11 ms·

We Tried Slack and Regretted It

329 points by mochtar 11y ago

niteshade 11y ago
I've had the pleasure of dealing with the Gitter team, and they are an awesomely talented bunch of devs.
comrade1 11y ago
Jesus, what a mess. Sounds like someone made a decision without doing even a modicum of research into pricing. Bowing to peer pressure just means someone is managing by consensus.
- aaronem 11y ago
  Yep. Jumping to a platform about which you know nothing is asking for trouble, no matter the context.
- evo_9 11y ago
  Hard to really fault him since he ran into an undisclosed max user limit, no?
  - cowls 11y ago
    No, slack free plan only allows 10000 messages to be saved at any one time. Nothing to do with user limit. Unbelievable that a service like this would change the key part of their platform without even checking the pricing page to see what free plan restrictions were... https://slack.com/pricing https://slack.com/pricing EDIT: I stopped reading after the first paragraph, looks like there was a user limit issue too :)
    - eli 11y ago
      Except if you read the whole post, he ran into a previously undisclosed explicit user limit. The client was crashing. Slack ideally should warn you if you have too many users, before the point where the client crashes and the backend fails to send messages.
      - cloakandswagger 11y ago
        Even if they hadn't, the 10k message limit is well publicized and would have forced them into an insanely expensive pricing model. Slack's pricing model and the ad copy of their website makes it obvious to me that it's a communication tool intended for small teams, not a chat room for thousands of users.
      - briandear 11y ago
        But who runs a chat with 5000+ users? The signal to noise would be insane. If each user posted 1 message per hour, that's 5000 messages per hour. For a group that size it seems like Twitter makes more sense. I can't imagine 5000 people needing real time communication. Kind of the mother of all edge cases for a team chat service.
        detaro 11y ago
        I don't think they are talking about 5000 users chatting in one chat room, but about 5000+ users having a common place to talk to others in small groups and maybe read announcements in a main channel. My university uses Slack, and the "main" rooms see a few posts a day, but there are tons of small groupchats and DMs.
        Cthulhu_ 11y ago
        There's plenty of IRC servers (which is probably the closest analogue to Slack) with more than 5000+ users. Sure, most of them have a #general channel, but nobody will see that one as the main channel; most will go to a more topical / relevant channel. That's how IRC works, that's how Slack should work.
        pcr0 11y ago
        It's usually 50-200 users online at a time, and out of that maybe 20-50 are chatting at least once a minute, so no, not 9000 users actively chatting at once.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      The 10,000 message search limit probably limits this realistically to 5 or 10 person teams. I would think I would want at least a week or even a month's worth of searching (ideally indefinitely, of course).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - abalone 11y ago
    You can definitely fault him for not researching pricing. Even if there were no limit to teams the pricing alone does not work for his organization. Why would you switch everyone over?
- proksoup 11y ago
  Sorry slightly off topic. But I need to know this. wait wait wait ... managing by consensus is .... bad? Where can I learn more about this to build consensus at my office that this is bad (because consensus is how all decisions are made)?
  - saryant 11y ago
    > because consensus is how all decisions are made This is the crux of it. All decisions are not made through consensus and I would wager that's true at most companies.
  - fineman 11y ago
    If there is real consensus on what should happen then nobody is managing, things are just happening. But "managing by consensus" is forcing everyone to say they agree (hah!) about what the manager has already decided on. Depending on how much the manager has bought in it may either be 1) veiled authoritarianism or, worse, 2) a cult where they think this is helpful. I can work with you without having been forced to agree.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >because consensus is how all decisions are made Not in any place were there is a hierarchy. In most companies for example, there are CEO, managers, and middle managers, etc. They make a decision and you get to implement it. Ideally they'd like your consent to, but even if you don't consent, you don't get much of a say to what the company will do.
- theVirginian 11y ago
  But you should always move fast and break things, don't look before you leap. It's the startup mentality and it's the way real scrappy entrepreneurs do things.
  - patrickmclaren 11y ago
    That's just knee-jerk mentality, not necessarily associated with startups.
    - theVirginian 11y ago
      I was being a bit sarcastic, its just that sometimes I read these highly critical blog posts about "we made X decision with Y product and it sucks" where really the person who was responsible for the decision could have anticipated the consequences with five minutes of evaluation.
morgante 11y ago
It sounds like they didn't do any research into what Slack's limitations are. Also, frankly, if I were Slack I would not invest in supporting this use case at all. Massive free chat rooms are not a profitable space to be in.
- jlees 11y ago
  It depends on the community. For this one, it's a bunch of folks learning to code and getting coding jobs; I can imagine many of those ending up working at tech companies who might be great Slack customers, and evangelising because they had such a great experience using it - so the investment of supporting a 'free' chat room could pay off over time.
  - pavlov 11y ago
    I don't know if that makes long-term sense. The OP sounds very entitled: "We'd endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media." Of course Slack must provide them with free chat rooms in perpetuity, they've even been mentioned in interviews! It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.
    - briandear 11y ago
      I really don't think Slack cares about one customer mentioning them in interviews. Especially a freeloading customer. Why not simply have each user pay their own $5 per month?
    - fleitz 11y ago
      They are not customers they are users, and it's important to make sure your users are happy, lest you run out of them before you run out of money catering to their every whim. This whole concept of a 'customer' sounds very interesting, I hear they appreciate the services companies provide so much that they are willing to hand over actual money, instead of using the service they got for free to bitch about the service they got for free.
    - 11y ago
gnoway 11y ago
Site does not resolve for me, here is the google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:94NVni1b_A4J:blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:94NVni1...
Bahamut 11y ago
The one thing that has me mostly abandoning Gitter is that switching channels is incredibly slow on the browser. If Gitter had a standalone client, I'd be willing to give it another shot, but until then, I'm a proponent of using IRC & Slack.
- ValentineC 11y ago
  Gitter does have standalone clients: https://gitter.im/apps https://gitter.im/apps
  - Lazare 11y ago
    In my experience they're no better than the web view.
- rekoros 11y ago
  I (and many others) keep up with Gitter rooms and IRC channels (Freenode, mostly) by bridging them to Slack or Kato with sameroom.io. It's also a good way of merging interesting channels from the 15 Slack teams I am member of into one.
- mydigitalself 11y ago
  Mike from Gitter here. We've improved the performance of this quite a lot over the last few months and will soon start implementing local caching that will make this pretty much instantaneous.
andmarios 11y ago
I think you should have ran the math before switching to Slack. A max limit of 10,000 messages history for your 8,500 free users, premium cost at $60/user/year. An engineer designs a product for the specifications she/he is given. Slack's engineers were given the specs above and obviously designed and optimized their product for much smaller teams than yours.
- metasean 11y ago
  They do mention in the write-up that, "We also held our breaths as we waited for Slacks' teased support for large open source communities like ours." and show the FAQ addressing their use case - https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8RAB/image.png https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8...
  - detaro 11y ago
    Where did Slack tease support for open source communities with thousands of members? Because seeing that FAQ makes me think "oh, hey, cool, potentially cheaper plans for open source teams", not "move a GIANT group over in anticipation". I agree though, Slack probably could have communicated that a bit better, at least if they contacted Slack beforehand. Even if the answer had been "We actually have no clue what happens if you try to join 10k people.", the problems certainly sound like that's the case.
  - andmarios 11y ago
    The screenshot you quote is about open source projects, not communities. If I understand correctly, even a large project like the Linux kernel has only a few hundred active developers at a time and the rest are one-time small-patch contributors. It would be interesting though to know how many students used slack for Harvard's online CS50 and how it worked for them.
  - rylee 11y ago
    Why would you jump ship for something that hasn't even arrived yet?
cechmaster 11y ago
Yeah dude, wtf, 5000 users and you think you can get away for free?
- eli 11y ago
  OK, but if Slack has a user limit there's no reason it should be secret.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    I'd guess it's not so much "a secret" rather than a natural limitation or just a "put a big number there that should be enough for everybody" (until it isn't)
    - eli 11y ago
      Maybe it isn't intentionally a secret, but it should be documented. If you take the time to code a hard user limit (with its own API exception code, etc), you can take the time to mention it in the docs.
- Nemcue 11y ago
  At least intuitively one doesn't think it would cost half a million dollars for a year.
dubcanada 11y ago
Why not just use IRC? Is it not made for the sole purpose of having lots of users talk with each other.
- fredoliveira 11y ago
  This is the real mystery here. I'm a huge fan of what Slack has done and was a big advocate for it when it was starting up. But it feels off that people with high realtime chat needs don't just use IRC, which has been around for ages, is super stable, and deals with this amount of users easily.
  - detaro 11y ago
    Is there any web client you can easily deploy that comes close to Slack in comfort for the users? IRC is cool, but getting thousands of users comfortable with it sounds like quite a challenge.
    - TD-Linux 11y ago
      A number of people in my company use IRCCloud, which is a web-based client with mobile apps. It also has built in bouncer functionality - it stays logged in even when you don't have the page open.
      - Lazare 11y ago
        Have to second IRCCloud as being a great IRC client. That being said, their pricing is probably no better than Slack's for this purpose ($5/user/month).
        jonty 11y ago
        IRCCloud staffer here! Glad you like it, this year is going to be a big one for us - we're actively looking at how we can better serve large open communities, and I would suspect that will result in some nice changes to both free accounts and the pricing of paid accounts. If anybody is interested in making IRC suck less, we've got a designer-shaped hole that needs filling... https://www.irccloud.com/jobs https://www.irccloud.com/jobs
coned88 11y ago
Personally we use slack at work and it's a terrible product. Yes it's nice that we can see pictures and gifs inline with the text but the client is not great. The mobile client is even worse. The bloody thing just doesn't work. I'll get a message via the desktop app and 10-15 minutes later get the push notification on my phone. Then I can only see some of the push notification on my phone and when I go to click the notification to read it. The entire channel or DM it came from is not up to date. So if I do have service which I may not have I have to then wait for the messages to download and for it to reconcile what has been read. Any irc or xmpp clients do not have these issues. products like Whatsapp and telegram don't have these issues.
Axsuul 11y ago
Using Slack for communities and groups of people who don't know each other is incredibly clunky. It still feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Slack is made for teams who communicate furiously. Large communities are typically more passive and casual.
derefr 11y ago
It's pretty clear that Slack is not, and never will be, built for this use-case. Slack is for teams: small groups where everyone knows one-another by name, can be trusted with one-another's email-addresses and other contact information, can be trusted to only use @everyone triggers for important things, etc. A lot of Slack's features are built to assume this "small group with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to fiddle with things" paradigm. Slack can handle "communities"—effectively groups with a "team"-sized aristocracy and a bunch of rarely-visiting people who mainly interact in a hub-and-spoke fashion with the team. But it's still not built for that. Slack is emphatically not for societies: groups big enough that people only know a small percentage of others, groups that must create "laws" to prevent random strangers abusing your shared infrastructure, etc. In fact, very few pieces of software are designed to cope with use by societies. Maybe Usenet (as a whole), IRC (an entire server, not a single channel), and Reddit (the code-base, run on your own server) are for societies. If I were to come up with a way to host a chat adjacent to a MOOC, though, I'd still probably use Slack; I'd just have one Slack team for each instance of each course. (The one thing I do think Slack is missing, is a way to easily share your "Slack identity" (username, avatar, client display prefs, etc.) between multiple Slack teams you're concurrently logged into. Then you could be in two "classes" and be sure the same person is the same person in both; or Slack could even consolidate their Direct Message threads into a single one shared between both teams.)
- _hadrian 11y ago
  very well said! I've worked in a team and we used slack, exactly as you explained... we knew each other, it worked great with Hangouts, Bitbucket and Asana integration. But for this use case in the post, it's obviously not such a great choice.
- michaelq 11y ago
  I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making. I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages. The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first community to hit this limit. Big online courses, for example, routinely draw 100,000s of students, and might make the same mistake we did (Harvard's CS50 class did). Slack may be able to fix its sluggishness for these other communities, and someone might build integrations that routinely export then delete messages so as to stay below the 10,000 message limit and remove the warnings. But it's too late for us. We can't pause our community growth while we wait for Slack to engineer around their undisclosed user limit. So we have no alternative but to switch. The main reason I wrote this post is to provide a cautionary tale to other open-membership organizations who are considering using Slack. Slack doesn't seem to be intended to do this! Please don't do this!
neumino 11y ago
I kind of think that Gitter is a joke and I'm not convinced they can do better than Slack. I mean their Android app has the balls to ask you to write your GitHub credentials. Maybe Asana/plain IRC is a better solution.
ExpiredLink 11y ago
WTF is Slack???
- greenyoda 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_%28software%29
- roghummal 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspiracy_and_.22Slack.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...
serve_yay 11y ago
It does seem to be a bad fit. That's too bad for them, I really enjoy using Slack.
hrayr 11y ago
You can't really use a product outside of it's use case, then complain about it when you reach "outside" it's walls.. I mean you can complain all you want about it, but don't blame it on the product itself. The manual invitation form is clearly designed to discourage mass open ended invitations. A product designed for teams with 500-1000 users in mind, is probably going to get bogged down by 10,000+ users.
seanp2k2 11y ago
Why not use IRC or some form of XMPP? Heck, just make a channel on Freenode and call it a day. Want integrations? Everything works with IRC already (maybe not all the one-click integrations).
hokkos 11y ago
BabelJS support chat that used gitter moved to slack, Reactiflux a React community uses slack. If think there is a real opportunity for slack to do like reddit with their subs for opensource software, they could monetize it with jobs offers. But for now if slack is more slick and fast than gitter we loose google searching, history.
philippnagel 11y ago
Does Slack really use LAMP?
- olso 11y ago
  Why are you surprised? LAMP stack, only at this scale is not a bottleneck. Who knows, maybe they are not even using HHVM, yet. I would be blaming actual code, not the stack for the current trouble. P.S. LAMP != shitty developers automatically
  - philippnagel 11y ago
    I was merely asking a question, not referring to the obvious downsides of LAMP. However Slack seems to be really unstable for being an enterprise product. Communication is a backbone of any business and should therefor be rock-solid. 5000 user maximum? Seriously?
    - spdionis 11y ago
      Given their pricing model i don't think they expected anyone to try to have 5000 users...
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
Every chat system since IRC has been worse than IRC. Without fail. Just use IRC, people, stop chasing shiny things.
- slyall 11y ago
  I'm afraid not. eg for me the 3 killer features on hipchat have been (a) Ability to scroll back and see what happened when I was offline (b) Ability to post pictures/files (c) search. Now all 3 of these could be implemented on a ICR server client. But they are not simple, not supported with all clients and not something that your marketing guy can easily use. With hipchat/slack/etc they are all out of the box on minute-one and easy to use.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    Any technical person in the organization could set those things up and have everyone, even the marketing guy, using it on IRC without any trouble in the course of maybe an hour.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    (a) Use screen or tmux. Log. (b) Post links. Everyone in IRC has been doing this for 30 years. Works fine. (c) Have your client log, or have a bot log to something with HTTP access. You can then use grep or a fancy web app or anything in between to search. I'm with the parent. Scalable chat is a solved problem; it was solved in the open, via open source and open networks, over 20 years ago. Everything since has been focused not on the technical problems of chat but on the business problem of making money from chat. The fact that someone out there wants to make money on chat does not mean you need to give them money to solve your chat problems. Paying for things of value is fine, but in this case you simply don't need to. Sometimes the best things really are free.
    - archinal 11y ago
      Semantically, an issue with posting links instead of files is that your users then need to go ahead and upload the file somewhere manually. HipChat takes care of this by adding the file to an S3 bucket when you drag it into the client. Way less hassle, especially for non-technical users.
dmourati 11y ago
Two things. 1. The decision making process here was unsound. You need to follow the one, some, all approach of rolling out changes. Jumping in on multiple thousands of users was irresponsible. 2. Slack should provide some guidance earlier in the process about user limits. They are known for their friendly UI/UX. An email to the admin saying: "Hey, we've noticed you reached 50% of our maximum users for your instance, are you sure you are on the right path?" would have gone a long way.
- omni 11y ago
  > 1. The decision making process here was unsound. You need to follow the one, some, all approach of rolling out changes. Jumping in on multiple thousands of users was irresponsible. To be fair, it does seem here like the failure mode wouldn't have been reached until they moved all of their users over.
ksk 11y ago
OK sure, I get that Slack wants to make money and doesn't want too many 'free' users. The restrictions themselves are acceptable to me. However, their platform seems super brittle and janky if it can't handle the users in the first place. Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now? Sending out emails without fucking up needs "engineering"? Um. OK. Personally, I would be embarrassed if I put my name on a product that couldn't handle such an extremely light load for a platform that basically transmits text.
- fleitz 11y ago
  Have you ever thought that they put those limits in there precisely so that situations totally inappropriate for slack don't occur? I love how programmers are always "embarrassed" about the limitations of billion dollar companies, have you ever though that these limitations might be vital to their success?
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    It's difficult to argue that the limit is essential to their success if only a single user has ever hit it, and that only recently. Of course, we don't know that's the case. There's nothing wrong with limits. Every piece of software has them, and even learning what they are is a major step. Known or explicit limits should be documented, however. It seems that in this case they were not. That's an error on Slack's part.
  - ksk 11y ago
    >I love how programmers are always "embarrassed" about the limitations of billion dollar companies, In my mind I picture a station wagon outracing a Ferrari. That would be cause for embarrassment. Your quotes seem to serve no purpose as far as I can tell. >have you ever though that these limitations might be vital to their success? You have much lower expectations than me. I don't see Slack doing something that is in any shape or form particularly challenging from an engineering standpoint.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now? Slack has millions of users and billions of messages -- working alright. 5000 users were seeing slowdonws for a SINGLE team -- not across Slack. And 10.000 is a limit put by Slack intentionally in place as a freemium boundary. All systems have breaking points, especially if they weren't designed for some specific use. You might as well ask "Twitter can't handle more than 140 characters now, seriously?". >Personally, I would be embarrassed if I put my name on a product that couldn't handle such an extremely light load for a platform that basically transmits text. Your answer doesn't show any understanding of network services at all, including as some guy already pointed out, the "basically transmits text" part, as if that is something trivial at scale...
sergiotapia 11y ago
What did you expect? You can't expect to hit such a ridiculously large number and not pay anything.
- briandear 11y ago
  Au contraire.. People expect it all the time. They have a hard time getting that these "free" services are built by people that need to get paid and eat. Adding 8000+ users for an implied PR benefit is silly. What's the ROI? Not going to be very high, almost guaranteed. Because these free users might evangelize other free users because the service is "free."
- detaro 11y ago
  You can have thousands of users working together on other platforms for free (e.g. Github) and Slack clearly advertises "$0 - no limits on time or users". It still would be a very good idea to contact them before and ask "We're considering moving a few thousand users to your free plan. You sure you mean what you write there?", but they are sort-of saying that it is ok to do. (EDIT: especially since they say that the intend for that offer is for small teams)
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    So I go to an all you can eat buffet, and stuff my face until I literally burst. "Hey it was written there clear as day!"
    - detaro 11y ago
      Yes, that is the idea behind an all-you-can-eat buffet. And I don't complain about restaurants that don't offer them anymore or are not putting out unlimited amounts of expensive food (just like I can totally understand Slack not spending much effort to support these guys), but in the same way a restaurant offering them made the choice to do so and has to live with people stuffing their face. To stay with the restaurant examples, for me OPs situation is more like they turned with a large wedding party to a pub and are now surprised not everybody gets a place at the bar and people have to wait for their beers.
cactusface 11y ago
This was actually a really entertaining telling of a boring old story about capitalist competition. Act I: We tried A, then we outgrew it. Someone said B was better. Act II: We tried B, then we outgrew it. Act III: By this time A had caught up to our needs, so we went back to A. End Credits
jonathanmarcus 11y ago
What a hyperbolic post. There is no reason to put a company on blast like this. There is a real team of people likely working exceptionally hard to operate Slack. You could have just written a post extolling the benefits of Gitter, and gone about your day of adding more campers to your project. I'm guessing Slack didn't beg for your business or community endorsements.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I agree The title should have been "We pushed Slack for a use case it was never designed for and it broke" Yes, sorry, sometimes limits are hit Maybe a better solution to them would have been to use IRC
- smm2000 11y ago
  Slack is a 2.8B dollar company and not a small scrappy startup anymore. They can handle all the hate in the world and should not get a pass for sleazy behavior (the same is true for Microsoft, Google or Exxon). Not putting max number of users on website or in documentation is not fair to customers.
  - vsl 11y ago
    Did you consider the possibility that it's a technical limit that they didn't even anticipate ever hitting in real life, because Slack is for small teams? Let's be fair here: the 10k visible messages limit means that Slack is basically unusable when you hit the user limit, as this post also says (messages archived within minutes of appearing). The pricing is clearly insane with this amount of users too.
modarts 11y ago
Drama Queen post of the year, good lord. Why don't you try figuring out what parameters the software you're using is designed to operate in before throwing such a public shit fit?
tosbourn 11y ago
I am guessing there will be a post slamming blogger soon since that is the only page that is currently working.
greenyoda 11y ago
"The only way to make this go away is to pay slack's cheapest plan, which is $5 per user, per month. That's $5 x 12 months x 8,462 campers = $507,720 per year, just for our current campers. Until then, Slack aggressively archived messages, sometimes only minutes after they were sent." Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free? How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this? Usually, "freemium" services are offered so that users can try out the service without having to pay for it, but if you expect unlimited support for 8462 users, it makes sense to have to pay.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Doesn't any IRC server ever do this? I mean 8500 users... isn't actually that much. Even if the free IRC servers don't support this amount of users, you could just set up a reasonably cheap server (for way less than half a million (!) a year) to do exactly the same thing. And that's just the thing. Most people will see Slack as IRC chat, but a bit better. And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month. Doubly so if your chat channel is open for everyone and you don't know who your users are.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month. Considering they have tens of millions in ARR, the market has proven you wrong.
  - Lazare 11y ago
    Slack is a lot better than IRC when used as intended. Also, my favourite IRC client (IRCCloud) is, in fact, $5/user/month, and I know I'm not even close to their only paying customer. I recognise you're engaging in hyperbole when you say "nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month", but when you're saying stuff which is so blatantly wrong (and trivially disproven), it undermines your entire argument.
    - teacup50 11y ago
      $5/mo for an IRC client? That's just silly. Geek cultured called -- they want their technology back. Apparently startup culture has corrupted our industry to a degree that people think $5/mo for a hosted IRC client is a fair exchange of value.
mbesto 11y ago
Here's the problem I have with this: 1. You have an organization (can't tell if for profit or non-for-profit) that explicitly states that it helps people "become a Software Engineer". 2. Yet, one of the organizers of the company (?) states "we blithely shepherded 300 to 500 new campers into our Slack every day, hopeful that this messaging company, now worth $2.8 billion, would hire more engineers to flog their LAMP stack application into shape." Thanks for this...you're now creating a culture of developers who "blithely" makes architectural decisions with little proper thought and publicly trash technology choices (in this case, LAMP). EDIT: Upon further review it looks like the person in question has a bit of an agenda... http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-MEAN-javascript-stack-vs-LAMP-stack/answer/Quincy-Larson?share=1 http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-MEAN-java... http://www.quora.com/Having-built-web-stuff-the-old-way-PHP-MySQL-back-in-the-day-and-wanting-to-build-a-new-account-based-web-site-app-that-can-handle-scaling-Whats-the-best-tech-approach-these-days/answer/Quincy-Larson?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Having-built-web-stuff-the-old-way-PHP-... I appreciate that people are stepping up to the plate and getting more people involved in coding, but this is seriously dogmatic and potentially harmful.
- plorkyeran 11y ago
  They even explicitly list the fact that Gitter uses Node.js as one of the advantage of them. I really hope they aren't teaching their students to pick third-party SaaS offerings based on whether or not they like the same tech as you do.
  - Lazare 11y ago
    I saw that too, and I had to laugh. I like node.js, I use node.js, I've shipped large projects with node.js as part of the stack, and I'll very likely select node.js for elements of future projects. But... ...someone has been drinking way way waaaay too much of the koolaid. All it was missing was the phrase "web scale". Edit: Heh. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-Slack/answer/Quincy-Larson http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-Slack/ans...
    - 11y ago
logicallee 11y ago
This title is extremely misleading and should read "We Switched Our 8,000 Campers to Free Slack and Regretted It". Even in a tiny organization (like <50 people) that starts using Slack, the plan would be to switch to eventually paying for it or look very hard at the limitations. Who builds a freemium service tier into their stack without looking at the limits! It's not like slack is ad-supported, free is not its basic model.
skybrian 11y ago
I love reading stories like this. While it could have been worded better, it's important to share information about migration failures, so that other people can learn from them. When done right, it's called a postmortem. We need more of them. I also think it's proper to point out that bandwagon effects played a role. Marketing shouldn't be used an excuse to skip due diligence, but in practice, it's often a factor in bad decisions.
shalmanese 11y ago
Their first clue that maybe this was an issue is they had to hack an undocumented API to even get people onto the system. Slack is going to need to do something about this because they're increasingly being used for communities of strangers around a common interest. Despite Slack doing everything they can to discourage this use case, there's a clear need there which Slack is filling. I'm currently part of 3 separate slack groups where this is the case. Either a "Slack for communities" forms to absorb that niche or Slack needs to start thinking of a service offering for these communities because they aren't going to go away and they're going to complain as vocally as free code camp when they don't get their way.
kolev 11y ago
I've always wondered why Slack gets so much love from engineers! It's noisy, it's expensive, and did I mention "noisy". It started as a copycat and didn't do much beyond that. The only thing I'm thankful to Slack about is that it's pushing HipChat to innovate. Finally we got multi-account support in there! Yes, I openly do like HipChat better - it's free, it's less noisy, it's coming from Atlassian, it integrates nicely into the Atlassian ecosystem, but there are alternatives like the open-source Rocket Chat [0] and Let's Chat [1], but Gitter is [2] is the best of those (like most of us) who use GitHub most of the day. Not sure why it doesn't get the love it deserves (but Gitter is expensive as well)! [0] https://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ https://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ [1] http://rocket.chat/ http://rocket.chat/ [2] https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/
- Lazare 11y ago
  Having used HipChat and Slack, I prefer Slack as a much better designed product. It's more stable, less buggy, and has more features. > did I mention "noisy" You did, but I have no idea what you mean. > it's coming from Atlassian One more reason to prefer Slack. I've had a lot of experience with Atlassian tools, and it's almost all been negative. Everything about Atlassian is slow: Their products, their support, and the pace of development. Submitting a bug report to Atlassian is an exercise in futility; if it's critical and affects hundreds of people, you MIGHT get reply within 2 years; you certainly won't get a fix that quickly. One bug I hit was opened in 2007, got an official response saying "maybe we could look into trying to fix that" in 2009, was officially added to their backlog to fix in 2010, and was announced as officially fixed in 2011. Spoiler: It wasn't fixed, and for all I know, it's still broken. The worst thing to happen to Hipchat was being purchased by Atlassian; it's when they stopped innovating and started stagnating.
  - kolev 11y ago
    People use JIRA and Confluence, because they are fully-featured, and complicated. It's easier to created a dumbed-down faster tool. Plus, they've been around for years. I'm sure one day they will rewrite them from scratch, but HipChat is not slow at all.
cddotdotslash 11y ago
Wow, this should be a textbook example of how not to make a decision. Zero forethought of future needs? Check. Picking a solution not designed for the problem? Check. Complaining that something that wasn't designed to do x isn't doing x? Check.
chris_wot 11y ago
Is the author paying for this service? If so - oh boy. Slack should have been more closely monitoring clients this big to ensure they don't reach self-imposed limits. That's just, heh, slack.
michaelq 11y ago
Look what I found: Slack's free tier pricing page explicitly states "There's no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp/status/612758062214950912 https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp/status/612758062214950912
- pavedwalden 11y ago
  With many freemium services capping free accounts at single-digit numbers of users, "no limit" is a reasonable way to let people know that they can stop looking for the catch. It would be more confusing if they said "up to 5,000" users, which sends the wrong message about who their service is targeting. Everyone understands that "unlimited breadsticks" implicitly means "lots and lots but not infinitely many"
  - crgt 11y ago
    Do you work for AT&T? Unlimited means unlimited. If there are limits, they need to be disclosed in advance. Especially if you are explicitly claiming that there are no limits..
  - pbreit 11y ago
    That's a crock. Please show me one other service that explicitly states "no limit" that actually has a hidden limit. The 10,000 message search limit makes it mostly unusable for groups in the 100s or even 10s so why even enforce the user limit?
    - nullrouted 11y ago
      Every shared web hosting company out there. Just giving you an example. They have been doing this for 10+ years.
      - pbreit 11y ago
        Can you point to one and explain the discrepancy?
neilellis 11y ago
I'm very disappointed with the level of comments here - the emotional attachment to Slack is just not neccessary; same for the ad hominem comments. For sure they have a great tool that I love and use but they have been slow to act upon the fact that many communities are using their free option with huge numbers. Rightly or wrongly. Slack just simply need to decide whether they are supporting this model or are happy to hand it over to Gitter to deal with. I suspect Gitter will be more than happy. Personally I think they could offer a fixed fee for public rooms. But hey that's up to them, it's their business model to decide. I think the problem is just the lack of clarity about how they are going to manage what they definitely know is going on (I have asked).
- wslh 11y ago
  I think now it is time for Slack to make a "paradigm shift". It seems Slack, like GitHub, is filling a place that was reserved to free open source offerings in the past (e-mail, IRC, newsgroups, etc) so they need to expand their freemium features.
partiallypro 11y ago
We have adopted Slack recently with a small 12 person (and everyone knows everyone) team and it works great. It really brings down distraction of people coming over to ask questions, they can just ask the question of a group and get it resolved by someone. We have Lync as a company wide (1000s) community messenger but for small teams this works great for collaboration of small groups. I am actually shocked that Microsoft doesn't have a solution like Slack built into Lync (Skype for Business now.) I mean it's possible they could buy Slack...but anyhow Slack is made for smaller teams. If you want a community use IRC (non-corporate), Skype or Google (corporate), etc.
- shavenwarthog2 11y ago
  Seconded. I've used Slack at two companies, both with a small, single-purpose team (< 10 people). In each case I and the other users were quite happy with the features available, and the overall design of the app. It isn't for everyone, but I whole-heartedly advocate teams examine Slack for their communication needs.
mcguire 11y ago
"No way were we going to spread our community across a bunch of disparate Slack instances. The entire point of a chat room app is convenient real time conversation." 5000 users, plus 300-500 new users per day. In a chat. Convenient real time communication, that is not.
nodesocket 11y ago
A perfect illustration of the "entitled developer complex". Failure to properly research Slack, a bad use-case, complain about pricing, then publicly bash. I've seen this repeatedly with my own startup (https://commando.io https://commando.io), and honestly this user profile is the worst. They won't pay, or will pay very little, and expect the most. They complain about the underlying codebase and stack (PHP), and fail to solve actual problems. They get stuck on details that don't matter.
- brobinson 11y ago
  Are you talking mostly about users of your free tier? Have you considered getting rid of it in lieu of a free trial on the paid plans?
- hox 11y ago
  I'd argue that "unlimited users" not really being unlimited is a pretty big detail that matters.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
After reading this I have but one request; please stop teaching people to code. Your solution to a problem you have with some software is to suggest they simple throw engineers at it is sadly pathetic.
lsc 11y ago
I find it super weird that new chat and messaging applications keep finding popularity. It seems like most of the features could be had by using a sufficiently featurefull IRC and email client. hmm. That could be an interesting project. Implement a social network using nntp, using public-key cryptography (with tight integration in the client) for access control. But seriously, I can see how some features of social networks would be hard to implement with nntp and clients... but I'm kind of missing out on why most of the newer chat networks are better than IRC.
dev1n 11y ago
Been using Circuit [1] for a while and have to say I've been impressed, if the people over at Free Code Camp are reading this. The document sharing and solidly built iOS app sold me on it. Switching teams on the iOS app for Circuit vs Slack was far faster too which I always found frustrating on the Slack app. Document searching was really well built on Circuit too. [1] https://www.yourcircuit.com/ https://www.yourcircuit.com/
vacri 11y ago
Slack's "sticker shock" is pretty big. I'm not sure if it's autodetecting and giving me Australian dollars in it's pricing, but in the first paid band it's showing me $6.67/user/mo for annual (who knows how many users a small team will have in a year?) or $8/user/mo for month-to-month (the usual pricing). $8/user/month for chat. And it's double that to get business-level SLAs. With 25 users in the account, including external teams and contractors, that would mean we're paying $200/month ($400 for business SLAs). Per month. For chat. Crazy. And slackbot keeps on claiming any "thank you" that someone says, even if specified @someone, the greedy little bugger.
utuxia 11y ago
This is what IRC if for numb nuts.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
libraryatnight 11y ago
I really like Slack. Where I work each team has its own Slack chat with various channels. I work in IT, our more general team is about 30 people and my more focused team is 7 people. We have specific channels for each focus group, and then a general channel for the entire team. Since we've used Slack I feel more up to date and more in the know because I can keep up with what everyone is talking about. I have keywords that give me an alert when someone mentions my name or specific things in which I specialize. I've been able to quickly offer help to those who might not have immediately thought to bring their issue directly to me as a result, and have had the same happen in regard to problems I bring up in channel. It reminds me very much of hanging out on IRC when I was a teenager, but an IRC built for business. Sharing files, code, screencaptures, etc is easy and intuitive. The integrations are useful: GitHub, Zoom video conferencing, Dropbox - having these items easily available only make Slack blend more seamlessly into my day. I like Slack, and reading this blog post I couldn't help but feel this was more a mismatch for the author's use-case than a problem with the application.
a-dub 11y ago
I really wonder what the din of an 8500 person chatroom would be like...

329 points by mochtar 11y ago

I've had the pleasure of dealing with the Gitter team, and they are an awesomely talented bunch of devs.

Jesus, what a mess. Sounds like someone made a decision without doing even a modicum of research into pricing. Bowing to peer pressure just means someone is managing by consensus.

aaronem 11y ago
Yep. Jumping to a platform about which you know nothing is asking for trouble, no matter the context.
evo_9 11y ago
Hard to really fault him since he ran into an undisclosed max user limit, no?
- cowls 11y ago
  No, slack free plan only allows 10000 messages to be saved at any one time. Nothing to do with user limit. Unbelievable that a service like this would change the key part of their platform without even checking the pricing page to see what free plan restrictions were... https://slack.com/pricing https://slack.com/pricing EDIT: I stopped reading after the first paragraph, looks like there was a user limit issue too :)
  - eli 11y ago
    Except if you read the whole post, he ran into a previously undisclosed explicit user limit. The client was crashing. Slack ideally should warn you if you have too many users, before the point where the client crashes and the backend fails to send messages.
    - cloakandswagger 11y ago
      Even if they hadn't, the 10k message limit is well publicized and would have forced them into an insanely expensive pricing model. Slack's pricing model and the ad copy of their website makes it obvious to me that it's a communication tool intended for small teams, not a chat room for thousands of users.
    - briandear 11y ago
      But who runs a chat with 5000+ users? The signal to noise would be insane. If each user posted 1 message per hour, that's 5000 messages per hour. For a group that size it seems like Twitter makes more sense. I can't imagine 5000 people needing real time communication. Kind of the mother of all edge cases for a team chat service.
      - detaro 11y ago
        I don't think they are talking about 5000 users chatting in one chat room, but about 5000+ users having a common place to talk to others in small groups and maybe read announcements in a main channel. My university uses Slack, and the "main" rooms see a few posts a day, but there are tons of small groupchats and DMs.
      - Cthulhu_ 11y ago
        There's plenty of IRC servers (which is probably the closest analogue to Slack) with more than 5000+ users. Sure, most of them have a #general channel, but nobody will see that one as the main channel; most will go to a more topical / relevant channel. That's how IRC works, that's how Slack should work.
      - pcr0 11y ago
        It's usually 50-200 users online at a time, and out of that maybe 20-50 are chatting at least once a minute, so no, not 9000 users actively chatting at once.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    The 10,000 message search limit probably limits this realistically to 5 or 10 person teams. I would think I would want at least a week or even a month's worth of searching (ideally indefinitely, of course).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- abalone 11y ago
  You can definitely fault him for not researching pricing. Even if there were no limit to teams the pricing alone does not work for his organization. Why would you switch everyone over?
proksoup 11y ago
Sorry slightly off topic. But I need to know this. wait wait wait ... managing by consensus is .... bad? Where can I learn more about this to build consensus at my office that this is bad (because consensus is how all decisions are made)?
- saryant 11y ago
  > because consensus is how all decisions are made This is the crux of it. All decisions are not made through consensus and I would wager that's true at most companies.
- fineman 11y ago
  If there is real consensus on what should happen then nobody is managing, things are just happening. But "managing by consensus" is forcing everyone to say they agree (hah!) about what the manager has already decided on. Depending on how much the manager has bought in it may either be 1) veiled authoritarianism or, worse, 2) a cult where they think this is helpful. I can work with you without having been forced to agree.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >because consensus is how all decisions are made Not in any place were there is a hierarchy. In most companies for example, there are CEO, managers, and middle managers, etc. They make a decision and you get to implement it. Ideally they'd like your consent to, but even if you don't consent, you don't get much of a say to what the company will do.
theVirginian 11y ago
But you should always move fast and break things, don't look before you leap. It's the startup mentality and it's the way real scrappy entrepreneurs do things.
- patrickmclaren 11y ago
  That's just knee-jerk mentality, not necessarily associated with startups.
  - theVirginian 11y ago
    I was being a bit sarcastic, its just that sometimes I read these highly critical blog posts about "we made X decision with Y product and it sucks" where really the person who was responsible for the decision could have anticipated the consequences with five minutes of evaluation.

morgante 11y ago

It sounds like they didn't do any research into what Slack's limitations are. Also, frankly, if I were Slack I would not invest in supporting this use case at all. Massive free chat rooms are not a profitable space to be in.

jlees 11y ago
It depends on the community. For this one, it's a bunch of folks learning to code and getting coding jobs; I can imagine many of those ending up working at tech companies who might be great Slack customers, and evangelising because they had such a great experience using it - so the investment of supporting a 'free' chat room could pay off over time.
- pavlov 11y ago
  I don't know if that makes long-term sense. The OP sounds very entitled: "We'd endorsed Slack to thousands of people on our Twitch.tv streams, and even mentioned it in interviews with the media." Of course Slack must provide them with free chat rooms in perpetuity, they've even been mentioned in interviews! It's probably better to be rid of "customers" like this sooner rather than later.
  - briandear 11y ago
    I really don't think Slack cares about one customer mentioning them in interviews. Especially a freeloading customer. Why not simply have each user pay their own $5 per month?
  - fleitz 11y ago
    They are not customers they are users, and it's important to make sure your users are happy, lest you run out of them before you run out of money catering to their every whim. This whole concept of a 'customer' sounds very interesting, I hear they appreciate the services companies provide so much that they are willing to hand over actual money, instead of using the service they got for free to bitch about the service they got for free.
  - 11y ago

gnoway 11y ago

Site does not resolve for me, here is the google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:94NVni1b_A4J:blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:94NVni1...

Bahamut 11y ago

The one thing that has me mostly abandoning Gitter is that switching channels is incredibly slow on the browser. If Gitter had a standalone client, I'd be willing to give it another shot, but until then, I'm a proponent of using IRC & Slack.

ValentineC 11y ago
Gitter does have standalone clients: https://gitter.im/apps https://gitter.im/apps
- Lazare 11y ago
  In my experience they're no better than the web view.
rekoros 11y ago
I (and many others) keep up with Gitter rooms and IRC channels (Freenode, mostly) by bridging them to Slack or Kato with sameroom.io. It's also a good way of merging interesting channels from the 15 Slack teams I am member of into one.
mydigitalself 11y ago
Mike from Gitter here. We've improved the performance of this quite a lot over the last few months and will soon start implementing local caching that will make this pretty much instantaneous.

andmarios 11y ago

I think you should have ran the math before switching to Slack. A max limit of 10,000 messages history for your 8,500 free users, premium cost at $60/user/year. An engineer designs a product for the specifications she/he is given. Slack's engineers were given the specs above and obviously designed and optimized their product for much smaller teams than yours.

metasean 11y ago
They do mention in the write-up that, "We also held our breaths as we waited for Slacks' teased support for large open source communities like ours." and show the FAQ addressing their use case - https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8RAB/image.png https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8...
- detaro 11y ago
  Where did Slack tease support for open source communities with thousands of members? Because seeing that FAQ makes me think "oh, hey, cool, potentially cheaper plans for open source teams", not "move a GIANT group over in anticipation". I agree though, Slack probably could have communicated that a bit better, at least if they contacted Slack beforehand. Even if the answer had been "We actually have no clue what happens if you try to join 10k people.", the problems certainly sound like that's the case.
- andmarios 11y ago
  The screenshot you quote is about open source projects, not communities. If I understand correctly, even a large project like the Linux kernel has only a few hundred active developers at a time and the rest are one-time small-patch contributors. It would be interesting though to know how many students used slack for Harvard's online CS50 and how it worked for them.
- rylee 11y ago
  Why would you jump ship for something that hasn't even arrived yet?

cechmaster 11y ago

Yeah dude, wtf, 5000 users and you think you can get away for free?

eli 11y ago
OK, but if Slack has a user limit there's no reason it should be secret.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I'd guess it's not so much "a secret" rather than a natural limitation or just a "put a big number there that should be enough for everybody" (until it isn't)
  - eli 11y ago
    Maybe it isn't intentionally a secret, but it should be documented. If you take the time to code a hard user limit (with its own API exception code, etc), you can take the time to mention it in the docs.
Nemcue 11y ago
At least intuitively one doesn't think it would cost half a million dollars for a year.

dubcanada 11y ago

Why not just use IRC? Is it not made for the sole purpose of having lots of users talk with each other.

fredoliveira 11y ago
This is the real mystery here. I'm a huge fan of what Slack has done and was a big advocate for it when it was starting up. But it feels off that people with high realtime chat needs don't just use IRC, which has been around for ages, is super stable, and deals with this amount of users easily.
- detaro 11y ago
  Is there any web client you can easily deploy that comes close to Slack in comfort for the users? IRC is cool, but getting thousands of users comfortable with it sounds like quite a challenge.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    A number of people in my company use IRCCloud, which is a web-based client with mobile apps. It also has built in bouncer functionality - it stays logged in even when you don't have the page open.
    - Lazare 11y ago
      Have to second IRCCloud as being a great IRC client. That being said, their pricing is probably no better than Slack's for this purpose ($5/user/month).
      - jonty 11y ago
        IRCCloud staffer here! Glad you like it, this year is going to be a big one for us - we're actively looking at how we can better serve large open communities, and I would suspect that will result in some nice changes to both free accounts and the pricing of paid accounts. If anybody is interested in making IRC suck less, we've got a designer-shaped hole that needs filling... https://www.irccloud.com/jobs https://www.irccloud.com/jobs

coned88 11y ago

Personally we use slack at work and it's a terrible product. Yes it's nice that we can see pictures and gifs inline with the text but the client is not great. The mobile client is even worse. The bloody thing just doesn't work. I'll get a message via the desktop app and 10-15 minutes later get the push notification on my phone. Then I can only see some of the push notification on my phone and when I go to click the notification to read it. The entire channel or DM it came from is not up to date. So if I do have service which I may not have I have to then wait for the messages to download and for it to reconcile what has been read. Any irc or xmpp clients do not have these issues. products like Whatsapp and telegram don't have these issues.

Axsuul 11y ago

Using Slack for communities and groups of people who don't know each other is incredibly clunky. It still feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Slack is made for teams who communicate furiously. Large communities are typically more passive and casual.

derefr 11y ago

It's pretty clear that Slack is not, and never will be, built for this use-case. Slack is for teams: small groups where everyone knows one-another by name, can be trusted with one-another's email-addresses and other contact information, can be trusted to only use @everyone triggers for important things, etc. A lot of Slack's features are built to assume this "small group with a shared purpose where everyone can be trusted to fiddle with things" paradigm. Slack can handle "communities"—effectively groups with a "team"-sized aristocracy and a bunch of rarely-visiting people who mainly interact in a hub-and-spoke fashion with the team. But it's still not built for that. Slack is emphatically not for societies: groups big enough that people only know a small percentage of others, groups that must create "laws" to prevent random strangers abusing your shared infrastructure, etc. In fact, very few pieces of software are designed to cope with use by societies. Maybe Usenet (as a whole), IRC (an entire server, not a single channel), and Reddit (the code-base, run on your own server) are for societies. If I were to come up with a way to host a chat adjacent to a MOOC, though, I'd still probably use Slack; I'd just have one Slack team for each instance of each course. (The one thing I do think Slack is missing, is a way to easily share your "Slack identity" (username, avatar, client display prefs, etc.) between multiple Slack teams you're concurrently logged into. Then you could be in two "classes" and be sure the same person is the same person in both; or Slack could even consolidate their Direct Message threads into a single one shared between both teams.)

_hadrian 11y ago
very well said! I've worked in a team and we used slack, exactly as you explained... we knew each other, it worked great with Hangouts, Bitbucket and Asana integration. But for this use case in the post, it's obviously not such a great choice.
michaelq 11y ago
I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making. I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages. The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first community to hit this limit. Big online courses, for example, routinely draw 100,000s of students, and might make the same mistake we did (Harvard's CS50 class did). Slack may be able to fix its sluggishness for these other communities, and someone might build integrations that routinely export then delete messages so as to stay below the 10,000 message limit and remove the warnings. But it's too late for us. We can't pause our community growth while we wait for Slack to engineer around their undisclosed user limit. So we have no alternative but to switch. The main reason I wrote this post is to provide a cautionary tale to other open-membership organizations who are considering using Slack. Slack doesn't seem to be intended to do this! Please don't do this!

neumino 11y ago

I kind of think that Gitter is a joke and I'm not convinced they can do better than Slack. I mean their Android app has the balls to ask you to write your GitHub credentials. Maybe Asana/plain IRC is a better solution.

ExpiredLink 11y ago

WTF is Slack???

greenyoda 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_%28software%29
roghummal 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspiracy_and_.22Slack.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...

serve_yay 11y ago

It does seem to be a bad fit. That's too bad for them, I really enjoy using Slack.

hrayr 11y ago

You can't really use a product outside of it's use case, then complain about it when you reach "outside" it's walls.. I mean you can complain all you want about it, but don't blame it on the product itself. The manual invitation form is clearly designed to discourage mass open ended invitations. A product designed for teams with 500-1000 users in mind, is probably going to get bogged down by 10,000+ users.

seanp2k2 11y ago

Why not use IRC or some form of XMPP? Heck, just make a channel on Freenode and call it a day. Want integrations? Everything works with IRC already (maybe not all the one-click integrations).

hokkos 11y ago

BabelJS support chat that used gitter moved to slack, Reactiflux a React community uses slack. If think there is a real opportunity for slack to do like reddit with their subs for opensource software, they could monetize it with jobs offers. But for now if slack is more slick and fast than gitter we loose google searching, history.

philippnagel 11y ago

Does Slack really use LAMP?

olso 11y ago
Why are you surprised? LAMP stack, only at this scale is not a bottleneck. Who knows, maybe they are not even using HHVM, yet. I would be blaming actual code, not the stack for the current trouble. P.S. LAMP != shitty developers automatically
- philippnagel 11y ago
  I was merely asking a question, not referring to the obvious downsides of LAMP. However Slack seems to be really unstable for being an enterprise product. Communication is a backbone of any business and should therefor be rock-solid. 5000 user maximum? Seriously?
  - spdionis 11y ago
    Given their pricing model i don't think they expected anyone to try to have 5000 users...

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

Every chat system since IRC has been worse than IRC. Without fail. Just use IRC, people, stop chasing shiny things.

slyall 11y ago
I'm afraid not. eg for me the 3 killer features on hipchat have been (a) Ability to scroll back and see what happened when I was offline (b) Ability to post pictures/files (c) search. Now all 3 of these could be implemented on a ICR server client. But they are not simple, not supported with all clients and not something that your marketing guy can easily use. With hipchat/slack/etc they are all out of the box on minute-one and easy to use.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  Any technical person in the organization could set those things up and have everyone, even the marketing guy, using it on IRC without any trouble in the course of maybe an hour.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  (a) Use screen or tmux. Log. (b) Post links. Everyone in IRC has been doing this for 30 years. Works fine. (c) Have your client log, or have a bot log to something with HTTP access. You can then use grep or a fancy web app or anything in between to search. I'm with the parent. Scalable chat is a solved problem; it was solved in the open, via open source and open networks, over 20 years ago. Everything since has been focused not on the technical problems of chat but on the business problem of making money from chat. The fact that someone out there wants to make money on chat does not mean you need to give them money to solve your chat problems. Paying for things of value is fine, but in this case you simply don't need to. Sometimes the best things really are free.
  - archinal 11y ago
    Semantically, an issue with posting links instead of files is that your users then need to go ahead and upload the file somewhere manually. HipChat takes care of this by adding the file to an S3 bucket when you drag it into the client. Way less hassle, especially for non-technical users.

dmourati 11y ago

Two things. 1. The decision making process here was unsound. You need to follow the one, some, all approach of rolling out changes. Jumping in on multiple thousands of users was irresponsible. 2. Slack should provide some guidance earlier in the process about user limits. They are known for their friendly UI/UX. An email to the admin saying: "Hey, we've noticed you reached 50% of our maximum users for your instance, are you sure you are on the right path?" would have gone a long way.

omni 11y ago
> 1. The decision making process here was unsound. You need to follow the one, some, all approach of rolling out changes. Jumping in on multiple thousands of users was irresponsible. To be fair, it does seem here like the failure mode wouldn't have been reached until they moved all of their users over.

ksk 11y ago

OK sure, I get that Slack wants to make money and doesn't want too many 'free' users. The restrictions themselves are acceptable to me. However, their platform seems super brittle and janky if it can't handle the users in the first place. Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now? Sending out emails without fucking up needs "engineering"? Um. OK. Personally, I would be embarrassed if I put my name on a product that couldn't handle such an extremely light load for a platform that basically transmits text.

fleitz 11y ago
Have you ever thought that they put those limits in there precisely so that situations totally inappropriate for slack don't occur? I love how programmers are always "embarrassed" about the limitations of billion dollar companies, have you ever though that these limitations might be vital to their success?
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  It's difficult to argue that the limit is essential to their success if only a single user has ever hit it, and that only recently. Of course, we don't know that's the case. There's nothing wrong with limits. Every piece of software has them, and even learning what they are is a major step. Known or explicit limits should be documented, however. It seems that in this case they were not. That's an error on Slack's part.
- ksk 11y ago
  >I love how programmers are always "embarrassed" about the limitations of billion dollar companies, In my mind I picture a station wagon outracing a Ferrari. That would be cause for embarrassment. Your quotes seem to serve no purpose as far as I can tell. >have you ever though that these limitations might be vital to their success? You have much lower expectations than me. I don't see Slack doing something that is in any shape or form particularly challenging from an engineering standpoint.
coldtea 11y ago
>Seriously? 5000 users, 10,000 messages is a "Use Case" now? Slack has millions of users and billions of messages -- working alright. 5000 users were seeing slowdonws for a SINGLE team -- not across Slack. And 10.000 is a limit put by Slack intentionally in place as a freemium boundary. All systems have breaking points, especially if they weren't designed for some specific use. You might as well ask "Twitter can't handle more than 140 characters now, seriously?". >Personally, I would be embarrassed if I put my name on a product that couldn't handle such an extremely light load for a platform that basically transmits text. Your answer doesn't show any understanding of network services at all, including as some guy already pointed out, the "basically transmits text" part, as if that is something trivial at scale...

sergiotapia 11y ago

What did you expect? You can't expect to hit such a ridiculously large number and not pay anything.

briandear 11y ago
Au contraire.. People expect it all the time. They have a hard time getting that these "free" services are built by people that need to get paid and eat. Adding 8000+ users for an implied PR benefit is silly. What's the ROI? Not going to be very high, almost guaranteed. Because these free users might evangelize other free users because the service is "free."
detaro 11y ago
You can have thousands of users working together on other platforms for free (e.g. Github) and Slack clearly advertises "$0 - no limits on time or users". It still would be a very good idea to contact them before and ask "We're considering moving a few thousand users to your free plan. You sure you mean what you write there?", but they are sort-of saying that it is ok to do. (EDIT: especially since they say that the intend for that offer is for small teams)
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  So I go to an all you can eat buffet, and stuff my face until I literally burst. "Hey it was written there clear as day!"
  - detaro 11y ago
    Yes, that is the idea behind an all-you-can-eat buffet. And I don't complain about restaurants that don't offer them anymore or are not putting out unlimited amounts of expensive food (just like I can totally understand Slack not spending much effort to support these guys), but in the same way a restaurant offering them made the choice to do so and has to live with people stuffing their face. To stay with the restaurant examples, for me OPs situation is more like they turned with a large wedding party to a pub and are now surprised not everybody gets a place at the bar and people have to wait for their beers.

cactusface 11y ago

This was actually a really entertaining telling of a boring old story about capitalist competition. Act I: We tried A, then we outgrew it. Someone said B was better. Act II: We tried B, then we outgrew it. Act III: By this time A had caught up to our needs, so we went back to A. End Credits

jonathanmarcus 11y ago

What a hyperbolic post. There is no reason to put a company on blast like this. There is a real team of people likely working exceptionally hard to operate Slack. You could have just written a post extolling the benefits of Gitter, and gone about your day of adding more campers to your project. I'm guessing Slack didn't beg for your business or community endorsements.

raverbashing 11y ago
I agree The title should have been "We pushed Slack for a use case it was never designed for and it broke" Yes, sorry, sometimes limits are hit Maybe a better solution to them would have been to use IRC
smm2000 11y ago
Slack is a 2.8B dollar company and not a small scrappy startup anymore. They can handle all the hate in the world and should not get a pass for sleazy behavior (the same is true for Microsoft, Google or Exxon). Not putting max number of users on website or in documentation is not fair to customers.
- vsl 11y ago
  Did you consider the possibility that it's a technical limit that they didn't even anticipate ever hitting in real life, because Slack is for small teams? Let's be fair here: the 10k visible messages limit means that Slack is basically unusable when you hit the user limit, as this post also says (messages archived within minutes of appearing). The pricing is clearly insane with this amount of users too.

modarts 11y ago

Drama Queen post of the year, good lord. Why don't you try figuring out what parameters the software you're using is designed to operate in before throwing such a public shit fit?

tosbourn 11y ago

I am guessing there will be a post slamming blogger soon since that is the only page that is currently working.

greenyoda 11y ago

"The only way to make this go away is to pay slack's cheapest plan, which is $5 per user, per month. That's $5 x 12 months x 8,462 campers = $507,720 per year, just for our current campers. Until then, Slack aggressively archived messages, sometimes only minutes after they were sent." Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free? How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this? Usually, "freemium" services are offered so that users can try out the service without having to pay for it, but if you expect unlimited support for 8462 users, it makes sense to have to pay.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Doesn't any IRC server ever do this? I mean 8500 users... isn't actually that much. Even if the free IRC servers don't support this amount of users, you could just set up a reasonably cheap server (for way less than half a million (!) a year) to do exactly the same thing. And that's just the thing. Most people will see Slack as IRC chat, but a bit better. And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month. Doubly so if your chat channel is open for everyone and you don't know who your users are.
- morgante 11y ago
  > And nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month. Considering they have tens of millions in ARR, the market has proven you wrong.
- Lazare 11y ago
  Slack is a lot better than IRC when used as intended. Also, my favourite IRC client (IRCCloud) is, in fact, $5/user/month, and I know I'm not even close to their only paying customer. I recognise you're engaging in hyperbole when you say "nobody will consider IRC chat worth $5 / user / month", but when you're saying stuff which is so blatantly wrong (and trivially disproven), it undermines your entire argument.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    $5/mo for an IRC client? That's just silly. Geek cultured called -- they want their technology back. Apparently startup culture has corrupted our industry to a degree that people think $5/mo for a hosted IRC client is a fair exchange of value.

mbesto 11y ago

Here's the problem I have with this: 1. You have an organization (can't tell if for profit or non-for-profit) that explicitly states that it helps people "become a Software Engineer". 2. Yet, one of the organizers of the company (?) states "we blithely shepherded 300 to 500 new campers into our Slack every day, hopeful that this messaging company, now worth $2.8 billion, would hire more engineers to flog their LAMP stack application into shape." Thanks for this...you're now creating a culture of developers who "blithely" makes architectural decisions with little proper thought and publicly trash technology choices (in this case, LAMP). EDIT: Upon further review it looks like the person in question has a bit of an agenda... http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-MEAN-javascript-stack-vs-LAMP-stack/answer/Quincy-Larson?share=1 http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-MEAN-java... http://www.quora.com/Having-built-web-stuff-the-old-way-PHP-MySQL-back-in-the-day-and-wanting-to-build-a-new-account-based-web-site-app-that-can-handle-scaling-Whats-the-best-tech-approach-these-days/answer/Quincy-Larson?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Having-built-web-stuff-the-old-way-PHP-... I appreciate that people are stepping up to the plate and getting more people involved in coding, but this is seriously dogmatic and potentially harmful.

plorkyeran 11y ago
They even explicitly list the fact that Gitter uses Node.js as one of the advantage of them. I really hope they aren't teaching their students to pick third-party SaaS offerings based on whether or not they like the same tech as you do.
- Lazare 11y ago
  I saw that too, and I had to laugh. I like node.js, I use node.js, I've shipped large projects with node.js as part of the stack, and I'll very likely select node.js for elements of future projects. But... ...someone has been drinking way way waaaay too much of the koolaid. All it was missing was the phrase "web scale". Edit: Heh. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-Slack/answer/Quincy-Larson http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-Slack/ans...
  - 11y ago

logicallee 11y ago

This title is extremely misleading and should read "We Switched Our 8,000 Campers to Free Slack and Regretted It". Even in a tiny organization (like <50 people) that starts using Slack, the plan would be to switch to eventually paying for it or look very hard at the limitations. Who builds a freemium service tier into their stack without looking at the limits! It's not like slack is ad-supported, free is not its basic model.

skybrian 11y ago

I love reading stories like this. While it could have been worded better, it's important to share information about migration failures, so that other people can learn from them. When done right, it's called a postmortem. We need more of them. I also think it's proper to point out that bandwagon effects played a role. Marketing shouldn't be used an excuse to skip due diligence, but in practice, it's often a factor in bad decisions.

shalmanese 11y ago

Their first clue that maybe this was an issue is they had to hack an undocumented API to even get people onto the system. Slack is going to need to do something about this because they're increasingly being used for communities of strangers around a common interest. Despite Slack doing everything they can to discourage this use case, there's a clear need there which Slack is filling. I'm currently part of 3 separate slack groups where this is the case. Either a "Slack for communities" forms to absorb that niche or Slack needs to start thinking of a service offering for these communities because they aren't going to go away and they're going to complain as vocally as free code camp when they don't get their way.

kolev 11y ago

I've always wondered why Slack gets so much love from engineers! It's noisy, it's expensive, and did I mention "noisy". It started as a copycat and didn't do much beyond that. The only thing I'm thankful to Slack about is that it's pushing HipChat to innovate. Finally we got multi-account support in there! Yes, I openly do like HipChat better - it's free, it's less noisy, it's coming from Atlassian, it integrates nicely into the Atlassian ecosystem, but there are alternatives like the open-source Rocket Chat [0] and Let's Chat [1], but Gitter is [2] is the best of those (like most of us) who use GitHub most of the day. Not sure why it doesn't get the love it deserves (but Gitter is expensive as well)! [0] https://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ https://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ [1] http://rocket.chat/ http://rocket.chat/ [2] https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/

Lazare 11y ago
Having used HipChat and Slack, I prefer Slack as a much better designed product. It's more stable, less buggy, and has more features. > did I mention "noisy" You did, but I have no idea what you mean. > it's coming from Atlassian One more reason to prefer Slack. I've had a lot of experience with Atlassian tools, and it's almost all been negative. Everything about Atlassian is slow: Their products, their support, and the pace of development. Submitting a bug report to Atlassian is an exercise in futility; if it's critical and affects hundreds of people, you MIGHT get reply within 2 years; you certainly won't get a fix that quickly. One bug I hit was opened in 2007, got an official response saying "maybe we could look into trying to fix that" in 2009, was officially added to their backlog to fix in 2010, and was announced as officially fixed in 2011. Spoiler: It wasn't fixed, and for all I know, it's still broken. The worst thing to happen to Hipchat was being purchased by Atlassian; it's when they stopped innovating and started stagnating.
- kolev 11y ago
  People use JIRA and Confluence, because they are fully-featured, and complicated. It's easier to created a dumbed-down faster tool. Plus, they've been around for years. I'm sure one day they will rewrite them from scratch, but HipChat is not slow at all.

cddotdotslash 11y ago

Wow, this should be a textbook example of how not to make a decision. Zero forethought of future needs? Check. Picking a solution not designed for the problem? Check. Complaining that something that wasn't designed to do x isn't doing x? Check.

chris_wot 11y ago

Is the author paying for this service? If so - oh boy. Slack should have been more closely monitoring clients this big to ensure they don't reach self-imposed limits. That's just, heh, slack.

michaelq 11y ago

Look what I found: Slack's free tier pricing page explicitly states "There's no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp/status/612758062214950912 https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp/status/612758062214950912

pavedwalden 11y ago
With many freemium services capping free accounts at single-digit numbers of users, "no limit" is a reasonable way to let people know that they can stop looking for the catch. It would be more confusing if they said "up to 5,000" users, which sends the wrong message about who their service is targeting. Everyone understands that "unlimited breadsticks" implicitly means "lots and lots but not infinitely many"
- crgt 11y ago
  Do you work for AT&T? Unlimited means unlimited. If there are limits, they need to be disclosed in advance. Especially if you are explicitly claiming that there are no limits..
- pbreit 11y ago
  That's a crock. Please show me one other service that explicitly states "no limit" that actually has a hidden limit. The 10,000 message search limit makes it mostly unusable for groups in the 100s or even 10s so why even enforce the user limit?
  - nullrouted 11y ago
    Every shared web hosting company out there. Just giving you an example. They have been doing this for 10+ years.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      Can you point to one and explain the discrepancy?

neilellis 11y ago

I'm very disappointed with the level of comments here - the emotional attachment to Slack is just not neccessary; same for the ad hominem comments. For sure they have a great tool that I love and use but they have been slow to act upon the fact that many communities are using their free option with huge numbers. Rightly or wrongly. Slack just simply need to decide whether they are supporting this model or are happy to hand it over to Gitter to deal with. I suspect Gitter will be more than happy. Personally I think they could offer a fixed fee for public rooms. But hey that's up to them, it's their business model to decide. I think the problem is just the lack of clarity about how they are going to manage what they definitely know is going on (I have asked).

wslh 11y ago
I think now it is time for Slack to make a "paradigm shift". It seems Slack, like GitHub, is filling a place that was reserved to free open source offerings in the past (e-mail, IRC, newsgroups, etc) so they need to expand their freemium features.

partiallypro 11y ago

We have adopted Slack recently with a small 12 person (and everyone knows everyone) team and it works great. It really brings down distraction of people coming over to ask questions, they can just ask the question of a group and get it resolved by someone. We have Lync as a company wide (1000s) community messenger but for small teams this works great for collaboration of small groups. I am actually shocked that Microsoft doesn't have a solution like Slack built into Lync (Skype for Business now.) I mean it's possible they could buy Slack...but anyhow Slack is made for smaller teams. If you want a community use IRC (non-corporate), Skype or Google (corporate), etc.

shavenwarthog2 11y ago
Seconded. I've used Slack at two companies, both with a small, single-purpose team (< 10 people). In each case I and the other users were quite happy with the features available, and the overall design of the app. It isn't for everyone, but I whole-heartedly advocate teams examine Slack for their communication needs.

mcguire 11y ago

"No way were we going to spread our community across a bunch of disparate Slack instances. The entire point of a chat room app is convenient real time conversation." 5000 users, plus 300-500 new users per day. In a chat. Convenient real time communication, that is not.

nodesocket 11y ago

A perfect illustration of the "entitled developer complex". Failure to properly research Slack, a bad use-case, complain about pricing, then publicly bash. I've seen this repeatedly with my own startup (https://commando.io https://commando.io), and honestly this user profile is the worst. They won't pay, or will pay very little, and expect the most. They complain about the underlying codebase and stack (PHP), and fail to solve actual problems. They get stuck on details that don't matter.

brobinson 11y ago
Are you talking mostly about users of your free tier? Have you considered getting rid of it in lieu of a free trial on the paid plans?
hox 11y ago
I'd argue that "unlimited users" not really being unlimited is a pretty big detail that matters.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

After reading this I have but one request; please stop teaching people to code. Your solution to a problem you have with some software is to suggest they simple throw engineers at it is sadly pathetic.

lsc 11y ago

I find it super weird that new chat and messaging applications keep finding popularity. It seems like most of the features could be had by using a sufficiently featurefull IRC and email client. hmm. That could be an interesting project. Implement a social network using nntp, using public-key cryptography (with tight integration in the client) for access control. But seriously, I can see how some features of social networks would be hard to implement with nntp and clients... but I'm kind of missing out on why most of the newer chat networks are better than IRC.

dev1n 11y ago

Been using Circuit [1] for a while and have to say I've been impressed, if the people over at Free Code Camp are reading this. The document sharing and solidly built iOS app sold me on it. Switching teams on the iOS app for Circuit vs Slack was far faster too which I always found frustrating on the Slack app. Document searching was really well built on Circuit too. [1] https://www.yourcircuit.com/ https://www.yourcircuit.com/

vacri 11y ago

Slack's "sticker shock" is pretty big. I'm not sure if it's autodetecting and giving me Australian dollars in it's pricing, but in the first paid band it's showing me $6.67/user/mo for annual (who knows how many users a small team will have in a year?) or $8/user/mo for month-to-month (the usual pricing). $8/user/month for chat. And it's double that to get business-level SLAs. With 25 users in the account, including external teams and contractors, that would mean we're paying $200/month ($400 for business SLAs). Per month. For chat. Crazy. And slackbot keeps on claiming any "thank you" that someone says, even if specified @someone, the greedy little bugger.

utuxia 11y ago

This is what IRC if for numb nuts.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

libraryatnight 11y ago

I really like Slack. Where I work each team has its own Slack chat with various channels. I work in IT, our more general team is about 30 people and my more focused team is 7 people. We have specific channels for each focus group, and then a general channel for the entire team. Since we've used Slack I feel more up to date and more in the know because I can keep up with what everyone is talking about. I have keywords that give me an alert when someone mentions my name or specific things in which I specialize. I've been able to quickly offer help to those who might not have immediately thought to bring their issue directly to me as a result, and have had the same happen in regard to problems I bring up in channel. It reminds me very much of hanging out on IRC when I was a teenager, but an IRC built for business. Sharing files, code, screencaptures, etc is easy and intuitive. The integrations are useful: GitHub, Zoom video conferencing, Dropbox - having these items easily available only make Slack blend more seamlessly into my day. I like Slack, and reading this blog post I couldn't help but feel this was more a mismatch for the author's use-case than a problem with the application.

a-dub 11y ago

I really wonder what the din of an 8500 person chatroom would be like...