
We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015) - hackerkid
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.jr3zva5v8
======
dahart
The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much
sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was
surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and
knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending.
Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the
advertising and economics only make sense for internal teams. He is trying so
hard to make his own mistake sound like Slack's fault.

Also, previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626)

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

~~~
dahart
You appear to have not read the article. The very first complaint is about the
10k message limit warnings. The author then complains "Slack would
aggressively archive messages, sometimes only minutes after they were sent."
He's lucky the messages even went through. He asked Slack for guarantees,
after the fact, on the free plan with no intention of paying Slack's rates.
Even the user limit problem is silly. It's called a team and marketed for
internal use, not as something you 're-sell' or offer customers. It's obvious
that putting your users on a single Slack team is not going to scale to tens
of thousands of people, as soon as you start using Slack. My point here is
that the author did not do his homework before he moved his thousands of users
to Slack, and your point falls squarely under this lack of effort.

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

~~~
dahart
My point, which you have missed, is that the author should have uncovered this
cap _before_ moving his community. It was clearly on sketchy ground before he
did it. You can't say anything about what paying would have done, because he
had no intention to pay. And if he had paid the 0.5 million, I'd be willing to
bet that Slack would attend to his needs. But none of that happened, so it's a
straw man.

~~~
Nomentatus
Please share your method of uncovering, in advance, undocumented limits
inherent in software; it's desperately needed.

The guy left a free trial for another free trial; if he's at fault we're all
at fault every time we change our go-to software. The lesson might be that
"there be dragons" \- you should guess that any "better" program or SaaS out
there is less that half of what it says once unknown limits have been
discovered.

~~~
dahart
It's called "due diligence", and people do it all the time.

He didn't change his own personal go-to software, we're not talking about a
trial of a video game here. He changed the software for thousands of his
users. He put thousands of people on a free trial for something that was not
obviously going to work.

You do have the option to investigate before you make that kind of move. If
you choose not to exercise it, you don't have that much ground to stand on
when things don't work out.

~~~
zedadex
The due diligence in this case would have been researching the user limits
which (as others have pointed out) were not published or advertised anywhere.

~~~
dahart
There's a reason it's called "diligence", because it typically involves
_trying_. Personally, I don't count reading a company's ad copy on their own
web page as being even remotely diligent or doing much research. Normally 'due
diligence' involves talking to the party you intend to engage with, as well as
talking to others who have experience with that party. The author didn't
mention any of that.

Other users here also pointed out that there is a known specific API error
message for the user limit. That kind of thing could be uncovered with a
little diligence. Author could also have setup a fake team and tried to add
many users before putting 8k real users on the team and just hoping.

He did finally start talking directly to Slack only after he started having
trouble, and they responded and disclosed the existence of a team size limit.
This obviously could have happened before hitting the limit.

The author expressed incredulity at what would be a $500k price tag, and yet
completely fails to see why that is a massive glaring red flag. That alone
should have been enough signal that his plan was skating on thin ice, but
instead he drove right past all the warning signs and then blamed Slack for
it.

~~~
Nomentatus
Trying a huge number of users? How without migrating?

He could have asked innumerable questions all of which contradicted the
description of what he was getting. He couldn't have known which was the right
question. I very rarely query in person before a purchase; I did recently and
was given a flatly wrong answer on one question, and then a very positive
answer that wasn't logically coherent (strongly suggesting a no, in truth) on
a second question. I'm buying anyway, but unless you can phone a corporate
head, querying customer support for arcane technical information is rarely a
great way to get the right answer, in my experience (sorry to say.) UNLESS you
already have a proven fail, of course - which he did.

If it were my program there'd be an error message in there no matter what the
upper limit was; I assume others are as competent.

I also don't follow your logic re the high price tag somehow logically
entailing a _secret_ limit on the free product - unless you're implying that
it's a trap, a way of phishing for phools. (In my country, an illegal bait and
switch, actually.) That's something that doesn't work too well when you're
peddling to corporations, the pool is small and word gets around too fast.

~~~
dahart
> I very rarely query in person before a purchase

Yeah me too, for things I buy for myself. But it's absolutely the norm for
software purchases of $500k. That's what _everyone_ does, it's extremely
common practice for any org purchase of software for over 100 people.

If the author were actually looking to spend $500k, he definitely would have
called first and done a bunch of research. Nobody spends that much without
talking to someone. The only reason he didn't have that dialogue is because he
thought he'd get the whole thing -- apparently a $500k value -- for free.

That's what I mean about the price tag being a signal. It should have signaled
a phone call, at the very least.

------
mi100hael
There's a perfect alternative:

* Free

* Handles thousands of users seamlessly

* Archived via bot same as free Slack

* No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes

* Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from

* Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities

It's called IRC.

Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these
days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell
and back!

A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other
feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal
setup and how they translate from Slack:

* Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search.

* Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels.

* Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar.

* File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.

~~~
pavel_lishin
There are drawbacks, though:

* no built-in file uploads

* a bot is _required_ for archiving

* a bot is _required_ for notifications

* no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies

* the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking.

It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either
rolling your own solution, or using a lot of other software to accommodate
everything and everyone.

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

* channel services can provide archiving and notifications.

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

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

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

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

Nope. They're extremely useful. Just offhand I can think of tons of times
we've (a) pasted metric graphs, (b) pasted annotated screengrabs, (c) pasted
snippets of code, (d) pasted snippets of test output. None of this is easy in
IRC.

~~~
mi100hael
But once they're pasted in there, they can only be used there. It's barely
harder to upload a file to any myriad of file sharing/hosting services and
paste a link which most graphical IRC clients can be configured to auto-expand
(and users who don't care/don't want a bunch of images can choose to handle
links differently)

~~~
zellyn
I want the text snippets to be shown inline. I'm fine with Slack owning the
image assets, because I don't have to worry about permissions the way I would
if I uploaded them somewhere else (unless it was to some other internal tool).

I've been on IRC since 1993, and I'm an accomplished programmer. I still find
setting up and configuring ZNC and an IRC client complicated, error-error
prone, and confusing. And it doesn't always work - sometimes it quits working
for no reason and I have to restart things.

~~~
zellyn
In particular, there are many settings that mention security, encryption, and
certificates. It's unclear what combinations are sensible, supported, or
necessary.

------
saas_sam
Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which
is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free
users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I
would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see
if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as
worthwhile given it would get 5000+ coders using Slack regularly, many of whom
would then promote in other companies.

~~~
Svip
If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and
not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been
able to accommodate all their users.

Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?

~~~
onion2k
There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in
an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good
account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't
great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media
embedding depends on the channel setup.

There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses
doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer
enough value _even if it 's free_.

~~~
SeeDave
> They're not pretty

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

> There's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else.

I believe that NickServ takes care of this.

As far as logging, and file-sharing. Yeah you're onto something. IRC isn't as
bad as people make it out to be :/

~~~
onion2k
_Check out Kiwiirc, it 's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could
build a nice interface._

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

 _I believe that NickServ takes care of this._

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

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

------
dusing
8,462 users on a free plan with no intention of upgrading to paid.

~~~
simonlc
He never said he had no intention, I just think he didn't want to pay half a
million dollars for slack.

~~~
gizmo
He wouldn't have paid $50,000 per year either. It's pretty obvious he signed
up with the full intention of staying on the free version forever.

~~~
mulletbum
Paying would not have helped him anyway.

------
Nomentatus
Like the author, I'm always "that guy" who plays a game or uses a program in a
way that seems reasonable, or optimal to me (and often is very efficient) but
is so unusual that the program eventually "falls off the edge of the world"
and starts crashing all over the place because none of the beta-testers ever
did anything quite like what I'm doing with the program.

Like this guy, I usually don't know at first just what is so unusual about my
behavior, and often I never do find out. My favorite game (not yet a decade
old) crashes every several minutes for me, playing the way I like. I just save
extremely frequently and keep right on playing it.

The moral: Where business is concerned: "Be a smart herder" \- don't make any
false moves, or adopt odd implementations or uses of key software products (or
software controlled products) because the minute your behavior is similar to
only 1/1000 users (sometimes 1/100 users), _you are using the equivalent of an
alpha or beta product_ , and you should count on getting zero product support.
Your complaints will, likely, not even be properly comprehended or will be
understood, but labeled "impossible" and abruptly closed (I'm looking at you
Open Office.)

------
nottorp
Speaking of Slack, what's an alternative with a different pricing model?

We have a core team that's always around, and for that Slack pricing is fine,
but we have a significant number of "drive by" users that aren't worth paying
$60 per year.

We're generally happy with Slack's features, so which are the similar services
that charge something different than per-user?

~~~
jjawssd
Mattermost is a complete replacement for Slack. I really don't understand why
people use Slack if they don't use the integrations, which in my opinion are
quite unnecessary in many cases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
DanHulton
I don't think I trip up the agreements anywhere, I've checked over them a few
times and also emailed Slack to ask if it was cool if I made a game on their
platform before I started. I didn't share too many specifics (I said it was
MUD-like and was going to use their buttons), but they told me to go for it,
so I think I'm in the clear there.

Also, while I haven't figured out monetization, I don't think there should be
any real problems with that either. Other people charge for their slack bots
and integrations, so unless they specifically have a problem with a game-style
slackbot charging money, there shouldn't be anything preventing me from
charging for stuff.

You very well may be right about the name, though. I've just registered
"chatandslash.com" as a backup that I can switch to before too much marketing
has gone forward, and I've already emailed Slack again to show them what I've
come up with and for further confirmation that what I'm up to is fine and
dandy before progressing any further.

Oh, and you're totally right about shimming out Slack with my own frontend.
It's in the backlog of stuff to do some day potentially, but I think there's a
lot to be gained in the meantime by explicitly staying with Slack in the
meantime. "An RPG you play in Slack" is a lot more interesting than "An RPG
that looks kinda like chat, I guess".

Thanks for the advice!

------
dbg31415
* Enterprise Grid || [https://slack.com/enterprise](https://slack.com/enterprise)

Worth noting that 1) the author's expectations were wildly unrealistic. 2)
Slack has since come out with better tools to manage large teams.

------
Spooky23
Sounds like a manifestation of the 6 p's: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss
Poor Performance.

------
vorpalhex
I switched over a large group of friends from using a gazillion hangouts to
slack and it's mostly been an improvement. That being said, there's a lot less
of us: around 30.

I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us
as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we
wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly
better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head
is just ridiculous.

We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people
outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some
people not having access at work.

~~~
dpark
Slack isn't intended for "friends". Their business model is clearly aimed at
supporting teams inside businesses. $60 per head is absurd for a tool to chat
with friends but pretty reasonable for a business that gets real value from
the tool.

~~~
vorpalhex
They clearly indicate otherwise. Slack is certainly meant as a productivity
tool, but they make several claims:

\+ For all kinds of "Work"

\+ For teams of all types and sizes

\+ Bringing people together to make them productive

Compare that to the messaging for say Hipchat:

\+ "Team chat built for business"

\+ Enterprise features

\+ Loved by your IT team

(Edit - Formatting)

~~~
dpark
I think you're selectively reading what you want to see. Slack's title line is
"Where Work Happens". Work, teams, and productivity normally are not terms you
use to describe chatting with friends.

------
morinted
This was very similar to the Reactiflux move to Discord:

[https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-
is-moving-to-discord.html) (October 2015)

To be fair, Slack never really said it was made to support that many users.
Even in my team of less than 20 on the free tier, we hit the 10,000 message
limit really quickly. I can't imagine how that must have been with 8 thousand
users.

------
altern8tif
This has been a sore point for many communities (see the Digital Nomads +
React communities).

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

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

~~~
lilbobbytables
It sounds like more of an engineering issue. I'd imagine that unlimited-up-to-
the-capacity-our-system-can-handle is reasonable.

The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you _think_ you might be pushing
a system, you should probably talk to a human first to get confirmation on how
it will work for your specific scenario, and not just use their sales page.

Particularly when that tool is so important to your operations.

~~~
quirkot
>> The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing
a system, you should probably talk to a human first

Two things: a) I wouldn't blink at 10k if my line in the sand was "Unlimited
number of people" (would I similarly ask a human if Amharic glyphs are
supported if the advertisement suggested "chat in all languages"?) b) It may
behoove me to verify claims before jumping in, but it is absolutely 100% the
responsibility of the _organization_ to set expectations in line with what it
can deliver

------
eddd
TL; DR: Slack costs money and that's why we didn't like it.

~~~
spraak
You missed where they said that Slack's actual infrastructure couldn't handle
it

------
yunolisten
Perhaps put the year of posting in the title? Has anything changed since this
has been published?

------
HalfwayToDice
How to view Medium pages on Safari Mavericks without crashing the browser?
It's been happening for weeks.

~~~
throwanem
Try blocking Javascript for medium.com? I'm sure there's a plugin for that,
but use Firefox for general browsing on all platforms where it's a thing, so
can't make a specific recommendation. I do have the same problem in Safari on
iOS 9.3.5, but I suppose that must have tab isolation, since the whole browser
doesn't go down.

~~~
zedadex
Ublock's advanced features are pretty nice + handy for selective script
enabling/disabling. It does it by origin rather than kind of course, but if
you're looking for a quick toggle you might already have one in your toolbar
:)

------
jjawssd
This could have been completely avoided if they had used Mattermost.

~~~
favadi
Do you know if there is any mattermost installation with over 5000 users.

~~~
it33
Mattermost team here. Yes, there are multiple Mattermost deployments over 5000
users within enterprises.

~~~
favadi
Good to know that mattermost works for that large team size!

------
wmccullough
So wait, you abused a free service to the extreme and you're complaining about
the service not meeting your expectations? Grow up.

~~~
jalfresi
It's not abuse if they were well within the terms laid out for the free
service

