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Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessag

by 013a 6y ago

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is. * iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives. * WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users. * Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2] * Discord, 100M monthly actives [3] * Slack, 12M daily actives [4] * Teams, which is certainly more popular than Slack, but I shudder to list it because its stability may actually be worse. The old piece of wisdom that "real-time chat is hard" is something I've always taken at face-value as being true, because it is hard, but some of the most stable, highest scale services I've ever interfaced with are chat services. iMessage NEVER goes down. I have to conclude that Slack's unacceptable instability, even relative to more static services like Jira, is less the product of the difficulty of their product domain, and moreso something far deeper and more unfixable. I would not assume that this will improve after they are fully integrated with Salesforce. If your company is on Slack, its time to investigate an alternative, and I'm fearful of the fact that there are very few strong ones in the enterprise world. [1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-world-privately https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-monthly-active-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-... [3] https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-shifts-away-from-gaming/ https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-million-daily-active-users.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-mil... (this was also announced on Slack's blog, but that's down).

jjice 6y ago
I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio and video service that I've used, especially kicking Zoom to the curb.
- 013a 6y ago
  Discord is definitely in the same realm of scale as Slack, and probably bigger (they publish different metrics, so its hard to say for sure). The really impressive thing about Discord's scale is the size of their subscriber pools in the pub-sub model. Discord is slightly different than Slack in the sense that every User on a Server receives every message from every Channel; you don't opt-in to Channels as in Slack, and you can't opt-out (though some channels can be restricted to only certain roles within the Server, this is the minority of Channels). Some of the largest Discord servers have over 1 million ONLINE users actively receiving messages; this is mostly the official servers for major games, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends. In other words, while the MAU/DAU counts may be within the same order of magnitude, Discord's DAUs are more centralized into larger servers, and also tend to be members of more servers than an average Slack DAU. Its a far harder problem. The chat rooms are oftentimes unusable, but most of these users only lurk. Nonetheless, think about that scale for a second; when a user sends a message, it is delivered (very quickly!) to a million people. That's insane. Then combine that with insanely good, low latency audio, and best-in-class stability; Discord is a very impressive product, possibly one of the most impressive, and does not get nearly enough credit for what they've accomplished. For comparison; a "Team" in Microsoft Teams (roughly equivalent to a Discord Server or Slack Workspace) is still limited to 5,000 people.
- gruez 6y ago
  >I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack Keep in mind you're comparing daily active users vs monthly active users. I'd guess most slack users are online weekday for pretty much the entire day (because it's for work and your boss expects you to be online), whereas a good chunk of discord users are only logging in a few hours a week when they're gaming.
  - 013a 6y ago
    At 12:00pm EDT on a workday: Minecraft official server: 190k online users. | Fortnite official server: 180k online users. | Valorant official server: 170k online users. | Jet's Dream World (community): 130k online users. | CallMeCarson server (YouTuber): 100k online users. | Call of Duty official server: 90k online users. | Rust (the game) official discord: 80k online users. | League of Legends official server: 60k online users. | Among Us official server: 50k online users. Their scale is insane. Even with their usage spiking during after-hours gaming in major countries, their baseline usage at every hour of the day, globally, makes it one of the most used web services ever created. Slack's DAU and MAU numbers are probably pretty close to one-another. Discord's MAU/DAU ratio is probably bigger than Slack's. That just means that Discord is, again, solving a harder problem; they have much bigger (and more unpredictable) spikes in usage than Slack. Yet, its a far more stable and pleasant product.
gilbetron 6y ago
It isn't just # of users, though - SlackOps is probably unique to Slack in that list (minus Teams, I guess) - so # of messages per month is a better metric. Not that I'm letting Slack off the hook, it still may be that their codebase and/or dev process is just nasty.
gmmeyer 6y ago
Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.
- johnmaguire2013 6y ago
  IME, Slack is far more likely to lose my message than iMessage. I believe that's part of the point being made above.
  - gmmeyer 6y ago
    I've never had slack lose a message when it's up
    - johnmaguire2013 6y ago
      That's kind of the definition of a service being up. :) I've experienced numerous "soft" outages which result in messages not sending and getting lost - and even more double sends, sometimes very distant from where the message was originally sent. ITT: Anecdotes
screye 6y ago
Just anecdotal, but as someone who has used Teams continuously for 1.5 years, I can say that it has never been down for me. That being said, individual instances of the app are notoriously unstable causing random annoyances. But, I am on a very early build of Teams, which is buggy by definition.
ffpip 6y ago
Telegram is closer to 500 million now. https://t.me/durov/142 https://t.me/durov/142

by 013a 6y ago

jjice 6y ago

I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio and video service that I've used, especially kicking Zoom to the curb.

013a 6y ago
Discord is definitely in the same realm of scale as Slack, and probably bigger (they publish different metrics, so its hard to say for sure). The really impressive thing about Discord's scale is the size of their subscriber pools in the pub-sub model. Discord is slightly different than Slack in the sense that every User on a Server receives every message from every Channel; you don't opt-in to Channels as in Slack, and you can't opt-out (though some channels can be restricted to only certain roles within the Server, this is the minority of Channels). Some of the largest Discord servers have over 1 million ONLINE users actively receiving messages; this is mostly the official servers for major games, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends. In other words, while the MAU/DAU counts may be within the same order of magnitude, Discord's DAUs are more centralized into larger servers, and also tend to be members of more servers than an average Slack DAU. Its a far harder problem. The chat rooms are oftentimes unusable, but most of these users only lurk. Nonetheless, think about that scale for a second; when a user sends a message, it is delivered (very quickly!) to a million people. That's insane. Then combine that with insanely good, low latency audio, and best-in-class stability; Discord is a very impressive product, possibly one of the most impressive, and does not get nearly enough credit for what they've accomplished. For comparison; a "Team" in Microsoft Teams (roughly equivalent to a Discord Server or Slack Workspace) is still limited to 5,000 people.
gruez 6y ago
>I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack Keep in mind you're comparing daily active users vs monthly active users. I'd guess most slack users are online weekday for pretty much the entire day (because it's for work and your boss expects you to be online), whereas a good chunk of discord users are only logging in a few hours a week when they're gaming.
- 013a 6y ago
  At 12:00pm EDT on a workday: Minecraft official server: 190k online users. | Fortnite official server: 180k online users. | Valorant official server: 170k online users. | Jet's Dream World (community): 130k online users. | CallMeCarson server (YouTuber): 100k online users. | Call of Duty official server: 90k online users. | Rust (the game) official discord: 80k online users. | League of Legends official server: 60k online users. | Among Us official server: 50k online users. Their scale is insane. Even with their usage spiking during after-hours gaming in major countries, their baseline usage at every hour of the day, globally, makes it one of the most used web services ever created. Slack's DAU and MAU numbers are probably pretty close to one-another. Discord's MAU/DAU ratio is probably bigger than Slack's. That just means that Discord is, again, solving a harder problem; they have much bigger (and more unpredictable) spikes in usage than Slack. Yet, its a far more stable and pleasant product.

gilbetron 6y ago

It isn't just # of users, though - SlackOps is probably unique to Slack in that list (minus Teams, I guess) - so # of messages per month is a better metric. Not that I'm letting Slack off the hook, it still may be that their codebase and/or dev process is just nasty.

gmmeyer 6y ago

Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.

johnmaguire2013 6y ago
IME, Slack is far more likely to lose my message than iMessage. I believe that's part of the point being made above.
- gmmeyer 6y ago
  I've never had slack lose a message when it's up
  - johnmaguire2013 6y ago
    That's kind of the definition of a service being up. :) I've experienced numerous "soft" outages which result in messages not sending and getting lost - and even more double sends, sometimes very distant from where the message was originally sent. ITT: Anecdotes

screye 6y ago

Just anecdotal, but as someone who has used Teams continuously for 1.5 years, I can say that it has never been down for me. That being said, individual instances of the app are notoriously unstable causing random annoyances. But, I am on a very early build of Teams, which is buggy by definition.

ffpip 6y ago

Telegram is closer to 500 million now. https://t.me/durov/142 https://t.me/durov/142