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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)

#71

Post by lawpoop »

arcticfox wrote: post #62
Bartweiss wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 tr…

640k should be enough for anybody

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

#72

Post by lorenzhs »

ATsch wrote: post #56
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…

It's a shame there has not been an easy, free way to solve the major problems with IRC for everybody: - no history while you are not in a channel - lack of modern features like sending images and lack of good UX - no mobile notifications Matrix.org solves these problems very well IMO, but it's adoption is abysmal too.

All of these problems are solvable, though:

- Commonly addressed with logging bots and a link to the log in the topic

- Some clients have this: when you drag an image into Glowing Bear (a web frontend for WeeChat that I'm working on), it gets uploaded to imgur and a link to the image is pasted in the channel. It can also display images and videos inline if you wish.

- Easily handled with services like push{over,bullet}

The problem is that these things don't work out of the box and that there's a learning curve. It's just not a very friendly experience for newcomers.

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

#73

Post by brandon272 »

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…

IRCCloud solves a lot of these problems and you'd think there's a market opportunity for them to step in and offer their enhanced IRC experiences to "teams" and "communities" with an appropriately optimized fee structure.

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

#74

Post by Karunamon »

SeeDave wrote: post #58
onion2k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They're not pretty It's an open protocol. Check out Kiwiirc, it's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could build a nice interface. > There's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else. I believe that NickServ takes care of this. As far as logging, and file-sharing. Yeah you're onto something. IRC isn't as bad as people make it out to be :/

NickServ (and all services packages for that matter) are basically hacks. They create god-clients on the server which have special rights.

Personally, I'd rather have accounting and permissions be a core part of the protocol, not a bolted on afterthought.

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

#75

Post by onion2k »

SeeDave wrote: post #58
onion2k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They're not pretty It's an open protocol. Check out Kiwiirc, it's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could build a nice interface. > There's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else. I believe that NickServ takes care of this. As far as logging, and file-sharing. Yeah you're onto something. IRC isn't as bad as people make it out to be :/

Check out Kiwiirc, it's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could build a nice interface.

Of course. But they haven't. Kiwi isn't bad for an IRC client, but it's way behind Slack.

I believe that NickServ takes care of this.

Nickserv is hard for a typical user to understand. The number of times someone thinks they've registered a name when they actually haven't demonstrates that. Ghosting makes it harder too.

I used IRC for about a decade. I used even more esoteric online chat services like telnet talkers and MUSHs too. They're great if you learn how to use them. But that's the key difference - you don't need to learn Slack. It works how you'd expect it to work. A user can just pick it up and do things with it. That's a massive difference, and possibly the main reason why Slack can charge a decent price for their product.

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

#76

Post by Karunamon »

Tloewald wrote: post #61
onion2k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack has IRC and XMPP gateways if you really must use some ancient client where half the features that make Slack desirable won't work.

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

#77

Post by mulletbum »

dahart wrote: post #53
__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.

You appear to have not read the article. The very first complaint is about the 10k message limit warnings. The author then complains "Slack would aggressively archive messages, sometimes only minutes after they were sent." He's lucky the messages even went through. He asked Slack for guarantees, after the fact, on the free plan with no intention of paying Slack's rates. Even the user limit problem is silly. It's call…

His point, which you have missed, is that although the archive thing was a problem, it may been their own fault. However, the number of users allowed was not, plus paying for the service wouldn't change that the cap exists.

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

#78

Post by jerf »

DanHulton wrote: post #50

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 histor…

Are you planning on trying to make money with this? If so, you're in some amount of trouble, depending on how much you're looking at trying to make.

If you're not trying to make money, you still should check the agreements for Slack; this may constitute abuse.

You should also take a look at your architecture, too. You've got a clear message bus where you send things to and receive things from Slack. You may notice that where those messages go matters less to your code than you may think. If you find you can't go with slack, it may not be all that hard to simply set up a web site that plays your text-based game by shimming the message flow in and out, in which case you can do whatever you like, at whatever rate you like. Despite the slick name, you may not need Slack at all. You'd still have the conceit of the chatbot experience, which will definitely appeal to a certain niche, just as MUDs did.

(And that name may be too slick. I don't know how nasty Slack is inclined to be, but directly referencing brand names in your name like that is dangerous from a trademark perspective.)

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

#79

Post by altern8tif »

This has been a sore point for many communities (see the Digital Nomads + React communities).

But if Slack were smart about it, they'll realise that there's an opportunity here. They are a very well-funded company and it wouldn't hurt to spend some resources to beef up their current code/infrastructure or to even spin up a separate product that they can profit from.

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

#80

Post by zellyn »

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.

At a "team" size of 5000, the 10000-message limit means you each get 2 messages before things start disappearing. So I think the message limit pretty strongly implies a team member limit.
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