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Comment by comrade1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

EDIT: I stopped reading after the first paragraph, looks like there was a user limit issue too :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

That's just knee-jerk mentality, not necessarily associated with startups.

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.

Yep. Jumping to a platform about which you know nothing is asking for trouble, no matter the context.

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)?

> 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.

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.

>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.

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