For those not in the know, once upon a time a guy named Stewart Butterfield and some friends tried to make a game, called Game Neverending. Somehow they ended up making Flickr instead! Later, he tried again, this time to make a game called Glitch. Again, he failed, and somehow ended up with Slack. That's why Slack's 404 page is like this ("you found a Glitch!"). To further confuse things they sold the name Glitch off to Fog Creek Software who is now using it as the new name for Gomix, which is the new name for HyperDev.

One of these days that guy will actually succeed in making a game. Until then here's hoping his failures continue to be so successful.

I think they were just nice enough to let Fog Creek use the name.

Lo siento mon frere

That which you seek is no longer there

In case you don't know, the team that made Slack first made a computer game called Glitch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)). Slack was borne out of the chat system from Glitch. I believe this 404 page is meant to be reminiscent of that game.

It's the same art. All the graphics, and a bunch of the code, is in the public domain:

http://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/

Screenshot:

https://www.mmobomb.com/file/2012/08/glitch_002.jpg

I was pretty late to the party when it came to getting onto Glitch, but when I did Stewart Butterfield was the person who helped me get around for the first hour or so.

Stewart and Cal Henderson have a history of making a game, and then making a tool out of it later. Flickr came out of a game called Game Neverending, hence the 'gne' extensions on Flickr.

http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Neverending

That's really fascinating. Makes me wonder if they have a) an easter egg already, or b) plans to work on the game any more in the future.

Interesting... Discord had practically the exact same beginning!

I believe Mattermost also had similar beginnings...

Am I the only one who's like -- you've raised $80M (another $250M on the way?), this 404 page exists, and yet your app still uses over a Gig of RAM for my rather pedestrian work uses? What gives?

They've raised like $800M!

Source: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity

omfg, it was worse than I remembered ;)

It's as if they care more about pretty and shiny than quality code.

It's as if the fact they are the prettiest and shiniest chat app is a big reason they got that much venture money in the first place.

Yup. It's a got to be about balance, though. Personally I find their app fast enough, and it never ·rarely) gives me issues.

And we're OK with it...

That's what needs to change.

Not to mention this is a fucking sidescroller that lags during the transition.

It's 2017 and they can't get it to scroll fluidly.

What browser are you using? It's perfectly fluid for me in Safari.

I just tried it in Firefox mobile and it was freezing for me constantly

I'm on the latest version of Chrome and it's choppy.

What OS? I just tried Chrome on macOS and it's still smooth.

Because this 404 page was probably made on a Friday afternoon while fundamental issues inherent with their core framework choices takes longer to fix. Just a guess.

But don't most computers have many gigs of RAM? If it's not really hurting performance, who cares?

This is precisely why most software is terrible. :)

I had a Java II professor who often said in class something along the lines of "between speed and memory, use more memory. Memory is cheap." So it's, somewhat, passed attitude through academia to students.

You must work at Slack...

The point is, I'm using one org, dozen channels, etc -- some are seeing several times this amount of resource usage and with seemingly endless supplies of capital and users complaining, it seems to get less attention than it deserves.

I gave up on the web UI and started using the IRC gateway. Doesn't really miss anything for my usage, but there's always things like wee-slack[1] that offer threads, reactions, etc in an IRC client.

[1]: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

Ah, word, I didn't know this even existed -- I might look into it.

Because when you have several similar programs, which all use a GB of RAM due to poor optimisation, then you run out of RAM.

Now that this is on HN I bet their error log monitoring is going to go berserk. There's probably an Ops guy trying to figure out where all the 404s are coming from :)

I can't help but be reminded of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 (tl;dr, the flying butterflies are dead butterflies)

A bit off but what does HN recommend for a html5 game engine in 2017?

If only their app was as snappy and responsive as their 404 page.

This is amazing. Slack was developed by accident - it was an internal tool for the company. Maybe this 404 should now become their mainline.

Also the story of Yammer.

Glitch was my favorite MMORPG ever - I'm really sad they ran out of money to fund it (though I guess I'm glad they made Slack).

Go to the bottom of the "Settings" activity in Android and keep clicking on the version. :)

This looks like a Green Hill Zone level from Sonic games, but with more flowers and less rings.

Oh. Pigs and chickens. Very clever.

It is?

I actually followed the chicken and pig from one side all the way to the other side.

Does this cause my computer to use way too much CPU and RAM too?

In a fun, social app, what's wrong with a fun 404 page?

I always appreciate easter eggs.

Now everyone's doing it. "Cute" isn't endearing anymore -- it's a tired technology cliche.

    $ curl -Is https://slack.com/404 | grep HTTP/1.1
    HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

It's still there.

Not in the page body

It's really not that bad. I've seen pages return 200 with a http equiv refresh redirect on all places where 4xx errors and 3xx redirects would be appropriate... that screwed with everything that wasn't a real(-ish) browser.

404 doesn't need to say 'File not found' -- it's not a file, but a resource. But yeah, I don't know why it would need to say so in the page?