[HN Gopher] Slack Price Increase beginning Sep 2022
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Slack Price Increase beginning Sep 2022
        
       Author : codegeek
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2022-07-18 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (slack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (slack.com)
        
       | bombcar wrote:
       | > We're also simplifying plan limits. Instead of a 10,000-message
       | limit and 5 GB of storage, we are giving full access to the past
       | 90 days of message history and file storage, so you'll never have
       | to guess when your team will hit your limit. The majority of our
       | active free teams will have access to more of their message
       | history with the new 90-day limit compared to the previous limit.
       | No matter how much your free team uses Slack, you'll always have
       | access to 90 days of history.
       | 
       | This seems, if anything, more of a noticeable change.
        
         | btown wrote:
         | Agreed - this is an outrageous change for low-traffic groups.
         | In an instant, tremendous amounts of history and early
         | documentation for small projects will be wiped out. Families
         | will lose their vacation planning that they started 4 months
         | ago. Small open-source projects and ramen-stage startups will
         | lose core operational pins. And for every one of these
         | communities that ponies up for Pro, ten will move to Discord.
         | Tools like https://github.com/thomasloupe/Slackord2 already
         | exist.
         | 
         | If anyone from Slack is reading this - I _desperately want_
         | Slack to be the thing people reach for everything in their
         | professional sphere. I want people to be exposed to it when
         | they 're working on that side project in college, or when
         | putting something together for a family project. Because
         | Slack's search is far better designed for documentation-style
         | posts... but more importantly, the world needs a tool that
         | feels native to colleagues and collaborators from all different
         | generations. If younger collaborators never experience free
         | Slack and their entire view of professionalism is Discord
         | communities, they'll demand Discord. And Discord, with gaming
         | culture still writ throughout its design system, is a big ask
         | for a non-gamer business professional to take in - Slack is
         | quite correctly designed to be the level of approachable it
         | needs to be. So communities will splinter on age boundaries,
         | and opportunities for collaboration will be lost. Some of them
         | might have even made bridges that would have accomplished
         | tremendous social good. All wiped out in the blink of a little
         | rotating gamepad icon.
         | 
         | It's not too late. You could change the update to say "90 days
         | of history, or the most recent 10k messages, whichever is
         | higher." You could even do this silently so you don't need to
         | walk back your posts. Doing so is at least a first step to
         | preserving Slack as a cultural keystone into the far future in
         | an evolving messaging environment. Please make the right
         | choice.
        
           | awill wrote:
           | >>Families will lose their vacation planning that they
           | started 4 months ago.
           | 
           | Excuse my ignorance, but do people really do this? I use
           | Slack for work, and have no desire to use it for personal
           | reasons or with family. Especially when there are free
           | messaging services that have fewer limitations.
        
           | dchuk wrote:
           | Nothing important should be singularly stored in a chat app.
           | If it matters, store it somewhere more permanent.
           | 
           | Chat needs to be ephemeral.
        
             | aaomidi wrote:
             | Why?
        
             | chrismartin wrote:
             | Disagree. The history is not just "chat". It's a valuable
             | stream of questions and answers, problem solving, code
             | snippets, bug reports, and user stories. It serves the
             | purpose that a FLOSS project's mailing list archive did a
             | decade ago.
             | 
             | Did you know that SLACK was originally an acronym?
        
               | mason55 wrote:
               | Except with a mailing list, every conversation is grouped
               | under a subject and all the replies are somewhere in the
               | thread.
               | 
               | On Slack, there's no such thing as a discussion-level
               | subject, and people frequently end up replying outside
               | the thread, or at a minimum there's other context outside
               | the thread that people don't bother linking to because
               | they think of chat as ephemeral, not that they are
               | constantly building up an internal wiki.
        
               | chrismartin wrote:
               | When people bother to make them, channels provide
               | discussion grouping at the subject level. Threads are an
               | even finer-grained grouping that, granted, some people
               | don't use. In my experience, all the problems you mention
               | are also present (in some form) on mailing lists.
        
               | hombre_fatal wrote:
               | Then again, for all of the Slack communities I'm part of,
               | the chat history is valuable because that's where the
               | people prefer to hang out, thus that's where the valuable
               | discussions emerge without anyone even planning it that
               | way.
               | 
               | There are often more durable options like a forum within
               | the community, but that doesn't stop the Slack companion
               | community from having high value discussions.
               | 
               | You often don't know you're having a conversation worth
               | having until it's done. Kind of like when you see really
               | good discussion in Stack Overflow comments that you wish
               | were upgraded into a community wiki question, but that's
               | not how it emerged.
        
             | makeitdouble wrote:
             | Slack is permanent for all matters and purposes.
             | 
             | If you need the distinction, label it "discussion" instead
             | of "chat", and assume that important discussions need to be
             | kept around for reference.
             | 
             | We have tons of one liner tickets with only a title and a
             | link to a Slack thread, and it saves crazy amount of time
             | and effort.
        
               | abduhl wrote:
               | This is a poorly designed process because, as this
               | pricing change underscores, Slack is not permanent unless
               | you pay them in perpetuity. Why would you place so much
               | power over your internal processes in the hands of a
               | third party? It may save a crazy amount of time and
               | effort (it does not) but it will cost a crazy amount of
               | money through lock in subscriptions or eventually being
               | forced out of the ecosystem because your chats are 90
               | days old.
               | 
               | You could accomplish the exact same thing you've done by
               | pasting the Slack discussion into the ticket or a text
               | file with a link. Except you'd now control your future.
               | So you've saved less than five seconds by copy pasting a
               | Slack link instead of highlighting a bunch of Slack
               | messages to copy paste.
        
               | chrismartin wrote:
               | Or you could use a libre and self-hostable chat platform
               | (like Element on Matrix), and get rich discussion that
               | costs little or nothing to keep around permanently.
        
               | groby_b wrote:
               | > Slack is permanent for all matters and purposes.
               | 
               | Surely, you meant to say "Slack used to be permanent...".
               | 
               | It's a valuable lesson that, it seems, each generation of
               | engineers gets to learn anew. If it's not under your
               | control (direct or contractual), you will lose it at some
               | point.
        
           | freediver wrote:
           | We quite successfully use Discord for business purposes. Both
           | for team communications and the user community. Discord is
           | not perfect, but there was something with Slack that made it
           | even less perfect. Hard to explain, I think it has to do with
           | their product thinking.
        
           | api wrote:
           | > In an instant, tremendous amounts of history and early
           | documentation for small projects will be wiped out.
           | 
           | Self-hosted or it's not yours.
        
         | RockRobotRock wrote:
         | They still store the message history, don't they? If you
         | upgrade you will be able to go back further and see those
         | messages.
        
         | ibidyouadrew wrote:
         | ooo that's nice of them. I'll immediately be using free slacks
         | to ingest millions of log messages a day as soon as this lands
         | :) my development logs searchable and organized by channel is
         | gonna be great
        
         | ledauphin wrote:
         | agreed. also, for several small groups I participate in that
         | use Slack for coordination, this is a real downgrade, since we
         | take years to generate 10000 messages.
        
           | lkbm wrote:
           | Yeah, though I think filesizes are the main thing my private
           | groups hit. I haven't measured, but I'm guessing someone
           | uploading a few images or a video causes weeks of messages to
           | drop off the tail end.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | In some way "90 days" is a more humanly understandable
             | limit than 10k messages or 5GB - as long as everyone knows
             | it's an ephemeral channel they can work with it.
        
         | prepend wrote:
         | This is horrible for me and a few small communities I run.
         | We'll have to stop using slack (discord I guess) as we don't
         | have much traffic. We never got near the 10k limit and would
         | use search quite a bit to find old items.
         | 
         | I guess Slack doesn't mind losing these users. Of course we are
         | free communities, but had also bought some seats for other
         | projects.
         | 
         | But this means I won't be able to use them any more.
        
           | lbarrett wrote:
           | It's possible to host a web app letting you view old Slack
           | messages from an export, e.g.
           | https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer or
           | https://github.com/srid/Taut . I wonder if that can help in
           | these use cases.
        
           | chrismartin wrote:
           | I have nothing but praise for Matrix, via element.io or any
           | other client of your choice. It's user-friendly, mature,
           | history is not restricted, and the public matrix.org
           | homeserver works great. You can use Element in your browser
           | or as an Electron app. We've been using Matrix for a couple
           | of years for the project I work on (Exosphere). It's a much
           | better fit for open, public communities than Slack is (or
           | Discord for that matter). Matrix lets you have both public,
           | non-encrypted rooms, and end-to-end-encrypted DMs (and
           | private rooms) where the server doesn't see the content of
           | messages. You can organize a collection of rooms in a "space"
           | for your community.
           | 
           | To ease the migration for your existing Slack users, you can
           | even bridge Matrix channels to Slack channels, so people in
           | either place still see all the messages.
        
           | vorpalhex wrote:
           | Discord is great for voice and gaming but not a good tool for
           | anything vaguely professional. Maybe Element/Matrix?
        
           | MrsPeaches wrote:
           | Can recommend Rocket Chat if your looking for an open source
           | alternative to Slack.
           | 
           | https://rocket.chat/
        
       | codegeek wrote:
       | TL:DR: On the Pro Plan, they are increasing the Price beginning
       | Sep 1, 2022. Got this email below:
       | 
       | "Switch to a yearly plan to keep our current rate for a year Your
       | team's current rate for the monthly Slack Pro plan is $8
       | USD/user/month.
       | 
       | Our current rate for the yearly Slack Pro plan is $6.67
       | USD/user/month, and we are offering monthly subscribers the
       | opportunity to lock in that rate for 12 months by committing to a
       | yearly Pro plan. To take advantage of this offer, switch to the
       | yearly Pro plan before September 1.
       | 
       | If you take no action, your monthly Pro price will adjust to
       | $8.75 USD/user/month and will be reflected in your account on
       | September 9th, 2022."
        
       | andy_ppp wrote:
       | I still think Slack are missing a huge revenue stream from open
       | source/personal orgs. I would happily pay Slack $8.75 per month
       | to get all the Enterprise features on all the random non-work
       | slacks I'm a member of. I'm not willing to pay individually for
       | each open source project or coworking space but I think there
       | would be a lot of users who want this if you got even say 6 open
       | source non-work orgs for that...
        
       | tuetuopay wrote:
       | Okay not as bad as I expected.
       | 
       | With all that money, maybe they'll finally be able to create an
       | app where ctrl+k does not have between one and ten seconds of
       | delay before showing the menu? Surely that's possible.
        
         | julianlam wrote:
         | Every once in awhile Slack dedicates a bunch of developer time
         | to fix UI lag. Loading the emoji autocompletion used to be very
         | fast, and slowed down over time (we only have about 50 custom
         | emoji.)
         | 
         | At some point they refactored some things, made stuff faster,
         | and wrote a nice blog post about it, and the emoji autocomplete
         | was lightning fast again.
         | 
         | Then of course, it slowed down incrementally over the next
         | couple months until it is now unbearably slow again.
        
       | stefan_ wrote:
       | Is this really the time to be increasing prices when they are in
       | an (anti-competitive) fight with Teams that is practically being
       | given away?
        
         | silisili wrote:
         | I really don't understand this mindset. Devs are paid
         | handsomely, most in the low 6 figures, good benefits, etc etc.
         | 
         | So why switch to an inferior product just to save a few
         | comparative pennies? I'd gladly ask my company to just remove
         | the cost from my salary to not have to use teams.
        
           | volongoto wrote:
           | Probably it's easier to argue this on a small company, where
           | the developers have a bigger impact. But I think in most
           | companies, nobody asks the developers about these things. If
           | the company is already invested in Office, then it's a no
           | brainer to use Teams. It's free and supposedly does
           | everything Slack does. It's well integrated with
           | Outlook/Calendar, etc. When you already have a free solution
           | it's very difficult to ask for a paid service with similar
           | functionality. I don't like using Teams, but that's not a
           | hill I'm willing to die on.
           | 
           | To be honest, the only complain I have about Teams is how
           | resource hungry and unresponsive the application is. But I
           | think it does (or should I say "attempts to do") some things
           | better than Slack. I like the way Teams displays the chat
           | threads as conversations instead of a long, narrow and
           | claustrophobic column on the right, for example. But, again,
           | nobody asks me :)
        
           | MonkeyMalarky wrote:
           | Synergy!
        
         | baal80spam wrote:
         | Maybe the don't do it "because they can" but "because they have
         | to"?
        
       | lsbehe wrote:
       | >`<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=">`
       | 
       | Blocking javascript causes every page on slack.com to
       | continuously refresh. Why?
        
         | chrismartin wrote:
         | "What are you doing with your weird broken browser, you
         | weirdo?"
         | 
         | (I am also a weirdo)
         | 
         | Fun fact, Slack also started blocking Fierfox 78 ESR last
         | winter, which was the default browser in Debian stable until
         | just a couple of weeks ago. They didn't merely show an
         | unsupported browser message, but actively prevented the app
         | from loading. It still worked fine if you spoofed the user
         | agent string to report a later Firefox version.
        
       | adzm wrote:
       | I'm always terrified that corporate will eventually decide to cut
       | slack from the budget and stick with Teams.
        
         | partiallypro wrote:
         | Why? In my experience Teams has generally been better than
         | Slack. People complain about Team's speed but I can't even
         | count how often Slack used to get hung on me.
        
           | xcambar wrote:
           | I've witnessed firsthand that the main problem of Teams is
           | that Slack is now so deeply wired into our daily working life
           | that people cplain about Teams just because it differs from
           | Slack.
           | 
           | It doesn't even matter if the choices and ergonomics are
           | better or worse... Since it's just not-Slack, it gets
           | rejected by a certain (IMO quite large) share of the
           | population.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | Teams legitimately crashes every single time I open it. The
             | stability is just.... not up to professional working
             | standards.
             | 
             | My company tried to switch to Teams and there was
             | practically an employee uprising... it now sticks to Teams
             | for all non-eng while eng does Slack.
        
               | xcambar wrote:
               | > it now sticks to Teams for all non-eng while eng does
               | Slack.
               | 
               | Why did the other depts stick to Teams?
               | 
               | Your comment seems to precisely prove my point, when
               | reading it from my seat :D
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | Other departments do what IT tell them, for the most
               | part.
               | 
               | eng usually knows about tech tools better than other
               | departments.
               | 
               | For programs: Ask the finance department about Sage and
               | excel and they will have opinions.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | Lots of pressure from the top to use Teams for what one
               | might call political reasons.
        
               | albedoa wrote:
               | > Why did the other depts stick to Teams?
               | 
               | You misunderstand. They didn't have a say.
        
             | ecshafer wrote:
             | I used Teams for several years before ever using slack. And
             | honestly, Teams is hands down one of the absolute worst
             | pieces of software I have ever used. Its slow, it has a
             | terrible UI, it's clunky, it drops calls, uses tons of
             | memory. Its absolute garbage. I've only used Slack for a
             | few months and I think its lightyears better.
        
           | SketchySeaBeast wrote:
           | For me it's information retrieval. For some reason searching
           | in teams will return my search text "Hey, where is the
           | _Controller_ located? ", but I can't actually navigate to the
           | message right after it, which is the answer.
        
             | albedoa wrote:
             | I can't wrap my head around the decision. There is a "go to
             | message" button, which brings you to the exact message you
             | were already looking at in the search results but still
             | completely isolated from context.
        
           | pmontra wrote:
           | It seems that it would be impossible to be signed in in
           | multiple Teams of different customers https://feedbackportal.
           | microsoft.com/feedback/idea/d256e0f6-...
           | 
           | Hopefully my customers will keep using Slack.
        
             | andkenneth wrote:
             | The idea is you can be invited to a team in another tenant
             | from your own account.
        
               | julianlam wrote:
               | ... and? In reality that's probably not how some not
               | insignificant minority of Teams users access the service.
               | 
               | I have clients that create external accounts for me under
               | their domain. Once signed in, I can no longer sign into a
               | different account, so my meeting with other clients have
               | Company A in my email... kind of odd.
               | 
               | Of course, I can't actually create a personal Teams
               | account, because my company does not use Teams.
               | 
               | So, I decided to burn everything MS Teams related out of
               | my home directory, and start fresh. I am now a guest user
               | for every company that needs calls done via Teams.
               | 
               | Arguably a worse off solution, no?
        
           | flerchin wrote:
           | Default-open nature of channels combined with infinite
           | retention and good search means that I can find the
           | information from a conversation 3 years ago that's relevant
           | to my current issue. The Ergo, for chat, is better than all
           | the competitors.
           | 
           | Main thing though is the default-open. If you don't get that,
           | well that's ok, many people don't.
        
           | Kaze404 wrote:
           | Welp, I guess I have to say it for the 6th time (wonder when
           | I'll stop counting). Teams on Linux is a complete nightmare,
           | with the most egregious aspect being that it continues
           | recording audio after you leave a meeting (which is easily
           | proven by just joining a meeting, leaving and opening
           | Pavucontrol). Someone recently mentioned to me in HN that
           | disabling spacial meeting recognition or some crap like that
           | fixes it, but I haven't been at my computer since to try it
           | out.
           | 
           | It's been like this for at least a year and a half, and I've
           | submitted it through the "feedback form" countless times.
           | 
           | Ps.: Interestingly enough, in Pavucontrol the application
           | shows up as "Skype", with the icon and all.
        
           | caseysoftware wrote:
           | For Teams, I'm shocked when it works the first time I click
           | it. Usually because I was signed into another group's Teams
           | and happened to go back to that one.
           | 
           | My bigger problem with teams is their multi-Team model. In
           | between my current and last job, I (part time) contracted
           | with a handful of groups and every single one added me to
           | their Slack or Teams group. With Slack, they popped up as
           | separate orgs and I could move between them as I needed. With
           | Teams, I had to log out of one to open the other.
           | 
           | I will never know how many questions I missed (aka billable
           | hours) and people I annoyed by "ignoring" them when I had
           | simply had to join some other group's Teams to take a call
           | and forgot to come back to their Teams.
        
             | Kaze404 wrote:
             | Seems like you got the good end of the stick wrt
             | authentication. At least twice over the past year and a
             | half my account got stuck in a login -> redirect -> logout
             | loop for days. If I had to regularly log out of Teams I
             | suspect this would manifest itself more often.
        
           | NAHWheatCracker wrote:
           | I can't believe anyone would say that Teams is better than
           | Slack.
           | 
           | Almost everything about Slack is better. It's easier to
           | manage conversations/channels. It's easier to read. It's
           | easier to write. It's easier to customize.
           | 
           | The only thing I've heard is that Slack is unstable for some
           | people. I haven't experienced any stability issues in 3+
           | years using the MacOS app. I've heard that the Slack web
           | interface may be the cause of stability issues.
           | 
           | We have Slack in my organization, but corporate has started
           | using Teams for the past year. I think the writing is on the
           | wall, and I'm dreading it.
        
             | bastardoperator wrote:
             | Now do a cost benefit analysis. I'm willing to bet teams is
             | free if you're buying other MSFT products. Personally, I'm
             | not a fan of either and I'd take discord over either.
        
         | AndrewUnmuted wrote:
         | If I had to use either of these things as part of running my
         | team of 12 engineers, I'd resign immediately.
         | 
         | I feel so sorry for those who continue operating in such
         | soulless, life-sucking work environments that they're down to
         | choosing which horrible attention-grabbing SaaS product they'd
         | rather use.
         | 
         | Have you not considered simply using neither? What is wrong
         | with email? Hell, what's wrong with a phone call?
        
           | marcinzm wrote:
           | >Hell, what's wrong with a phone call?
           | 
           | >attention-grabbing
        
           | corrral wrote:
           | > Hell, what's wrong with a phone call?
           | 
           | You have to remember to take notes.
           | 
           | I hate going to find something in Slack history and seeing a
           | phone call right around where I think important information
           | may have been conveyed. At best, I have to go look other
           | places to find it. At worst, there's nothing. And since I may
           | not have been on the call, it may not even be _possible_ for
           | me to have notes, short of bugging the people who
           | participated and hoping they took notes.
           | 
           | This even goes for personal stuff. I much prefer when my wife
           | sends me important info via chat (not Slack, in this case)
           | rather than calling, unless it's _super_ time-sensitive, for
           | basically the same reason.
           | 
           | Email evades the objection to calls, sure, but I've yet to
           | see an email client that doesn't suck for low-friction
           | multiparty chat. Yes, including gmail. I'm pretty sure this
           | _could_ be solved by a client, but I 've not seen it, and I
           | think part of the problem is having to accommodate other
           | clients' default quoting behavior and threading and such, so
           | it may be something that could _technically_ be solved by a
           | good client, but couldn 't _in fact_ be solved by a client.
        
       | agluszak wrote:
       | Huddles, Clips, probably some kind of TikTok-like stories next...
       | for me Slack has never become anything more than a good and
       | reliable, but still a simple chat app (one of ~10 I have
       | installed on my phone) dedicated for work.
       | 
       | > "In a true digital HQ, you can move all communications--even
       | those with external partners and customers--from siloed email
       | inboxes to channels and direct messages in Slack." Siloed email
       | inboxes? Slack's solution is precisely putting everyone into
       | THEIR silo/walled garden.
       | 
       | I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce at least some degree of
       | inter-compatibility between chat apps. I'm tired of switching
       | between FB Messenger, Instagram, Discord, Slack, Signal,
       | Whatsapp, Matrix and whatnot.
        
         | guenthert wrote:
         | I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce a ban on chat apps.
        
         | vitus wrote:
         | RIP, XMPP + federation
         | 
         | (fb messenger, slack, whatsapp, hangouts/gchat, and more used
         | to be accessible through a single client. That said, I recall
         | federation was mostly unsupported by the various hosts, so you
         | still needed to be logged in to each service.)
        
         | porcc wrote:
         | Silo as in only-for-the-email-recipients
        
         | smcleod wrote:
         | To be fair huddles are really useful, simple and low impact to
         | have a quick verbal chat and maybe screen share without having
         | a formal meeting.
        
         | Arathorn wrote:
         | > I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce at least some degree
         | of inter-compatibility between chat apps. I'm tired of
         | switching between FB Messenger, Instagram, Discord, Slack,
         | Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix and whatnot.
         | 
         | Well, it's happening. The final phase of the legislation passed
         | today:
         | https://twitter.com/SamuelStolton/status/1548955978166575104
        
         | adrr wrote:
         | If slack polled all their paying customers if inter-
         | compatibility was important, do you think any of them would
         | agree it was? As a slack customer I never had any need to have
         | cross app support for my internal chat tool. That would be a
         | headache for my IT team supporting multiple apps.
        
           | lmm wrote:
           | > If slack polled all their paying customers if inter-
           | compatibility was important, do you think any of them would
           | agree it was?
           | 
           | Being able to use slack to talk with their clients /
           | suppliers who don't use slack (and who often have their own
           | preferred chat system) would definitely be important/valuable
           | to many of them. Hell, I've worked at more than one place
           | where you couldn't use slack to talk to a different
           | department and this was an issue recognised by management.
        
             | oceanplexian wrote:
             | This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Not sure if there's a
             | name for it but I would consider Slack a productivity hack
             | that actually hurts productivity in the long run. Chat apps
             | are like a quick fix for poor management, which leads to
             | everyone interrupting everyone else due to lack of
             | documentation or escalation paths. The P2P model works but
             | it is wildly inefficient and no one ends up being held
             | accountable.
             | 
             | If Slack didn't exist, leaders would have to come up with
             | documentation, rules and processes to shuffle work around,
             | probably much more efficiently.
        
         | zaik wrote:
         | We have an internet standard for interoperable instant
         | messaging since 2004.
         | 
         | Companies really don't like you can escaping their walled
         | gardens and users/customers never made compliance with internet
         | standards a requirement for the services they use.
        
         | ceeplusplus wrote:
         | Facebook uses a variant of Facebook to have employees promote
         | their work internally. I think it makes sense for larger
         | organizations - person to person chat and all hands are missing
         | an element in the middle where teams may want to promote the
         | outcome of a particular project to their larger org, but not to
         | everyone. Right now I've seen Slack channels used for that
         | purpose, so it makes sense to help augment that with some
         | additional features. Medium bandwidth, medium reach.
         | 
         | You might argue this sort of communication is unnecessary but
         | it's very hard to get big orgs consistently on the same page.
         | An all-hands is just not the right tool for that.
        
       | naet wrote:
       | I always thought $5+ per user (per month) is a really high fee
       | for a not all that great service and pretty clunky client. There
       | should be a text-only budget version that costs less for leaner
       | organizations that can use other services for sharing large
       | files, video or audio calls, etc.
        
       | devmunchies wrote:
       | Has anyone had success with Google chat? Looks like a competitor
       | and many companies already pay for Google Workspace.
       | https://workspace.google.com/products/chat/
        
         | malkuth23 wrote:
         | If I were starting over, I would probably push for Google Chat.
         | It was such a chore getting my workmates to switch to Slack
         | from email, that I don't want to disturb the delicate balance.
         | That said, Google Chat has less integrations and I don't trust
         | Google to keep products around.
         | 
         | Besides the price, Google Meet is miles better than Slack video
         | chat. I know most people just pay for Zoom, but for those of us
         | that are stuck in Slack calls, Meet is a huge improvement.
         | 
         | I wonder if there is a tool to migrate all public messages from
         | Slack to Google Chat?
        
         | jjcm wrote:
         | We use it for our family chat, and so far it's been a total
         | pain. Google changes things so regularly, but with little
         | awareness of the impact those changes make. At one point they
         | deprecated hangouts for chat, but required hangouts still for
         | viewing video on mobile, while also enabling partially
         | supported chat on gmail. What ended up happening was there was
         | a period where I had to have all 3 apps on my phone to use it,
         | and I'd get a notification from all 3 for every message:
         | https://twitter.com/pwnies/status/1404895098194644994
         | 
         | The one thing I will say that's great about it is their search
         | functionality is top tier.
        
         | volongoto wrote:
         | I believe, their history of messaging apps, makes it very
         | difficult to rely on Google in this area. Organizations that
         | are already in Google's ecosystem will probably use it, but I
         | doubt it will have any significance otherwise. As long as you
         | don't have a need to use it towards other organizations it
         | should work (but don't ever expect Google to implement a
         | feature that is requested by their customers).
         | 
         | [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-
         | half-... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/so-nice-
         | they-killed-...
        
       | notwhereyouare wrote:
       | One feature I wish you could do is add people to a group chat and
       | keep history. Or prompt if you're adding to a chat to convert to
       | a channel and keep history.
       | 
       | I probably once a month start a group chat and need to add
       | somebody to it and all context is gone
        
       | Solvitieg wrote:
       | Finding myself liking Slack these days.
       | 
       | I was really big into Deep Work's hyperactive hivemind and saw
       | Slack as a negative until I took a full remote job and found it
       | to be a critical tool for async communication.
       | 
       | The solution ended up being really simple: cmd + q when I want to
       | focus.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | dahdum wrote:
       | Having seen so many SAAS turn the screws on their customers over
       | the years with absurd price hikes it's refreshing to see such a
       | reasonable one.
       | 
       | ZenDesk's 300% hike still stings over a decade later.
        
         | brianwawok wrote:
         | zendesk sure cost a lot of money for an app that if I submit a
         | support ticket (using zendesk of course) it takes 3-4 days to
         | be told to restart my computer. (Nope, not it, guess again).
        
       | adrr wrote:
       | I would think they would be lowering their price to compete
       | against Microsoft Teams. Teams is eating their business because
       | it comes bundled with Microsoft365 subscription.
        
       | ubertaco wrote:
       | I just left Salesforce, and on the way out I talked to some folks
       | who saw Slack as the last decent corner of the company to work in
       | (while that lasts).
       | 
       | As someone who worked at a company Salesforce acquired, I can say
       | from experience that tinkering with pricing and packages is how
       | it starts. Next will be tight integration with Salesforce's
       | nightmare monolith, and then a mountain of compliance bureaucracy
       | burden as salespeople try to convince government agencies that
       | they need something they don't and that making compliance burdens
       | more and more insane is good for them (when in reality it's just
       | a transparent attempt at giving Salesforce more of a "most"
       | around their business to keep out any upstart competitors who
       | might otherwise enter the market with the same or better product
       | for cheaper).
       | 
       | If the current pattern holds, this will culminate in mass exodus
       | from engineering and a promotion for some execs for
       | "strengthening Salesforce's position in the marketplace" while
       | "cutting costs" in the form of reducing the number of salaries
       | they pay out)
        
         | punnerud wrote:
         | Will be interesting to see how they handle Shrems iii, if the
         | software have to be able to run without influence by American
         | companies (aka OnPrem) to operate in Europe
        
         | Mandatum wrote:
         | Uhhh, if you have LinkedIn Navigator, check ex-Slack engineers.
         | Everyone who was pre-IPO without many RSU's has already left.
         | 
         | Management has already left, in true Salesforce and Oracle
         | fashion they'll be pushing Salesforce VP's into senior
         | leadership roles at Slack - starting with regions.
         | 
         | 1 year acquisition anniversary is next week, so you'll see an
         | influx of more, and then the final exodus will be 1 year later
         | when KPI's for 2-year employee retention bonuses runs out.
        
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