
We Tried Slack and Regretted It - mochtar
http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it.html
======
derefr
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.)

~~~
michaelq
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!

~~~
xpaulbettsx
> So we have no alternative but to switch.

It seems unlikely that all 5000 people are actively using their Slack account
- if you started automatically deactivating accounts that haven't logged in
after 3+ months (a pretty easy Cronjob using the API), you would most likely
stay well south of the limits. You can always Email people with something to
the effect of, "Hey! We've turned off your account, if you visit the site
again, we'll turn it back on, no big deal".

~~~
pcr0
Yeah, but at the current growth rate, they would've easily hit 9000 active
(logged in within 3 months) in less than a month

------
greenyoda
_" 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_
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.

~~~
Lazare
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
$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.

~~~
greenyoda
The market determines prices based on what people are willing to pay.
Apparently the companies who are paying Slack $5/month think it's a good
value, since they've chosen Slack over all the alternatives. They may even buy
it for purely intangible reasons, like their employees enjoy using it and thus
communicate more effectively.

If you think you can offer the same services that Slack does for $1 a month,
maybe you have an opportunity to start a business that successfully competes
with them.

You talk about a "fair exchange of value". Is it fair for Apple to charge you
a 50% markup on an iPhone? Is it fair for Starbucks to charge $4 for a latte?
Do you know of any for-profit business that sets its prices based on an
abstract notion of fairness rather than supply and demand? If your company was
fortunate enough to make a 50% profit next year, would you offer to return
some of it to your customers?

------
mbesto
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-
java...](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/Having-built-web-stuff-the-old-way-
PHP-...](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)

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
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
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/ans...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-
Slack/answer/Quincy-Larson)

~~~
arenaninja
Wow.And here I've been starting to get worried about future employment
prospects if I keep accepting LAMP+jQuery jobs. Reminds me of [this
tweet]([https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352](https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352))

------
andmarios
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
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_cX8...](https://www.evernote.com/l/AHQa0WlJiC9IRZyu8Us7Xm3xOAD31_cX8RAB/image.png)

~~~
detaro
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.

------
nodesocket
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.

~~~
hox
I'd argue that "unlimited users" not really being unlimited is a pretty big
detail that matters.

------
cddotdotslash
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.

------
jonathanmarcus
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.

~~~
smm2000
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
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.

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

~~~
mtrpcic
I agree that IRC would have been a good fit, and with modern IRC clients like
LimeChat and Slate, it's not the "legacy" experience a lot of people remember.
IRC also would solve all of the problems this guy faced:

* Free. You can hop onto an existing tech-focused server like Freenode, or if you want your own control, throw it on your own server(s) for pennies. If you do the latter, you have full control over all logging.

* Logging. Every client can choose what they want to log, what format the logs are in, where the logs live, etc. No more archived messages. Some IRC clients are smart enough to pull from the log to "back-fill" the messages.

* Modern Clients. Like a said above, LimeChat is a really nice IRC client. It doesn't have _all_ the features of Slack, but do you really need _all_ the features of slack?

* Bot Surplus. There are hundreds of bots written for IRC, in nearly every conceivable language. This was the first "integration" anyone ever used for chatting, and can integrate with anything if you put the time in. You don't get it for free, but for a community focused on programming, that's not the worst thing.

~~~
voltagex_
The slow demise of IRC is sad. Clients like WeeChat excel on the text side of
things, but where's the knockout web, desktop and mobile client? Something
with the UI of Gitter would go far.

I always feel like IRC is a few protocol extensions and a few clients away
from being relevant again.

 _/ me goes back to Freenode_

~~~
jsmthrowaway
I'm happy IRC is dying, because it's a giant attack surface. As a hosting
provider sysadmin, dealing with IRC servers was among the absolute worst parts
of my job -- mitigating DDoS attacks against them, extensive hacking attempts
directed at their infrastructure and later, _mine_ , when they couldn't get
in, credit card fraud associated with the accounts, IRC networks designed
specifically for command and control of botnets and trafficking in child
pornography, FBI raids against said networks we hadn't yet discovered...

There are exceptions, like OFTC, but merely waltzing into the wrong place on
EFnet these days is enough to get 10+ Gbit of UDP traffic directed at your IP
address. I used to be fairly okay bouncing on a vhost, but now even the
12-year-olds have enough traffic to knock over a 40 Gbit port channel. An
increasing number of datacenters are just filtering 6667. I'm on board with
that.

Seriously, let IRC relegate itself to the dark corners of the Internet on
shitty hosts and stay there, IMO.

~~~
pki
From my experience I haven't seen anything like this in the last few years.
Botnets are controlled primarily from C&C web services or other SSL/TLS
(+encrypted messages) transport via web.

The brute force ddos attacks I've seen are on illegal private server emulators
and Minecraft et al. Maybe this is just a completely different experience by
being in differnt part of internet.

------
neilellis
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
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.

------
coned88
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.

------
dmourati
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
> 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.

------
michaelq
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
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"

~~~
pbreit
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
Every shared web hosting company out there. Just giving you an example. They
have been doing this for 10+ years.

~~~
pbreit
Can you point to one and explain the discrepancy?

~~~
nullrouted
Sure...

www.hostgator.com - unlimited disk and bandwidth. Never truly unlimited.

They limit the types of content you can host (no media sites), they set inode
limits ([http://support.hostgator.com/articles/pre-sales-
policies/rul...](http://support.hostgator.com/articles/pre-sales-
policies/rules-terms-of-service/inode-limits)), they will suspend you if you
use too much server resources. Pretty much anything to keep you from using
"unlimited" resources.

There are a ton of other examples. I would check out www.webhostingtalk.com if
you want to see all the issues with these type of hosts.

~~~
pbreit
They do explain that other limits make it essentially impossible to actually
utilize "unlimited disk/bandwidth". And they don't mention unlimited on the
home page. But fair enough, you found one.

------
morgante
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
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
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
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?

------
skybrian
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.

------
hrayr
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.

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

~~~
slyall
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.

~~~
fredkbloggs
(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.

~~~
comex
> (a) Use screen or tmux. Log.

This is not something "your marketer guy can easily use". And even for techies
it has issues like lack of notifications (fixable), lack of non-suck mobile
support, and, extremely important for me even if apparently not for some,
typing latency (mosh is a partial solution but not good enough for me).

There are a few applications that use a daemon running a custom protocol to
fix the scrollback issue: Quassel, Smuxi, weechat remotes, others. This is a
decent approach in general, and the one that I use (weechat + Glowing Bear),
but I haven't found any such applications with good mobile support or which
are very high quality in general.

Maybe IRCCloud is the answer - has a spiffy web client and iOS and Android
apps. It's a hosted service and non-free so I am not willing to use it myself,
but most people don't care that much about such things, and it's not like
Slack is any better on that front.

------
cactusface
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

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

~~~
eli
OK, but if Slack has a user limit there's no reason it should be secret.

~~~
raverbashing
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
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.

------
logicallee
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.

------
modarts
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?

------
lsc
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.

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

------
kolev
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
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
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.

------
Axsuul
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.

------
partiallypro
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
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
" _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.

------
dev1n
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/)

------
libraryatnight
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.

------
hokkos
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.

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

~~~
detaro
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
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
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.

------
shalmanese
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.

------
neumino
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.

------
seanp2k2
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).

------
gnoway
Site does not resolve for me, here is the google cache link:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:94NVni1...](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)

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

------
Bahamut
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
Gitter does have standalone clients:
[https://gitter.im/apps](https://gitter.im/apps)

~~~
Lazare
In my experience they're no better than the web view.

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

------
JustSomeNobody
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.

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

------
utuxia
This is what IRC if for numb nuts.

------
comrade1
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.

~~~
evo_9
Hard to really fault him since he ran into an undisclosed max user limit, no?

~~~
cowls
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
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.

~~~
briandear
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
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.

------
vacri
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.

------
philippnagel
Does Slack really use LAMP?

~~~
olso
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
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
Given their pricing model i don't think they expected anyone to try to have
5000 users...

------
ExpiredLink
WTF is Slack???

~~~
greenyoda
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_%28software%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_%28software%29)

------
chris_wot
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.

------
ksk
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
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
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.

