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My experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional, for several reasons. I use paid Slack, to pretty good effect, every day at w

by agf 8y ago

My experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional, for several reasons. I use paid Slack, to pretty good effect, every day at work. First of all, they have to rely heavily on hacks to store information long-term because of the 10,000 message limit. Second, even with fairly diligent use of Google Docs for important stuff, tons of info is still lost. I've got a slack where I have DMs with four different people starred. But for two of the four, I have no idea why, because I don't recognize the names and the entire conversation history is gone. Third, where the message limit is less of an issue, and low barrier to entry is important -- ones with a lower activity rate, and where the community is not super close-knit -- tend to suffer from constant challenges to the group's norms. People drift in and out, wanting to argue again and again about how it's OK for them to use exclusively male pronouns all the time, or how it's OK for them to discuss irrelevant topics. This takes up a ton of the message history, and lowers the information density. Like it or not, IRC, with a web client, and a publicly available archive that is searchable, is far more functional for this situation. Paid Slack is a pretty good tool for work communication, but the free version, for now, doesn't translate well to open communities.

amorphid 8y ago
> My experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional I had really good luck with the Elixir Slack channel when I was first starting out with the language. I guess I'd say Slack can be a great newb friendly place to ask dumb questions. There were plenty of times I didn't know what to Google, because I didn't understand a basic concept, and I couldn't figure out how ask a clear question on StackOverflow. When you're in newb territory, having a Slack channel full of helpful people is nice.
- Hoasi 8y ago
  > When you're in newb territory, having a Slack channel full of helpful people is nice. Exactly my experience as well. In those cases, Slack is just like an old school IRC channel with a shinier interface.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    You both missed the point, which is - for such use cases, Slack is even worse than an old school IRC.
    - Hoasi 8y ago
      Well, in those cases you go where the community is. Maybe one is better than the other, but my personal preference doesn't matter here. I would still use one or the other, regardless. If something better comes along, you should use it.
- agf 8y ago
  I don't disagree with this at all -- but the value there has very little to do with the tool, Slack. An IRC channel is at least as functional. It's been years since I used Stack Overflow chat, but I always felt if it had been a bit better, it would have been the tool for groups like this. A missed opportunity, given that Stack Exchange is committed to making all of the information on their sites freely available forever, and Slack definitely is not.
Karunamon 8y ago
Wouldn’t the same message history hacks apply to IRC? It’s an ephemeral platform by nature, so unless you have a bot logging conversations somewhere, it’s the same problem either way.
- dijit 8y ago
  I am an IRC operator of nearly 20 years; and I guess I'm here to say: "it depends". Speaking about IRC as if all IRC servers that came before are all IRC is capable of is.. odd.. it would be trivial to create an inspircd module that pushed data into elasticsearch.. At the same time, clients log by default too, they just don't expose a way of searching the logs they generate.. IRC is a (dated, stateful connection based) protocol; nothing more, it's a shame there are not nicer clients because of all the functionality slack has; are easily "add"-able to IRC, bar one- it's ability to handle network disconnections well. IRC+Bouncer is how most people interact with IRC today; however it's a workaround for a problem users should not have. There is a company called IRCCloud who are attempting to make IRC easy to use, much in the way slack do by operating a webclient+bouncer bundle for you.. You could also self-host something like "The Lounge" which does effectively the same thing: https://github.com/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge (I am not affiliated with either). However I'm aware that the above options are both significant barriers to entry when compared to slack. that is the _real_ value of slack, onboarding people into a slack discussion is a breeze, and once you have someone there there's no tangible reason to move to something else.

by agf 8y ago

amorphid 8y ago

> My experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional I had really good luck with the Elixir Slack channel when I was first starting out with the language. I guess I'd say Slack can be a great newb friendly place to ask dumb questions. There were plenty of times I didn't know what to Google, because I didn't understand a basic concept, and I couldn't figure out how ask a clear question on StackOverflow. When you're in newb territory, having a Slack channel full of helpful people is nice.

Hoasi 8y ago
> When you're in newb territory, having a Slack channel full of helpful people is nice. Exactly my experience as well. In those cases, Slack is just like an old school IRC channel with a shinier interface.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  You both missed the point, which is - for such use cases, Slack is even worse than an old school IRC.
  - Hoasi 8y ago
    Well, in those cases you go where the community is. Maybe one is better than the other, but my personal preference doesn't matter here. I would still use one or the other, regardless. If something better comes along, you should use it.
agf 8y ago
I don't disagree with this at all -- but the value there has very little to do with the tool, Slack. An IRC channel is at least as functional. It's been years since I used Stack Overflow chat, but I always felt if it had been a bit better, it would have been the tool for groups like this. A missed opportunity, given that Stack Exchange is committed to making all of the information on their sites freely available forever, and Slack definitely is not.

Karunamon 8y ago

Wouldn’t the same message history hacks apply to IRC? It’s an ephemeral platform by nature, so unless you have a bot logging conversations somewhere, it’s the same problem either way.

dijit 8y ago
I am an IRC operator of nearly 20 years; and I guess I'm here to say: "it depends". Speaking about IRC as if all IRC servers that came before are all IRC is capable of is.. odd.. it would be trivial to create an inspircd module that pushed data into elasticsearch.. At the same time, clients log by default too, they just don't expose a way of searching the logs they generate.. IRC is a (dated, stateful connection based) protocol; nothing more, it's a shame there are not nicer clients because of all the functionality slack has; are easily "add"-able to IRC, bar one- it's ability to handle network disconnections well. IRC+Bouncer is how most people interact with IRC today; however it's a workaround for a problem users should not have. There is a company called IRCCloud who are attempting to make IRC easy to use, much in the way slack do by operating a webclient+bouncer bundle for you.. You could also self-host something like "The Lounge" which does effectively the same thing: https://github.com/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge (I am not affiliated with either). However I'm aware that the above options are both significant barriers to entry when compared to slack. that is the _real_ value of slack, onboarding people into a slack discussion is a breeze, and once you have someone there there's no tangible reason to move to something else.