me wonderfully. (I'm one of the Glowing Bear developers)
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