[HN Gopher] Slack's free plan change is causing an exodus
___________________________________________________________________
Slack's free plan change is causing an exodus
Author : williamstein
Score : 633 points
Date : 2022-08-26 22:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.zulip.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.zulip.com)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The main competitor of your paid product cannot be your free
| product.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I think that something like this is basically inevitable for most
| free offerings that deal with data storage.
|
| We saw something similar planned by DockerHub because there were
| a lot of abandoned container images, GitLab briefly wanted to do
| something similar to dormant projects and I'm sure that there are
| plenty other cases like that out there.
|
| That said, this always comes with quite the backlash, so quite
| possibly it's better to bake in data expiry and cleanup from day
| 1 if you can get away with it.
|
| Personally, though, I think that more people should host their
| own Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Nextcloud Talk or other chat
| solution instances.
| crecker wrote:
| Go Mattermost!
| aka-rabbi wrote:
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think it would be cool to be able to pay on the user side and
| allow me to have some number of workspaces with distinct friend
| groups.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Imagine a ransomware company gives you a free SSD for your home
| computer, and then encrypts data making it inaccessible after a
| few months, and then reduces that to 90 days. That SSD doesn't
| seem so free after all!
| esprehn wrote:
| My wife and I have used slack for years for our personal chat.
| The multiple channels made categorizing the messages easy (ex.
| #house, #kid1, #kid2, #coding, etc). The change in free retention
| meant we'd lose important messages so we've given up on slack and
| moved to a different service.
|
| I'm sure our small usage of it won't matter to slack, but the
| money grab and their insistence that this change was somehow
| better for me because it was "simpler" when I reached out to
| their support really soured my opinion of them. I wouldn't
| recommend them to others in the future.
| turtlebits wrote:
| I hate this entitled attitude. There is no "money grab". They
| own the service, they're free to set whatever price they want.
| If you don't want to pay, don't use it.
|
| In other words, don't rely on "free", as there is no such
| thing.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| I don't think it has anything to do with an entitled
| attitude. Nobody is demanding that Salesforce provide free
| services. What I see instead is valid criticism of sleazy
| business practices. IMO, the fact that Slack won't
| unconditionally permit you to exfiltrate your private message
| data (even after upgrading two tiers to a "Pro" plan!!) says
| everything that needs to be said.
| esprehn wrote:
| We stopped using it as you said. TFA is all about how many
| people did that.
|
| The money grab is in how they've gone about this. They made
| up an excuse about how this is better for users somehow (as
| discussed in the article as well). If they want to eliminate
| the free tier they should just do it.
| [deleted]
| funOtter wrote:
| Element (Matrix) might be a good alternative!
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| I thought that all the cool kids are squatting in Discord now?
| bartwe wrote:
| We've looked at paying for our free slack a few times but the
| pricing is just far too high to take serious for the amount of
| users we have.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I don't understand the criticism. I worked with a lot of free
| Slack accounts. None of these had 90 days of history. Would say
| 20-30 days or something like that on average. To get 90 days
| history is an improvement for most larger consumers on free
| tiers. No?
| Test0129 wrote:
| I understand why people are upset but the chest thumping and
| anger over losing certain aspects of a free tier makes no sense
| to me. If you're hosting a large community of people that needs
| to look far back in history then maybe you should consider either
| self hosting, or cajoling your members into paying. If the
| community truly brings value you'll be able to find the money. If
| not, then you have your own freeloader problem you have to
| address.
|
| This was the same thing as forums a long time ago. Unfortunately
| they are dead now. However, it wasn't uncommon to have a special
| member class for people who paid into some tier (usually less
| than a cup of coffee) to support the host.
|
| It's easy to forget that while you're freeloading someone is
| paying the bill. Slack is just finally forcing free tier user's
| hands. For people like me who use a slack channel once in a blue
| moon outside work this change is effectively a no-op. The people
| who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have
| the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into
| paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly. Slack is still
| footing the bill for storage/compute/etc and if the accounts show
| no real intention to buy into a better tier sometimes you need to
| twist the screws a little.
| muppetman wrote:
| My wife has 4 business slacks she's a part of. Because she's
| got the slack client open all day, she setup a little slack for
| just her and me to use. We use it during the day to plan
| things, talk etc etc.
|
| It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various
| conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old.
|
| I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business
| ones she uses are all paid. I'm a member of 3 paid slack
| myself.
|
| Now we need to install a second app for this sort of stuff. As
| more people do that, it's going to mean more people are exposed
| to Slack alternatives and might move to them fully.
|
| Making things free also makes them sticky for people using them
| in more than one way. They've now broken that.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Its been great for you to use Slack and to be able to go back
| and view conversations from years ago. It's so useful to you
| that you've used it for years, and you love it.
|
| ...but you won't pay $12/month for it?
|
| Yes, you are a freeloader. And you'll inevitably keep
| bouncing from free app to free app as services mature and
| shift focus to making money. You, as a freeloader, are of no
| economic value to Slack, Discord, or wherever you end up
| next.
| tomrod wrote:
| $12/month is a lot for a messaging protocol, some scripts,
| and storage under a few GB a year in a market that is
| Betrand pricing with a first-mover leader.
|
| SaaS adds up.
| skapadia wrote:
| $12/month is a LOT of money for sending some messages back
| and forth with your significant other. I would suggest they
| use Signal for that.
| c256 wrote:
| > ...but you won't pay $12/month for it?
|
| But it's $24/month, isn't it? Double that if they invited
| the kids, in-laws, or neighbors but they don't use it
| regularly because those people don't use Slack for business
| -- which is the whole point of the loss-leader approach:
| get people used to using slack, get them in the app, and
| then get them to bring it into larger environments where
| corporate rates make sense.
|
| This new policy degrades the value of slack significantly
| for a bunch of long-term, low-volume users. It will cause a
| few people to move to a paid plan, maybe, and it will
| certainly cause many to leave slack. The last part will
| make slack less sticky, less familiar, less generally used,
| and will save them some amount on storage, maybe? Have you
| priced out storage recently? I'd bet the cost difference
| for storage of short text snippets between 90-day rolling
| and 10k messages is: - Smaller than the variance of MTBF of
| different batches of disks - Smaller than the variance on
| overhead in block/page size for their underlying storage
| system - Smaller than the variance of employee number for
| their 90th percentile large customers In other words,
| they're adding annoyance and losing users for peanuts.
| nottorp wrote:
| I'm using Slack for productive purposes and still won't pay
| 12/month/user for it. We're an outlier org that has a lot
| of mostly inactive users that get active when something's
| going on. We don't want to pay 12/month just because one of
| them said happy birthday in the general channel. And no,
| the guest user feature won't do.
|
| They should switch to fixed pricing for small teams.
| Something that ends up at far less than 12/user.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and
| have been getting value for years is not an option,
| because...?
| dijit wrote:
| > $12 p/m
|
| Notably this is a 50% higher price than Disney+
|
| Each subscription takes a toll. The price is set at $0, to
| make it more expensive is always going to be infinitely
| more expensive, but $12 _is_ a lot for simple uses, and
| paying it in perpetuity is undesirable too.
|
| Whatsapp was $1/y when it monetised, and I believe they
| were profitable, for context.
| morelisp wrote:
| Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement
| for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| The problem is that there are many useful tools and
| services that most of us are using for free: Text editors,
| browsers, email, forum software, all sorts of apps, cloud
| storage etc. It's not realistic to pay 5$ or 12$ a month
| for each.
|
| Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really
| should cultivate more community organized tooling based on
| Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's
| usecase.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah right, we know, it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee.
| All those Starbucks coffees add up you know.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There's kinda of a https://xkcd.com/1172/ vibe to that use
| case.
|
| Being able to go back through two years of chats with your
| wife most likely was never an intended use case for Slack.
| For a free tier, 90 day retention seems reasonable. The issue
| Slack has in their pricing, for private use, is that the
| cheapest tier is pretty expensive. This could be remedied by
| adding a private tier, for $1 per month per user. I think
| Slack has put a large number of potential customers in a
| position where they are asking them to upgrade to a paid
| tier, but not providing a realistic tier to upgrade to.
|
| I am fascinated by the amount of people who use Slack though.
| While completely off topic, it an absolutely mess of a thing.
| It has to be one of the worst UIs I had the misfortune to
| use. It makes Google Chat look reasonable.
| nottorp wrote:
| It's irc with the ability to share files and pin stuff to
| channels :) Felt extremely natural to me from day one.
|
| Except threads. Threads are useless.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Except threads. Threads are useless.
|
| That might exactly be my problem with Slack, and Google
| Chat as well. I understand the desire to wanting to some
| sort of threading, but it doesn't work in either
| programs. Instead it just confuses the interface greatly.
| Slack is super weird, because you can have a thread open,
| and navigate around, so the thread view is now completely
| out of context.
| staindk wrote:
| IMO Slack threads are quite good.
|
| I'm sure it depends on your use case etc., but in my work
| context I find they function really well.
|
| I did try test some concepts around Slack/Discord threads
| serving as entire "discussions" for a literary community
| (so you e.g. post a topic and discuss it in the thread
| under the topic), and in the end there were a bunch of
| small pain points that all added up and made it
| unfeasible.
|
| At work though I find Slack threads to be a good middle
| ground for having discussions in a medium-large channel
| with interested parties - everyone can see the main
| channel message, and those who choose to engage further
| can post in the thread or opt to receive thread updates
| if they just want to "listen in"... then if some
| important conclusion is reached you can opt to send that
| thread message out to the main channel as well to catch
| other people up on what was discussed.
| nottorp wrote:
| > but in my work context I find they function really
| well.
|
| You have only one channel? We have zillions, per topic.
| staindk wrote:
| Besides the default/obvious channels, we generally seem
| to have a channel per "team", a channel per "division"
| (group of teams), and then some channels for "division
| collaborations" e.g. data science + engineering. Then we
| also often set up a channel for big new features/projects
| and invite stakeholders to them.
|
| _EDIT: I guess the last type could be what you mean by
| "topic" - we are a startup so perhaps the number of
| feature/project type channels will balloon out over time,
| but doubt we would end up with "zillions" haha. And loads
| of them would be old and essentially archived._
|
| A lot of the channels become somewhat bloated over time,
| with people joining because they are interested in
| keeping up with stuff in a broad context, but have no
| need to click into each thread and read over everything.
|
| I would choose threaded discussions over PM groups or
| short-lived channels any day tbh.
| jchoca wrote:
| I think the problem is not with threads themselves but
| with Slack's implementation. Threads provide a much-
| needed way of creating a discussion around a specific
| topic that doesn't pollute the main channel. In Slack
| they seem like more of an afterthought than a primary
| communication tool.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah, they're very hard to find when you just quickly
| check where you're needed.
| rattray wrote:
| > The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free
| tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no
| intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this
| frankly.
|
| The problem, as another commenter points out, is the price.
| There just isn't a pricing tier that would make sense for
| people to pay as individuals to participate in an informal
| community (especially if even only some members could not
| afford it). I can't imagine more than $5/yr really working -
| probably only $1-2.
|
| Well another problem is that they don't actually have a way for
| individuals to cover their own memberships; you'd need a
| community leader to set up a GoFundMe/equivalent, fundraise
| every billing cycle (which is logistically taxing and damages
| community feelings), etc. Yuck.
|
| For color, I'm part of a professional network slack (alumni of
| a company) that people derive a fair amount of professional and
| personal value from. Important business and career networking,
| fond friendships, etc etc. Roughly nobody in that group is
| poor, or even US-middle-class, but the willingness to pay the
| current lowest tier for us is absolutely not there. Not even
| close.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Bring back mailing lists; ban Outlook from top posting to them.
|
| Distributed forums. Tada!
| TabTwo wrote:
| Oh cry me a river. You don't pay for it - you are not a customer,
| you're probably the product. You don't own the server - you dont
| own the data on this server/service (anymore). You cant afford to
| pay for such service - declare bankruptcy, obviously your
| business is not sustainable. You cant afford to pay for the
| needed SLA and your business won't survive a few days downtime -
| declare bankruptcy, obviously your business is not sustainable.
| kishansh wrote:
| Wonder how many people jumped ship to https://mattermost.com/
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| If you're upset with changes like this, you weren't using Slack
| as it is intended to be used. Nowhere is Slack advertising itself
| as a data archival platform, a file storage, or a project
| management software. It's a chat application.
|
| Look at all the reactions in the article, they all are using
| Slack in ways it is not supposed to be used.
|
| _Also note that the article is written by a direct competitor of
| Slack..._
| ultra_nick wrote:
| The 90 day limit is better for large groups. We have 12,000
| students in a free slack chat and we can't see yesterday's
| messages because they're past the message limit.
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| Boo hoo. Either use open source of pay for the service. It's
| bizarre that people think everything should be free and spoonfed
| to them
| JadoJodo wrote:
| It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have
| essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up
| to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to
| security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing
| only: community.
|
| I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on
| a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree
| CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on
| the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord
| (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident),
| or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the
| article).
|
| As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your
| house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to
| imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating
| experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut
| down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the
| service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free
| or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
|
| (I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but
| at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't
| think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
| dirkhe wrote:
| I think https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat
| and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts
| using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.
| RileyJames wrote:
| They were also more than a community. They became massive
| sources of niche information.
|
| Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche
| (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft
| modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)
|
| Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will
| be worse off.
|
| Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they're
| inactive you can't just jump in and continue the thread.
|
| Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time
| communication is not required for a community. And it's a
| really poor way to create information that will remain useful
| for years or decades to come.
|
| Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled
| the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by
| accident
|
| I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places
| of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are
| uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making
| a one sentence Slack or Discord post?
|
| Forums could serve an important role in business documentation.
| Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade?
| Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in
| forums instead of meetings.
| nerdponx wrote:
| See also: mailing lists.
| julianlam wrote:
| Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the
| current generation of forums.
|
| Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are
| pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse
| often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)
|
| e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three
| in the space.
|
| (Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with
| a grain of salt)
| antifa wrote:
| Not a lot of options where it's a fast, modern language
| (crystal/nim/rust/etc.) and also not an SPA.
| sh4rks wrote:
| I would give Discord servers another go. They definitely have
| that "community" feel, especially for more niche servers.
| ddingus wrote:
| I really am missing forums. One area of interest of mine has a
| good one and it has a solid population. I value it increasingly
| highly.
| layoric wrote:
| There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and
| in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1]
|
| [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
| getcrunk wrote:
| Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or
| smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been
| meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps
| fro some of my hobbies.
| julianlam wrote:
| While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment
| mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our
| standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5
| droplet.
|
| So far we're hitting that goal.
| SXX wrote:
| Discourse can be hosted on $15-20 VPS since it's need
| docker and fsr more disk space due to using containers.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I could run phpBB just fine on my $5-10/mo shared
| hosting.
|
| It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack
| alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they
| require a lot more resources than shared hosting can
| provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go
| along with it.
| antifa wrote:
| Most phpBB-like forums will run fine on your $10/year
| shared MySQL hosts.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yes but will Discourse?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was
| clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality
| community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray
| beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.
|
| PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/
| Aeolun wrote:
| Reading their latest announcement makes me question how
| alive they are. Feels like an announcement from 5 years
| ago.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Some times I get confused at what I'm looking at with
| discourse. The scrolling timeline thing is super confusing
| . Much rather have paging.
| julianlam wrote:
| Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse,
| I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for
| and against pagination.
|
| You can't really pick one method without alienating the
| other, but it is possible to allow the end user to
| choose.
|
| Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless
| scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate
| navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS
| setup.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| The issue with discourse is it isn't infinite scroll.
| They break up the timeline into the right side and if you
| have an exceptionally long timeline it will skip time
| periods thinking you just want the original post and the
| new stuff.
|
| It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.
|
| Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.
|
| Not necessarily, pagination is often configurable, so
| either way you need a per-comment permalink for linking
| to be reliable.
| julianlam wrote:
| This is correct. A problem with a sensible solution. When
| you scroll through NodeBB your address bar updates with
| the context of where you are. Copying that address will
| return you to where you were.
|
| Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It
| will also return you to that post.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with
| Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better
| full-text search than the old-style forums too.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB.
| Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting
| for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they
| feel like search results. I like pagination and
| "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel
| that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that
| those pixels have private property rights and never ever
| move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical
| pixels for a Discourse logo.
|
| Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with
| me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had
| clarity.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| > not a giant scrolling doomswheel
|
| Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI
| feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else
| comes even close.
| ysavir wrote:
| It's not a competition, though. Nothing stopping a forum
| from having both features. A forum I'm on has the
| classic-style forum navigation as well as feeds, and
| customizable feeds at that. Each user can read through
| the forum in whatever fashion they like.
|
| Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?
| folkrav wrote:
| Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily
| dislike anything infinite-scrolling...
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Have you tried it? Check it out e.g. [1].
|
| 1) You immediately get to see the date range of the
| thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or
| position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite
| scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading,
| for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview
| the comments before actually jumping to it.
|
| [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-
| html-cs...
| masklinn wrote:
| > Have you tried it?
|
| Yes, it's awful.
|
| > Check it out e.g.
|
| Oh lord. 40 comments? That's a single page of traditional
| forums.
|
| How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I
| do mean threads of a million comments.
| Sharparam wrote:
| How is navigating millions of comments in a paginated
| thread any better? That's more than 25 000 pages.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Hmm... man I tried to like this stuff and used it with
| good faith. No idea why I don't like non-static UIs. I
| just want everything like a static page, almost like a
| physical analog piece of paper. Nothing moves. The
| monitor is like a loupe that I scan through on a giant
| canvas. I can empathize with people that like new fangled
| UIs, problem is with me.
| fragmede wrote:
| It _has_ been a problem, that 's why there aren't several
| million more phpbb users. Discourse is filling a niche
| that hasn't been filled. Slack and Discord aren't right,
| but unfortunately phpbb isn't it either.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I agree with all this. But I was talking about the full-
| text search and tags, which (at least in my opinion) is
| way better than the old forum engines.
| monkpit wrote:
| https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
| list/vendor_id-1529...
| [deleted]
| gernb wrote:
| IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any
| discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the
| phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced
|
| Something about the design of Discourse does not actually
| encourage discourse.
|
| On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens
| of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required
| to run one instance of discourse
| rtpg wrote:
| I agree about the design, but disagree about thriving-ness.
| There are many Discourse sites that exist and serve their
| purposes well.
|
| I do daydream about making some simpler forum software
| though.
| baby wrote:
| Yeah I hate it as well :( maybe someone should write an
| open source forum as well
| asim wrote:
| What about https://forem.dev? I think it powers Dev.to
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > I've never personally seen any discourse communities that
| are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin,
| forums they replaced
|
| I think discoverability by search engines is very different
| from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or
| maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is
| Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich,
| though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
| oarmstrong wrote:
| Are you perhaps conflating Discord and Discourse?
| Discourse is certainly a forum in my eyes.
| muglug wrote:
| > I've never personally seen any discourse communities that
| are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin,
| forums they replaced
|
| I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/
| [deleted]
| gernb wrote:
| Those numbers are small, There are around 40k posts and
| 20k users
|
| Vs these, orders of magnitude more users, multiple orders
| of magnitude more posts
|
| https://www.forumrankings.net/
|
| Also
|
| https://www.neogaf.com/
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of
| Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it
| because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?
|
| It always appears to load significantly more data that it
| needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place.
| There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter
| numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long
| discussion that you just get lost in.
|
| I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being
| everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| Ruby is not necessarily more resource hogging than PHP,
| but the way typical ruby webapps deployed (all workers
| processes started immediately and left idling to wait for
| requests) leads to higher memory usage compared to low
| traffic PHP webapp (worker processes only started when
| requests is coming and shutdown afterwards, so you can
| host a lot of small traffics sites in a small server). If
| PHP webapps are deployed with similar process lifecycle,
| I imagine it would consume similar resources.
|
| For medium and high traffic webapps, the difference is
| moot because you're going to end up with a large amount
| of worker processes to handle all those traffics anyway
| regardless of how you initially spawn them.
| danielheath wrote:
| > Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature
| of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is
| it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?
|
| Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but
| in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP
| request" slow.
|
| They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be
| outrageously slow.
| Raymonf wrote:
| I found that my Discourse instance consistently took ~250
| milliseconds to display the forum post list (according to
| the little box at the top left corner). After getting
| annoyed with Discourse, I went back to Invision Forum and
| I see about ~95 ms for the same thing, including sending
| the response to my browser.
| danielheath wrote:
| Those are both unreasonably slow in a way that has little
| to do with the language.
|
| Optimizing responses has diminishing returns once you're
| below 100ms, but 250ms is _far_ too slow.
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| There's something /off/ about discourse that I can't put my
| finger on.
|
| In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums
| (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use,
| even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection.
|
| Today, some recent communities that I have visited using
| discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn.
| Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to
| render feels so slow, then the subsequent fetches using
| infinite scroll just sucks.
|
| I've also visited some forums recently that do not use
| discourse, like the arch forum and some maplestory private
| server, and I don't feel the awfulness that discourse
| invokes.
| zarzavat wrote:
| I also have the same bad vibe with discourse.
|
| For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I
| find the website uncomfortable to look at because the
| screen is mostly white and very little _anything_ is
| visible.
|
| I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a
| very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why
| they built churches with high ceilings.
|
| The website also gives me vibes of being a question and
| answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.
| masklinn wrote:
| Thank you. I've been feeling really alone.
|
| > Something about the design of Discourse does not actually
| encourage discourse.
|
| The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen
| is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a
| much higher content/ui ratio.
|
| They're also full of bullshit gamification and immediately
| start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable
| it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with
| it.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see
| a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section
| mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not
| sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it.
| But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about
| vendors who also host)
| tabbott wrote:
| My personal test for whether an open source company
| encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page
| advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how
| they advertise commercial offerings.
| mythz wrote:
| Having their free self hosting plan linked on their
| pricing page [1] is more than enough, ridiculous to
| expect companies should the devote the same valuable
| realestate promoting their free offering as their
| commercial products which sponsors development.
|
| [1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing
| sushid wrote:
| If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$
| from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're
| under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't
| have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
| 3np wrote:
| Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-
| term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$
| at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does
| that need to go against the interests of shareholders,
| nor is there any law mandating so.
|
| Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made
| in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get
| away with it and make more money by doing so.
| Vardiak wrote:
| I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies
| are literally an optimization mechanism for turning
| profits.
|
| Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not
| enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes
| in slave-like conditions.
| 3np wrote:
| GP is implying that companies that don't are by
| definition performing poorly by missing out on the
| margin.
| 3np wrote:
| In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should
| be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being
| fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _It 's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear
| have essentially gone away entirely_
|
| May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
|
| I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted
| forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design
| principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early
| 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from
| participating in some communities I would have liked.
|
| The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the
| user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the
| interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line
| signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when
| someone was just posting "this". And having to page through
| each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
|
| Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies
| building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles
| of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow
| dynamic loading.
|
| In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and
| democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate
| free alternative. What are the candidates?
| masklinn wrote:
| > The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as
| the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered
| the interface. [...] In any case, I'm extremely glad
| Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX.
|
| Yes, it's so good that all this "excessive metadata" was
| replaced by... even worse metadata, and white space, and all
| the metadata is above and below comments because having giant
| margins is absolutely necessary, so information density
| absolutely tanked to non-existent.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| I honestly prefer to see sites made by people who don't know
| how to design anything. The people who do know how to design
| websites seem to be either malicious or designing in the
| interest of some alien species from another dimension- see
| how bad Discourse looks, whitespace galore, too low density.
| Its modern polish is both its strength and its weakness.
| berns wrote:
| > In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and
| democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an
| adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
|
| Discourse is 100% open source.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the
| first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a
| very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user
| icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures.
| They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by
| copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more
| like a natural discussion that way.
| mig39 wrote:
| I host a bunch of Discourse sites. You can do it yourself on a
| 1GB server.
|
| The docker install is super easy.
| joe-collins wrote:
| Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server,
| and there's something else massive that we've lost:
| searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal
| searches, _after you 've joined a particular server_, but
| they're utter black boxes to the outer world.
|
| I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination)
| where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord.
| Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to
| share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you
| start running into structural problems for information sharing:
| Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a
| scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive
| channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't
| tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions,
| endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
| insightcheck wrote:
| The more fragile presence of the information is actually a
| feature to some. If messages are more permanent and
| accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think
| before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of
| having a free-flowing conversation.
|
| I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and
| public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with
| someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message
| that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think
| it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or
| relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums
| structured like HN or Reddit.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Yes, but not for e.g technical help channels. I don't want
| a personal relationship with another user of xx OSS tool -
| I want to search for the error message and find previous
| answers.
| joe-collins wrote:
| On the one hand, I met my partner in a community that uses
| Discord, so I can't disagree that developing relationships
| there can work.
|
| On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is
| endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>"
| "check the pins".
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>"
| "check the pins".
|
| This was still a thing back during the days of forums.
|
| No, reading comprehension in humanity hasn't improved
| over the last 20~30 years.
| antifa wrote:
| But back then you could google it.
| conductr wrote:
| Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of
| forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People
| were helping others and I could find it later.
|
| Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers,
| never even read a book about it, but when I searched I'd find
| tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the
| expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I
| search something similar it's pretty much ads and stack
| overflow. SO is good but at times I don't like how it's so
| strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate
| pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on
| Reddit but I've long learned to just live without that.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Expert sex change! Blast from the past. Pen Island too!
| holler wrote:
| Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of
| comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im and I'm
| interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| Discord's UX is a disaster for most of the things I've seen
| Discord used for. Lately, I don't even bother trying.
| Nowado wrote:
| It just keeps happening.
|
| People used email lists for everything, then forums for
| everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now
| using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest
| to educate users on picking communication tool for their
| purpose.
| chx wrote:
| The wiki situation is _really_ not helped by how wikia turned
| into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure
| whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any
| more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that
| away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
| insightcheck wrote:
| The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and
| several others for less popular games) remain active,
| though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find
| some for particularly niche games, as some information
| (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than
| nothing for smaller games.
|
| [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia
| turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire.
|
| Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect
| solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each
| niche.
|
| How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there
| it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even
| ads...
| egypturnash wrote:
| Gotta make a profit.
|
| Gotta make the most profit possible. At any cost.
|
| Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time
| your Internet connection would have come with some
| hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for
| your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's
| just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give
| you a space to put your _content_ that 's framed with
| ads.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.
| piperswe wrote:
| There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names
| - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have
| all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports
| everything about a page, including history) still intact
| last I checked.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Someone will copy your wiki's content into Fandom and
| Fandom will starve you voa SEO.
| antifa wrote:
| If that's really happening, then DCMA take-down?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your
| community (they will ban you if you link to the new
| community) and having more SEO juice than you.
| Arcorann wrote:
| Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis
| where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when
| many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010),
| leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know
| whether they still do this nowadays, but after that
| incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again
| (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms,
| usually Miraheze).
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| Completely agree. Since I've enjoyed taking a look at some
| of the good community run wikis others have posted, I'll
| shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging
| into the lore of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe.
| Arcorann wrote:
| There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to
| avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which
| is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on
| donations).
|
| [1] https://miraheze.org/
| nerdponx wrote:
| The Dota 2 wiki is pretty much the canonical "technical
| reference" for the game.
| joe-collins wrote:
| There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with
| exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they _are_
| exceptions.
| wishfish wrote:
| I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for
| moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in
| good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the
| Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past.
| Detailed information. Even the comments are good.
|
| Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but
| not mainstream or AAA.
| mjr00 wrote:
| There's probably more than you think -- they can just
| hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of
| Google, as has been discussed here recently [0].
|
| As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for
| info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese
| platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to
| the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki",
| followed by more generic information such as its
| Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half
| of the second page results that you'll find a link to
| RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and
| documents pretty much every detail about the game.
|
| In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there
| are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will
| never show up at the top of Google results. I still post
| in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have
| all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd
| never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google
| search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on
| the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are
| in the same boat.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010
|
| [1] https://rabidb.com/
| Sharparam wrote:
| What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"?
| Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check
| various technical details on games and any tricks that
| can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older
| games.
| Arainach wrote:
| Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the
| problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a
| server with PHP and a database and install your choice of
| tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of
| the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still
| fundamentally works today.
|
| However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in
| running any service involving user-generated content that's not
| guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can
| make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum
| or not.
| 02020202 wrote:
| fivre wrote:
| rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the
| primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members
| will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most
| discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really
| much in channels other than the collection of initial messages
| that started a thread.
|
| i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump
| mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to
| the top of a list, they just stay in their original
| chronological order), and in the thread view where there is,
| you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for
| threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads
| is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when
| replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the
| channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might
| help.
| nottorp wrote:
| Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that
| I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that
| some of the treads you're in have new messages.
|
| The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see
| at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested,
| isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
| KhalPanda wrote:
| I don't think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted
| communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of
| modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most
| popular. Otherwise there's NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin,
| IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.
|
| The larger "problem" is the world has moved on. For its flaws,
| people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella
| sites like Reddit.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The joy is probably the lack of friction.
| neovive wrote:
| Flarum (https://flarum.org/) is an interesting option.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Discourse also offers free hosting for OSS projects.
| SXX wrote:
| There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for
| any existing community. We end up asking for hosting
| sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse
| there.
|
| Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is
| unfortunately very much useless for any existing community.
| And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-
| profit open source project.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Good to know
| derefr wrote:
| > Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server
| by accident)
|
| You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set
| of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast
| user switching" between said accounts.
| snapdeus wrote:
| You can't switch users on mobile!
| aendruk wrote:
| ...and I'd be terrified of using that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all
| of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be
| great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss
| some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will
| spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as
| useful
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are
| you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or
| mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other
| subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?
| projektfu wrote:
| Reddit has active communities of people who just repost
| other subreddits to laugh at, get outraged at, or bully. In
| theory the bullying and brigading is supposed to be
| moderated against but weakly moderated niche subreddits can
| sometimes find themselves under attack.
|
| That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about
| Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Sites for pointing at people and mocking them for being
| different have been with us much longer than Reddit.
| SomethingAwful. 4chan. LJDrama. alt.fan.warlord. The
| current main site in this space is Kiwifarms and I sure
| won't be sad if Cloudflare finally decides to stop
| protecting them from the DDOS consequences of their
| actions.
|
| Bulletin boards with any kind of roadbump to registration
| could make it a bit harder for a bunch of atrocity
| tourists to start showing up and mocking someone directly
| but you sure couldn't stop them from screenshotting you
| and kicking you around on _their_ board.
|
| (okay alt.fan.warlord is maybe a _bit_ of a stretch given
| that it was generally confined to only making fun of
| people 's signature blocks, but...)
| [deleted]
| googlryas wrote:
| It happens if a niche reddit has a popular post and makes
| it near the front page. Or, someone makes a post that gets
| the attention of one of the brigading subs(even if mods
| remove post as soon as they see it, it might be too late).
| Usually the sub will have an influx of low quality
| posts/shitposts for a while after that.
|
| Also, not subreddit-subreddit, but multiplex times, posts
| of mine got reported to admins for hate speech because I
| said "retarder" in a mechanical focused subreddit, and I
| suppose they don't care to take the time to realize it's a
| perfectly fine piece of technology and not an ableist slur
| before sending out threats of banning you forever from the
| site.
| atwood22 wrote:
| Reddit is pretty much dead IMO. There seems to be a few
| substantial posts, if that, per day. Discord is way more
| active.
| airtonix wrote:
| immibis wrote:
| the fuck
| [deleted]
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Why would you expect a business to provide a free service in
| perpetuity? Some people ar eso entitled and naive.
| [deleted]
| stavros wrote:
| Zulip is a much better communication medium than Slack, is
| faster, has better UX and is open source.
|
| I hope this move by Slack accelerates migration to Zulip.
| alberth wrote:
| > Zulip [has] better UX [than Slack]
|
| While yes I like the thread model, I don't believe most users
| would agree and say Zulip UX is better.
| stavros wrote:
| Really? I'm surprised many people would disagree. Slack is
| slow, bloated, has threading as an afterthought, is really
| hard to navigate, and is very bad at traversing history.
|
| In Slack, if I've been away and going through channels to see
| what I've missed, and want to go back to something I just
| saw, it's impossible to find again unless I remember the
| channel name. In Zulip, just scroll up.
| signalblur wrote:
| Did you play Eve-O by chance?
| stavros wrote:
| No, sadly :(
| flerchin wrote:
| alt-left to go back. Just like a browser.
| alberth wrote:
| There is a massive difference in # of users of Slack vs. #
| of users of Zulip. Easily 2 orders of magnitude.
|
| People literally like the UI/UX of a Slack so much more
| than Zulip they are willing to pay for it vs. using a
| complete free Zulip alternative.
|
| I'm not trying to be negative. Just don't let a vocal
| minority cause confirmation basis. People have spoken with
| their wallets on Slacks UI/UX.
| stavros wrote:
| You're telling me that everyone who's used Slack has used
| Zulip and just found Slack better?
| ABS wrote:
| I find Zulip unbeareable and feel like I was sent back to
| the 1990s but IRC in the 90s was much better than Zulip in
| the 2020s.
|
| I literally cannot follow anything and be productive in
| Zulip for communities with a reasonable number of people
| (e.g. Quarkus).
|
| Some of it is obviously personal taste and habits
| danpalmer wrote:
| While this is a slimy tactic from Slack, I doubt that
| organisations significantly under the 10k message limit over 90
| days are actually benefitting from it.
|
| That's 110 messages a day. Fewer than ~5 users and regular
| personal IM applications are probably easier to use than Slack.
| Fewer than 20 messages a day and the messages are probably long
| enough form that email or documents would be a better option.
|
| Slack is a lot of overhead to read just a few messages, and is
| definitely best when multiple channels become necessary, and when
| not using it for email-length messages.
| ledauphin wrote:
| I am sorry to report from the front lines that such users and
| use cases do, in fact, exist.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Sure, but are they getting more value out of slack? I've been
| in many slack channels that would be better as email, IM, or
| other formats. I feel like many jump on the slack bandwagon
| because it's popular rather than critically evaluating it
| next to other options.
|
| What do you feel it brings for these very small and low
| volume use-cases over alternatives?
| stevebmark wrote:
| Please understand that Zulip is nightmare software and it's
| absolutely not a replacement for useful productivity team
| software. Zulip is a joke (and an unfunny joke at that) for so
| many reasons. I've worked at three companies that tried and
| abandoned Zulip, all for good reason.
| jakobnissen wrote:
| That's interesting - I've used Zulip casually and it's always
| been more responsive and stable than Slack, which has endless
| UI glitches both on my phone and laptop.
|
| Not to mention that Zulip has some nice features like sane
| markdown and latex integration.
|
| What has your problems with Zulip been?
| deadbeef57 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Zulip. I use it heavily on
| leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages/week). I've never used
| it in the setting of a company.
|
| What kind of issues did you hit? Doesn't sound fair to me to
| call Zulip an unfunny joke without providing any serious
| reason.
| dsr_ wrote:
| We have been self-hosting Zulip for about 3 years now and it is
| immensely popular.
|
| It would be nice if there were a good fail over or cluster
| model so we could run it at multiple sites.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| I'm just wondering why these services need centralised hosting to
| begin with. Peer-to-peer networking isn't new, Blockchain as a
| tech could take care of decentralised but shared information.
|
| And I don't mean that a company of 10 people depends on each
| other, their messages are also hashed, seeded, encrypted, etc. on
| the entire network. Each company and each individual can have
| their own unique key that's used to make their own messages and
| content readable again.
|
| Of course, a company should be able to choose to only share
| messages across their own employees and not to anyone outside, if
| they are wary of security issues. Messages could have set
| expirations, too, etc.
|
| We shouldn't need an expensive middle-man. It should be a free
| open-source project.
|
| But I'm not a networking expert. Is this simply not feasible for
| other reasons? I'd love to work on such a project as a software
| engineer, for sure.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been
| seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was
| closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was
| exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions
| from Google Reader with one click.
|
| I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business
| models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something
| extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up
| sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
| sdwr wrote:
| That casts Google shutting down dozens of products in a
| different light!
| insightcheck wrote:
| > "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of
| business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy
| something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck
| up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
|
| It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was
| with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know
| personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free
| plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched
| services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a
| lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database
| formats).
|
| I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally,
| as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually
| fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market
| leaders slip up.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Slack has actually caused this same situation before. Tuple
| benefited when Slack shut down ScreenHero.
|
| https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...
| deadbeef57 wrote:
| Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better
| than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the
| conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had
| too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only
| used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation.
|
| Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is
| dumping on users.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate
| are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I
| didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard
| of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.
| pygy_ wrote:
| Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_...
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202...
|
| https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic
| samstave wrote:
| DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX.
|
| Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills
| old.reddit, exodus will happen.
|
| -
|
| But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the
| consumption/participation model as opposed to just the
| eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...
|
| The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the
| UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push,
| while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable,
| that shit was dead.
|
| Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are
| actively killing their UX.
| notatoad wrote:
| This is one of those things where the distinction between
| "UI" and "UX" really matters. reddit is fucking up the UI,
| but the content is still reddit. digg fundamentally changed
| the content they displayed from community driven to
| publisher and power-user driven. they could have survived a
| redesign if they hadn't also pivoted the whole product
| direction at the same time.
| xtracto wrote:
| > Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills
| old.reddit, exodus will happen.
|
| I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder
| how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was
| basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok,
| etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near
| future the number of people that use old.reddit.com
| exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of
| people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is
| "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of
| the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like
| :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the
| new reddit).
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I
| assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit
|
| You're not missing much
| samstave wrote:
| I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the
| things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive
| mobile consumers, is that information density is super
| high with old.reddit and RES.
|
| I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed
| - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I
| have the 1,000 Karma Stare.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I
| assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit
|
| For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey
| script that converts those codes to the proper custom
| Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at
| least:
|
| https://justpaste.it/6624t
| jprd wrote:
| It is still so friggin' weird to me that Reddit had the
| longevity over Digg.
| t-writescode wrote:
| IIRC, ads and paid posts caused Digg to lose over Reddit. I
| didn't use either at the time, but people I know did.
| samstave wrote:
| Yes. This is exactly what happened.
|
| DIGG basically became what new Reddit looks like now, but
| they were specifically transparent that every post was
| essentially a paid marketing blob and the corporate
| commercial took over all of DIGG - pissed everyone off
| and they all flocked to Reddit.
|
| Reddit is doing the same thing, however, when DIGG messed
| around with the UX, bots were not a thing in the same
| form they are now...
|
| "Video killed the radio star" but now it's
|
| "Bot killed any sense of trust on social media"
| agumonkey wrote:
| > If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
|
| Plausible, but if it really does happen it will be a
| landmark. Modern losing against old and ~crippled UX.
| raydev wrote:
| > If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
|
| You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit
| gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit
| is.
| techsin101 wrote:
| it's becoming tiktok slowly
| dagurp wrote:
| moved on to what?
| pwpw wrote:
| I have to imagine most users are mobile or it's actively
| trending in that direction
| raydev wrote:
| To using reddit as reddit intends, either the default
| interface on the web (so not old.reddit), or even more
| likely the first-party apps on iOS and Android.
| lebaux wrote:
| To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made
| enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO
| plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and
| as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend
| and it will work better". It was never ment to become a
| project.
|
| Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years
| later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am
| the only other guy working with him.
|
| Transport of data was at that time trivial.
| d3fault wrote:
| I haven't seen Mattermost [0] mentioned by anyone here,
| especially considering it's open-source and you can self-host.
| Admittedly, it has been a while since I've done some research on
| these platforms, but is there something I'm missing that makes
| Zulip or Rocketchat better?
|
| [0] https://mattermost.com/
| olingern wrote:
| If Zulip became an overnight success, five to seven years from
| now I see them making similar changes. Resources cost money and
| Slack achieved what it needed to in order to establish itself as
| the dominant company in the space.
|
| If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Slack isn't dominant. They sold to Salesforce because they
| couldn't beat Microsoft on distribution in the enterprise, and
| saw the writing on the wall.
|
| I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What
| resources will be saved by this change?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Slack only lost because of Microsoft using their near-
| monopoly in one space to take over another. Almost like this
| is a pattern of behavior for them.
|
| Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. It
| could never survive in the marketplace on its own merits.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is.
|
| That's why Microsoft won. It's better than Slack for the
| people that make the purchase decisions. Who cares what the
| users think if they're not the ones that make that
| decision.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Teams is horrible, of course. Like I said, Microsoft won
| cause of enterprise market dominance.
| stavros wrote:
| I can self-host Zulip, so I don't care what they do, as long as
| they're alive.
| williamstein wrote:
| One difference is that Zulip is 100% open source, whereas Slack
| is not.
| jwmoz wrote:
| Cough up.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Head of product of Slack recently said in an interview:
| [paraphrased] "We don't want to make money, the founder wants
| adoption"
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| How does Slack make money off the free plan? If they don't, I
| don't see that anyone has any business complaining about any
| changes they make to it whatsoever
| nirui wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This limit sounded reasonable. In fact, I would rather set such
| limit myself to prevent leaks (for example, my Telegram account
| is set to delete if I'm inactive for 60 days).
|
| IMO, private chat message SHOULD be temporary by default, and
| made persistent only if user decides to achieve it. I also don't
| use chat services to share my PPTs/PDF/other files in general,
| there are way better place to do such thing than in an IM.
|
| As long as Slack don't delete my account and chat rooms (and it's
| settings), it's fine by me.
|
| Also... Smart move, Zulip
| verdverm wrote:
| HACK: If you want to save all of your current slack messages,
| sign up for https://orbit.love, connect it to slack, and then
| grab the messages from the API. Not sure how much longer this
| will work, it takes time and they may catch on.
|
| I do like Orbit as a user, still a relatively new product
| hedora wrote:
| As I was reading your message my brain inserted a second step,
| where you use a slack bot / api to reinject all the messages
| back into slack, but with today's date.
|
| Unlimited storage; 90 day retention! Whee!
| dsr_ wrote:
| Every multi-user communication system invented after Usenet tries
| to fix some shortcoming in Usenet while (sometimes intentionally)
| throwing out some part of the essential usefulness of Usenet.
|
| Zulip comes pretty close, though.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| Gen F? People who demand free stuff and complain like babies
| instead of building a solution based on an existing docker image
| in 1 day
| OOD wrote:
| userbinator wrote:
| IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've
| logged...
|
| One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty
| understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone
| typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little
| over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack
| of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes, and searching history in slack is very painful, I have no
| use for history in slack, might as well delete it after 2 days.
|
| With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want
| using any tool you want.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I normally use localslackirc (which I mostly wrote)
| https://github.com/ltworf/localslackirc to use slack.
|
| I can grep through the logs if I need to find something.
| That's really really fast compared to their search on the
| website.
|
| I also get other advantages such as not automatically being
| forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence
| notifications from certain users that abuse them.
| christophilus wrote:
| From the size and performance of their website, I'd guess
| they've probably found a way to make their costs much greater.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Replacing slack with IRC really doesn't feel like a sincere
| proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push
| notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video
| calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no
| configuration or research.
|
| The only way it's going to fly is if your organization is
| entirely hacker types.
| userbinator wrote:
| I did work at one company where the main means of
| communication was an IRC server on the intranet. Calls were
| done through VoIP and file sharing was via the usual shares
| --- usually the coworker's machine, but central servers were
| also available. Of course this was a company that specialised
| in networking and communications products, so perhaps they
| were more inclined to do such a thing (and we "dogfooded" all
| of our products too), but nonetheless it was a great
| experience.
| RunSet wrote:
| >The only way it's going to fly is if your organization is
| entirely hacker types.
|
| Read that as "IRC has integrated anti-non-hacker technology."
|
| Consider holding physical meetings with hard copies of
| reading material (or at least some Lorem ipsum) to occupy the
| other employees.
| Teckla wrote:
| _IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you 've
| logged..._
|
| The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of
| server-side history.
| manquer wrote:
| To me it is a feature not a limitation
| aendruk wrote:
| So read it as:
|
| > The biggest problem with IRC [for Slack's principle use
| case, which does not apply to me] has always been its lack
| of server-side history.
|
| You can understand that while still personally preferring
| another messaging model.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I have no idea why you wouldn't mind that, but thats fine,
| you do you. I am curious though, if you don't mind sharing
| why?
|
| To everybody else who are hit by this, they would not
| consider it a feature but a pretty serious limitation,
| since if you didn't care about server side logging in first
| the place why would you mind messages disappearing after 90
| days?
|
| Regardless though, IRC also doesn't persist user names
| which I think is a serious limitation.
| megous wrote:
| Server side history and SaaS frontends is the biggest
| misfeature of all the modern chat services. (and
| corresponding lack of client side history logging)
|
| Every single time I have to join one of these new chat
| systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of
| messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.
|
| There's no way I can use a chat service for business
| communication without having an archive of communication. If
| you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export
| option (or it's surely is well hidden).
|
| With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't
| have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the
| basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online
| status tracking.
| blueflow wrote:
| But: It does not randomly change payment tiers or features or
| require a client update. In fact, IRC works stable for like,
| 40 years now?
| mrweasel wrote:
| One of my main concerns about IRC, for the average user, is the
| lack of good modern clients. IRCCloud is pretty good, but
| that's also sort of missing one of the point with IRC, to me at
| least.
|
| That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI
| either... Actually it's horribly confusing.
| lolinder wrote:
| Slack allows image and file uploads, and in every slack I've
| been on that feature is used heavily. Those stack up fast.
| insightcheck wrote:
| Yeah, even if file uploads are disabled and limited to
| sharing links (e.g. from Google Drive), screenshots will be
| very useful for communication, for a long while.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| We need a IRC client that will convert images to ASCII art.
|
| no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)
| sweetbitter wrote:
| I've seen a matrix client that does this, 'Gomuks' if I
| recall correctly.
| major505 wrote:
| I mean, where are we gonna go? Microsoft Teams? Damn thing is
| terrible.
|
| I guess Discord can be a option.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Good time for NetMeeting to make a return.
| vel0city wrote:
| A cheap VPS could easily host your own Zulip or Mattermost
| server. Then you can be in charge of your own data.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Google Workspace Chat! jk
| smabie wrote:
| Telegram is pretty good
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Teams is a mess, but it's a Microsoft supported mess that
| integrates with the rest of their mess. Granted I run version
| 1.5.00.23452 as of today which is even more messy than public.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Maybe our needs aren't terribly great, but Teams works pretty
| well in our enterprise. ~3000 users.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If teams works great for you I don't think I want to work
| there.
|
| Some idiot higher up thought it was a great idea to switch
| from Slack to Teams, presumably because they have a vendetta
| against it, and our communication experience and
| effectiveness (especially cross-border) absolutely crumpled.
|
| My biggest problem with Teams is the same as Jira. It gives
| you _so much_ rope to hang yourself with.
|
| Everybody and their mother wants to create a whole Team for
| their pet project, and then invites the whole organisation,
| because there is no way to discover existing teams.
| icelancer wrote:
| MS Teams is garbage. When I did some consulting for
| Microsoft recently I was added to a Slack channel. Even the
| engineers at Microsoft I work with don't use it.
|
| One developer at my company uses Teams for video meetings
| instead of our corporate Zoom account. I don't know why. So
| like 5-10% of the meetings I go to I have to suffer through
| Teams' inferior audio and interactive experience.
| kirbyfan64sos wrote:
| ...Zulip, the author of this blog post?
| bee_rider wrote:
| A new one will pop up.
|
| It is the chat client circle of life. An old chat client has to
| do something unpopular to obtain some return on investment.
| Users look for a new solution. They find one that is still in
| the "basically mature but trying to grow marketshare by using
| investor money to provide services and features for free." It
| works well while that investor money holds out/as long as they
| can get more ("look at our user growth!"). Eventually investors
| get tired of paying for things, look for an ROI, and they have
| to do something unpopular...
|
| Hopefully the "gamer" branding will keep Discord in their niche
| for a little longer. It will be a shame when we all have to
| transfer our gaming groups to something different.
| andix wrote:
| They should just make it to 3 months -or- 10.000 messages and
| everybody will be happy.
| kazinator wrote:
| Can't you use some channel bot to archive everything?
| deadbeef57 wrote:
| Big fan of Zulip here. Admittedly, I haven't used Zulip in the
| context of a company. But I'm a happy user of -
| leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages / week) -
| coq.zulipchat.com (~1200 messages / week) -
| categorytheory.zulipchat.com (~600 messages / week)
|
| as well as the quieter - isabelle.zulipchat.com
| - hott.zulipchat.com
|
| For research groups, it seems to work exceedingly well. The UI is
| unobtrusive, and values my screen real estate. (Slack only
| devotes < 50% of the screen to the actual conversation. On Zulip,
| the list of users and threads are delegated to the margins, so
| that the actual messages have the center stage.)
|
| Besides that, I find that Zulip found the Goldilocks-equilibrium
| with its threading model. It works really well for both
| synchronous and asynchronous conversations, and you can easily
| switch back and forth between the two within one thread.
|
| I'm a big fan.
| zaik wrote:
| I wish they would integrate an IRC or XMPP gateway per default.
| I know that #isabelle is visible in isabelle.zulipchat.com, but
| if the instance admin does not enable it, there's no way to
| participate using the standard IM protocols.
| nyellin wrote:
| Slacks pricing model makes sense for business workspaces, but it
| doesn't work well for public communities.
|
| I run the Slack community for https://github.com/robusta-
| dev/robusta
|
| We'd gladly pay, but pricing needs to be different when you have
| a community that is open to the public and has far, far more
| users than the size of your company.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Same. I have some slacks with friend groups on the free tier.
| We'd like to see message history and would pay a bit for it...
| but the enterprise rates are way too high for random social
| groups.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Seeing this, and then seeing Heroku cut its free plan...isn't
| this just Salesforce dictating the future of the companies they
| acquire? Salesforce is traditionally an incredibly expensive
| platform and there really aren't many things you get for free
| with them. The focus seems to be shifting to enterprise
| customers(even more so than before).
|
| (Salesforce developer here)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Please stop using Slack/Discord for forum replacements. Forums
| can be indexed and found. Slack/Discord is like pissing in the
| wind. Here today, gone three hours from now.
| chrisan wrote:
| > Please stop using Slack/Discord for forum replacements
|
| I always thought it was replacing irc and other previous chat
| platforms (google chat, hipchat, skype, icq, etc)?
| insightcheck wrote:
| An interesting partial solution to an older, niche Discord
| community I've found was the creation and sharing of a "lore
| document" of important insights and parts of the community's
| history.
|
| I generally agree that knowledge-sharing helps more people if
| it's easily searchable via Google, but then again, it's also
| possible that the interactions would be different without the
| exclusivity. Many events in the community's history may have
| never happened if it were more public.
| [deleted]
| rynop wrote:
| guilded.gg is a great alternative for this use case (and many
| others). Transparency: I work there.
| zenith035 wrote:
| If people have small communities on slack they can use Niche
| Community https://niche.community
| mdaniel wrote:
| I find that landing page insulting to anyone who might want to
| learn what that product is and why I should use it. So your
| webpage allows me to play basketball or go hiking together, is
| that what it does? Only by going to "the changelog" link,
| because I'm a curious fellow, does one find the discovery page
| and see an actual implementation:
| https://niche.community/niche/pzd3x67l0gmqn/hackernews/
|
| > What is the current stage of Niche Community?
|
| > Niche Community is in the early stages of its development.
|
| Yeah, no kidding
| itsmeste wrote:
| I was using Slack to manage notes on my personal research
| projects. I never used any features besides channels, messages,
| and search. I loved it's UI, rich-text features, accessibility,
| and reliability. Amount of workspace messages after 5 years is
| 1154. Besides that, I'm using Slack's business+ plan in the
| corporate teams I'm leading.
|
| Again needing to migrate from a once great app that's now getting
| ruined by Salesforce, again with no complete export features
| available, I start feeling ridiculed.
|
| Zulip looks promising, and they even support good imports from
| Slack. However, their UI just feels too cluttered with all those
| borders around messages, and their rich-text support isn't as
| convenient as Slack's.
|
| A majority of my team members felt the same, and we decided to
| spend a day for hosting an internal contest to build a basic
| alternative to Slack that we happily migrated our personal
| workspaces to.
|
| What Slack could've done better: - Saving money at other places
| than the most critical one for backwards compatibility, message
| retention - Store messages locally, instead of on their servers -
| Offer complete exports - Don't advertise this change as
| "beneficial for free users" - As a last resort, offer one-time
| payments instead of a per-user subscription model
| huxflux wrote:
| They finally got us guys! is anyone surprised at all?
| bborud wrote:
| My goodness people need to rein in their sense of entitlement. It
| is a free tier.
|
| Buy the product.
| bborud wrote:
| Or better yet: build an alternative that is good.
| rr808 wrote:
| Salesforce strikes again
| tedk-42 wrote:
| f#ck salesforce
|
| same thing with heroku
| Liron wrote:
| This is amazing marketing. I would never know or care about Zulip
| but I like how they're dissing Slack so now I'll keep them in
| mind.
| jms703 wrote:
| Good. Slack history isn't documentation. Long term data retention
| seems bad anyway.
| [deleted]
| northisup wrote:
| http://discord.com
| agluszak wrote:
| No, discord is not a good alternative. We just have to wait
| until they pull the rug from under their free users in order to
| aggressively monetize. And I think that will hurt much more
| than Slack.
| Teckla wrote:
| I like, and use, Discord daily, and like it a lot.
|
| But I have to agree: _Eventually_ , management will start to
| more aggressively monetize it (i.e., "pull the rug from under
| their free users").
|
| Truly free (e.g., IRC) alternatives seem like the only long-
| term solution, otherwise people will keep stumbling from one
| commercial platform to another, because they never last.
| zhfliz wrote:
| not just that, they're also incredibly hostile to users
| trying to retain privacy.
|
| they're requiring phone number validation just after
| registration or you run the risk that they suddenly lock your
| account, demanding a phone number for "abuse prevention".
| depending on ip reputation and possibly other factors it may
| be impossible to use it in the first place without providing
| a phone number.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| So, Element/Matrix it is, then? I'm not sure how it holds up
| to slack, having never touched Slack myself, however it fills
| the Discord niche for me.
| [deleted]
| smashah wrote:
| I hope this is a wake up call for OSS projects that communicate
| from Slack to migrate to discord. And for discord based projects
| to have a plan to commit valuable conversations to a more open
| and permanent record.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I hope this is a wake up call for OSS projects that communicate
| via Slack to migrate to Zulip and turn on the public thread
| option so those chats show up in search results
|
| Going from one closed ecosystem to another closed ecosystem
| sounds like the makings for having to do that migration again
| when Discord does something evil this time next year
|
| I'm looking at you, kubernetes.slack.com
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I've never subscribed to replacing documentation with Slack
| search. Use markdown, wysiwyg, whatever fits the org and restore
| good hygiene. The culture will probably improve as well.
| ikiris wrote:
| Why are we basically posting some barely disguised ad piece for
| zulip?
| can16358p wrote:
| Sure it's an ad piece, but it's telling the truth.
|
| Smart move from Zulip.
| megous wrote:
| > However, Slack's policies do not allow organizations on the
| Free or Pro plans to export their private channels and private
| message history.
|
| I guess, but individual users can still periodically sync
| everything they have access to via regular API to some database
| for archival purposes. That includes the private messages. You
| can workaround these limits that way.
| garfieldnate wrote:
| I tried using Zulip for a short period of time at a small company
| with lots of chat and was completely overwhelmed by the volume of
| messages that that I had alerts for. There didn't seem to be any
| obvious way to choose not to include the whole company in a
| conversation by default, allowing them instead to opt in. I had
| thousands of unread messages and just declared bankruptcy by
| deciding not to read all of them. I mostly had to just wait for
| someone to @mention me.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| I hate the state of chat right now. IRC is the kind of open
| standard and FOSS technology we need, but terribly outdated,
| Slack and Co. are shiny but inflexible and locked in.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| My favorite is still Stackoverflow's channels for community
| discussions. It sucks that SO didn't find time to invest in the
| channels. I hate Slack and Discord for creating broken siloed
| communities.
| buzzwords wrote:
| I would imagine this is the first wave of changes to come.
| Salesforce wants to see bigger profits so more and more changes
| will come.
| hankman86 wrote:
| The 90 day cap on the search history essentially turns the free
| plan into a time-limited trial. Slack is probably happy to part
| ways with whoever still cannot justify their subscription price
| after that time. They will have figured that these users are not
| likely to upgrade to a paid tier at a later date either. As a
| for-profit entity, Slack has no reason to offer a free service to
| a longtail of non-paying users.
|
| From a business perspective, this makes perfectly good sense.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > whoever still cannot justify their subscription price after
| that time
|
| There's also a lost opportunity in not selling these users a
| subscription at a lower price. Products like Gmail partly
| succeeded because that's what people used at home, so they
| wanted to use something equally good at work.
|
| If you push users towards alternative in their private life,
| you risk that they want to bring new product into work.
| badrabbit wrote:
| No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord,
| migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality
| but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But
| discord and pals not so much.
|
| Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet
| and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms
| active in parallel.
|
| This is why I don't support any platform that does not also use
| an interoperable protocol. This includes Signal which won't let
| 3rd party clients connect to its servers. Protocol is a
| foundational element of communication. If you are designing a
| communication system that others that are strangers to your
| system can't talk to your users because you don't have a
| protocol, your system isolates users and is hostile to its very
| purpose:communication.
|
| I mean really, I rant here a bit but have all these smart people
| never heard of adversarial compatibility?
|
| For Matrix, I really wish they didn't associate with their
| flagship client, others who build clients have to also compete
| with the protocol authors, this should be a lesson to future
| communications systems designers.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| There's a talk that made the same points: _Signal: You were the
| chosen one_.
|
| https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-196-signal-you-were-the-chose...
|
| Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32244795
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Matrix too slow, missed important messages. Never again.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| I'm interested in matrix, how can I learn more and can you
| choose providers or clients, any recommendations?
| twicetwice wrote:
| Element [0] is the main/most popular client. FluffyChat [1]
| is also good. They both have web, Android, iOS, and desktop
| (Electron) apps. There are at least a dozen other clients but
| those are the only two I've tried so far.
|
| For hosting, I believe the flagship host is Element Matrix
| Services [2]. It's made by the same organization that leads
| development (it is all FOSS) of Element and the reference
| server Synapse.
|
| You can also self-host. Synapse is pretty slow and memory-
| hungry (it's written in Python), but for a small group it
| still fits pretty comfortably on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS.
| That's what I'm doing. It took less than an afternoon to set
| up (`apt install synapse` and then setting some config,
| mainly--there are a bunch of good guides online) and has been
| happily running ever since. Matrix is federated, so as long
| as you set up federation properly, you can seamlessly message
| anyone on any federated Matrix server. (Federation is opt-
| in.)
|
| There's also Dendrite and Conduit, Matrix servers written in
| Go and Rust respectively, which are much leaner and faster.
| Both are still in beta and missing some features, but are
| definitely usable.
|
| If you want to mess around with bots, I've had a lot of fun
| with both the Matrix Rust SDK [3] and JavaScript bot SDK [4].
| Both are quite easy to get started with, and as of a few
| months ago both support E2EE pretty painlessly too (not
| totally pain-free though lol), which is cool.
|
| Overall, the ecosystem is still maturing imo, but I've been
| using self-hosted Synapse and Element "in production"--it's
| me and my girlfriend's primary method of communication--for
| over a year now with only some minor UX hiccups (mostly
| issues decrypting E2EE messages in Element). I definitely
| encourage giving it a shot as long as you're willing to
| tolerate a few remaining growing pains.
|
| [0]: https://fluffychat.im/
|
| [1]: https://element.io/get-started
|
| [2]: https://element.io/matrix-services
|
| [3]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk
|
| [4]: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk
| ptman wrote:
| Synapse is no longer very slow or memory-hungry. It is
| being continuously optimised.
|
| "for instance Synapse uses 5-10x less RAM than it used to
| (my personal federated server is only using 145MB of RAM
| atm!" - https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-
| summer-special...
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Legend
| cge wrote:
| I'm on the matrix server of a research group that self-
| hosts matrix (Synapse). It has been quite low maintenance,
| has around 15 users, and as it's on a server that's already
| running the group's website, the running costs other than
| the time maintaining it are minimal.
|
| As an additional advantage over per-user-priced options, it
| has very low barriers for loose collaborations. There's no
| reason to fret over giving someone an account if they might
| ever use it. And if someone already has a matrix account
| elsewhere, federation means we can just add their accounts
| to our rooms.
| altantiprocrast wrote:
| In addition to what the sibling comment said, Beeper is a
| great 'all in one' bridges type of software. The client is
| proprietary, but still interoperable with the larger Matrix
| network (and they contribute to upstream too).
| benreesman wrote:
| You've got to have a pretty sticky and/or differentiated product
| before you won't see a lot of price/feature sensitivity in the
| skew-small groups who would be affected by this.
|
| Slack as a product is pretty good, but it's not wildly better
| than the other zillion messaging things. If you've got 10-100K
| people in your Slack, that's a high switching cost, but you're
| not using the free tier at that point.
|
| I have Slack along with Signal and Telegram and Discord and
| iMessage and Google Meet and IRC and and and and... some people I
| need to talk to are on it.
|
| But is it scratching any itch that I have as a small fry that
| isn't easily scratched elsewhere? Not really.
| yrgulation wrote:
| To where? Another free platform? You want quality services,
| without ads, you need to pay for them. Get used to it.
| aeturnum wrote:
| This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me,
| especially coming years after launching free instances. For
| smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces
| them to pay or lose months or years of history.
|
| To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about
| supporting what people are currently using their product for.
| They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase
| revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of
| users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but
| the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking
| around for other options.
| [deleted]
| chrisan wrote:
| Isn't slack a bit heavy for families/houses/groups of friends?
| Why not something like Telegram?
| Aeolun wrote:
| > To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about
| supporting what people are currently using their product for.
|
| Did you expect Salesforce to?
| jimvdv wrote:
| > pay or lose months or years of history.
|
| You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat
| history.
|
| Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don't think
| anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.
| macintux wrote:
| You can't download private messages, however.
| price wrote:
| No, some certainly were. There's one quoted in the blog post,
| for example.
|
| In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of
| chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific
| research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k
| messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to
| have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one
| wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)
|
| (I'm one of the Zulip developers.)
| cauthon wrote:
| > ather for something focused like scientific research, you
| can go years and years without reaching 10k messages
|
| I don't know what kind of scientists you've worked with,
| but I haven't met any so short-winded
| prepend wrote:
| I work with a ton of scientists (and am one myself) and
| I'm a member of multiple slack channels with hundreds of
| members that are years old and only have a 1-2k messages.
|
| An example is a Python users group where there's maybe a
| few threads a week. And it's really useful to search for
| old threads.
|
| Another is a hackathon with maybe 30 people where there
| were a few hundred messages over a week and then 1
| message a month.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Self host a forum...
| prepend wrote:
| That's what I'll end up doing. Pretty much migrating all
| these chats off slack.
|
| Interestingly, these led to lots of pie licenses and
| we're migrating all these over too.
|
| Once we're self hosting a server then we don't need the
| paid license either.
|
| Seems kind of much for $100/year/user anyway. Teams is
| bundled in with o365 for nothing or little extra.
| [deleted]
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| sounds like now you know of plenty!
| aeturnum wrote:
| I don't mean to say that people were led to believe that free
| instances had no limits - just that this is a reversal of the
| nature of those limits. Groups that had planned based on the
| old limits are now in a tough spot.
|
| I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I
| am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within
| the slack client.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > pay or lose months or years of history.
|
| You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit
| in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7
| members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using
| it as clipboard across devices.
|
| Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:
|
| - potentially going to become paid customer eventually
| (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money)
| - never going to pay (families, online communities)
|
| Changing this to 90-days plan:
|
| - potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and
| either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers
| before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a
| win for slack. - Online communities most likely benefit from
| that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of
| messages a day - Family slacks probably don't care, they always
| knew old messages will go away
|
| The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company
| is because I use Slack at the day job.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| My rather large extended friend group uses Slack free quite
| heavily. We have less than 90 days history right now so are
| looking forward to the change. It is also nice to know exactly
| how long messages will be around for. I think people are
| overreacting.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| For users in the European Economic Area, could they get the
| private message export by making a subject access request using
| the GDPR?
| drKarl wrote:
| This will catch a lot of small teams unprepared, but to be honest
| they should've considered chat as ephemeral, and if something was
| worth keeping they should've persisted that elsewhere. Also that
| reminds me of the old days of IRC and how simple it was to keep
| logs of conversations.
| mikl wrote:
| One reason for this change might be all the dead Slack workspaces
| out there. I've been in over a dozen Slack workspaces over the
| years, and many of them were just used temporarily for one
| project or another. Slack probably has millions of such zombie
| workspaces, that pay no money, but with the simple 10k message
| limit system, they had to keep their data around forever.
| nmcela wrote:
| I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it
| forced our hands.
|
| We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external
| SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms
| and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will
| lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you.
| This has happened with other services we've used in the past too.
|
| So we decided to just start self-hosting our own private
| intranet. I've installed gitea, NextCloud, a private irc server
| (we're old school irssi users and love it, shoutout for thelounge
| -client too), a private social network site with Wordpress and
| Buddypress+BBpress with our own theme, among other things.
| Everything was super simple to setup and is trivial to maintain,
| works well across devices without any limitations. We control
| everything and don't have to worry about the big brother snooping
| our data. Along with these came many new business opportunities.
| So yeah, thanks slack.
| tomrod wrote:
| Have you put up a blogpost to compare the alternatives? We'd
| love to self-host in the mid-term.
| tebbers wrote:
| You're not a customer, you don't pay for the product. If you
| want to be treated like a customer, then pay for the product.
| This entitlement mindset is extraordinary. Slack was literally
| paying for you to use their product. Regardless, it sounds like
| you're happy with your move.
| capableweb wrote:
| Even if you pay for the product, using SaaS products VS
| hosting your own software, still puts you under someone
| else's control. The feature you really needed from them,
| might be decided that it should be removed, because only 1%
| of the total users actually used it, and you'll have no
| recourse.
|
| This has happened time and time again with most SaaS, and
| will continue to do so, unless some new model arrives where
| each user can run their own version.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Do you have integrated collab apps too ?
| yrgulation wrote:
| The freemium model needs to die. Entitled "customers" that dont
| pay are pita and thanks to their mindset we end up with stuff
| like facebook and generally speaking an ad filled internet.
| Sorry for the tone but i've had it.
| Gatsky wrote:
| This should be the top comment.
| jorl17 wrote:
| While I agree with the sentiment that external dependencies
| are a risk, why should this be the top comment?
|
| This person was having a service for free, having the
| possibility to pay and have better guarantees and is shocked
| that the service has changed its terms? How is this not an
| absurd mentality?
|
| If gmail suddenly became paid, I would be pretty pissed, but
| I would have no real reason. It's a service I have for free!!
| Not even my taxes pay for it.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Why? Because it describes a technical solution to a
| problem, instead of complaining/rationalising.
| rattray wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience, this is very useful!
|
| > Along with these came many new business opportunities
|
| Curious to hear more?
|
| Also curious how long you've been running this stack and how
| large your organization is?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| Welcome to the "Extenguish" phase of the business model ladies
| and gents. Now that you're all dependent on their product they're
| going to charge for all the free features that made you embrace
| it. What, did you think their business model was to generate a
| profit by giving everything away for free forever?
|
| PersonallyI stopped liking them after they ditched the irc
| gateway. That was when I realized that all this silicon valley
| free-service bullshit is just a short-term ploy to expand their
| customer-base as large as they can before the free VC money runs
| out and they have to generate a profit somehow.
| zacharybk wrote:
| Slack was, and is, a business tool; It was never intended for
| communities (though they clearly didn't discourage this type of
| usage).
|
| In Lenny's podcast (link below), you can listen to Slack's former
| head of product and growth, Merci Grace, talk about why they
| never implemented a block feature. The answer, like this 90 day
| limitation, is obvious once you look at it from the lens of a
| business tool.
|
| When you mistakenly look at Slack as a community tool, this
| change is bound to upset you. On a personal level, loss aversion
| sucks, and I'm sorry to lose all of the slack history that my
| wife and I had.
|
| https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1546515666420649984?s=21...
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Talk about entitled. First off, this is a CHAT system, not
| document storage. If you want permanence, send E-mail (and
| archive it).
|
| Second, it's FREE. Case closed.
| zackees wrote:
| s1k3s wrote:
| Get a $10 VPS and install Rocket Chat. Same functionality,
| supports hundreds of users.
| dabedee wrote:
| I would take this post with a grain of salt given it's written by
| a direct competitor who has many reasons to have a biased point
| of view. That they noticed people signing up in troves on their
| platform is a totally valid point. They do mention that fact, but
| a big disclaimer is the kind of information you'd like to see at
| the top of the article.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's on their corporate blog; I'm totally unfazed by the lack
| of disclaimer since it's literally running under their banner.
|
| Do you have any issues with the article?
| dabedee wrote:
| I didn't know Zulip or what they did prior to reading this,
| so I guess it's also contextual. I understand why they would
| advertize that they didn't change their plan even though
| Slack did and they are indeed free to post whatever they want
| on their corporate blog. I would just take it with a grain of
| salt given the underlying interests.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Oh, I agree completely that the article should be taken
| with a grain of salt but don't need a disclaimer. I also
| didn't really see anything in the article that made me
| suspicious.
| alberth wrote:
| This is a Saleforce thing.
|
| They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely
| revamped/ended their free tier this week.
| chris_wot wrote:
| OpenSource projects who relied on "free" slack were told by many,
| many people they were being stupid. And here is why.
| omegalulw wrote:
| I don't get this attitude. For an open source projects,
| especially ones not funded, properly utilizing free tools is
| key to success.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I see a general move towards "reducing costs at all costs", which
| at least for me, indicates that people are getting ready for the
| upcoming Autumn/Winter Economic crisis...
| matchagaucho wrote:
| _" But Clack's marketing team isn't happy with that! They ask the
| analytics team what can be done..."_
|
| (sigh) If meetings and analysis are required to assess
| alternatives to freemium collaboration apps, then you can afford
| the $9 per month :-/
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Setting aside that this is from a Slack competitor...
|
| > _one would be hard-pressed to find any who are excited about
| it_
|
| Me.
|
| You know all that bitching we collectively do about ad and
| tracking supported business models obsfuscating the cost of
| "free" products?
|
| The solution is being willing to pay for something you use and
| like.
| majormajor wrote:
| I would be excited if it applied to paid plans too so "oh the
| documentation is this ancient Slack thread" would stop being
| treated as a viable option. ;)
| a1371 wrote:
| I have like 7 Slacks. 2 of them are paid, 5 of them are hobby
| that I may use once a month. What are you suggesting? That I
| pay an extra $40/month just so that maybe I need an old message
| in one of those? I'd agree with you if Slack were indie devs
| but does Slack need my $40?
|
| The unhappiness comes from the fact that people want to rely on
| a service, even if it's free. It would make sense if this was a
| change for the sake of resources or paid user experience. This
| is for neither, just a tiny push for people to pay or leave.
| Ironically, It may make me want to stop paying because having
| all the conversations in one place is nice if I take the hobby
| slacks elsewhere
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| So I have to ask, why use Slack for hobby things instead of
| Discord? Is that driven by people used to having it at work?
| I'm confused by the thought of "hobby Slack channels".
| muppetman wrote:
| Discord is so childish. It's embarassing to have open.
| egKYzyXeIL wrote:
| In what way is Discord childish?
| muppetman wrote:
| Nitro banners, blobs, public servers with bowling balls
| etc. If you're just in a discussion it's fine but click
| the wrong place and it's like a teenage dream exploded.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| I feel like it's rather silly to be so concerned over
| something as trivial as that, like being worried over
| what other people think if you have a hello kitty bag.
| Life is entirely too short to be bothered by
| inconsequential external perception.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| Is it the friendly user-interface? The non-corporate
| artwork on curated pages? The community-vs-company-based
| branding?
|
| What about any of that is embarrassing or childish? That
| it's not specifically designed for corporate drudgery
| hell?
| muppetman wrote:
| Yea, pretty much, well put.
| raydev wrote:
| Being embarrassed by it seems childish. Who are you
| trying to impress?
| Spivak wrote:
| Especially since it's almost literally Slack except
| purple. The design and feature set are the same.
| muppetman wrote:
| And the giant "Nitro!" banners with blob melting faces
| and the rest. I don't know I uninstalled it after I made
| the mistake of installing it at work.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Discord is actually fairly annoying because so many things
| are on Discord and split between servers.
| kevincox wrote:
| How is this any different than slack being split between
| workspaces?
|
| It seems to me that the main organization model of Slack
| and Discord are the same.
| egKYzyXeIL wrote:
| I don't understand the point of your comment. How is it
| annoying that different interest groups are separated
| from each other? Reddit is split into different
| subredits, IRC is split into different servers and
| channels, forums do the same thing, I could go on. Would
| you rather everything be jumbled together in one place?
| icelancer wrote:
| I agree. My experience with Discord vs. Slack is not
| nearly what people seem to make it out to be. I find
| Discord significantly more confusing and the concept of
| "servers" is not one that makes any actual sense; they
| are using that word as a stand-in for
| rooms/workspaces/etc, but "servers" sounds better to
| gamers. I can't blame them, but it's confusing to me. Oh
| well. I'm old.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| I don't really get your source of confusion, The concept
| of a server makes perfect sense in so far as it's a self-
| contained "themed" communication space that contains many
| rooms a.k.a. channels.
| raydev wrote:
| > the concept of "servers" is not one that makes any
| actual sense; they are using that word as a stand-in for
| rooms/workspaces/etc
|
| What do you mean? The analogue to rooms would be
| channels, which falls under a server.
| barbs wrote:
| Paying for something does not necessarily mean you won't be
| tracked, or even not be shown ads ( Windows, anybody?).
|
| The better solution for that is to use open-source software.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Except we still get tracked in the paid stuff.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Exactly right. The whole "pay so they don't track you" thing
| is a trope of maybe more than a decade ago. Now you pay to
| get the basic feature you need and you'll get your data sold
| anyways.
| StopHammoTime wrote:
| The fact they track the amount of messages is analytics to
| begin with even if it has a valid reason.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'd be willing to pay, but not that much for my brother and I
| to chat every now and then.
|
| Their pricing is geared towards enterprises with big budgets,
| not family and friends, nor even interest groups. It's pretty
| much Discord everywhere now, and it's just a matter of time
| until Discord eats the enterprise market too...
| LunaSea wrote:
| Discord just isn't a good fit for B2B
| withinboredom wrote:
| Yet?
| insightcheck wrote:
| Hypothetically, I wonder how Discord would pull off a
| shift to enterprise. A big differentiator is that Discord
| is more for casual conversation. By changing the current
| successful product, it won't stand out versus
| Slack/Teams.
|
| However, a fork to a separate version of Discord sounds
| very, very costly in terms of resources. They would need
| a lot of software development (when their current
| developers are already occupied with the main app), and a
| costly marketing strategy too (to reframe Discord's fork
| as non-casual and suitable for business).
|
| The shift sounds very expensive, and I'm not sure how
| Discord could make it pay off.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I'm not sure how Discord could make it pay off.
|
| I dunno, enterprise sales sound like a fairly
| straightforward payoff to me. But I kinda don't want them
| to lose focus, and that would inevitably happen.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I think Google shows how non-trivial being good at
| enterprise sales is. It's a different mindset to become a
| "We never thought anyone would want to do that, but we
| realize it's a key feature for you, so we'll get it on
| the roadmap" company.
| hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote:
| jpm_sd wrote:
| > Your chat history should be a valuable knowledge repository
|
| No, no, no. Anything important needs to go into a document with
| some kind of shared permanence. Chats are not not not
| documentation! Have been burned by this too many times.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Curious if this is the first sign of what are likely to be more
| aggressive monetisation changes coming from Salesforce. I'd say
| that if this is a sign of things to come, it's time to plan your
| exit if you are on the free tier even if you aren't affected by
| this change.
|
| The good news is that Slack's success has bred a crop of much
| more free and open including self-hostable alternatives. It's a
| good time to check them out. Slack always was a bait and switch
| as a shallowly open but ultimately data-lockin play with a walled
| garden.
| nix23 wrote:
| >>I have recommended Slack for almost any project! I can't do
| that anymore... :-(
|
| Yeah, don't recommend something you have no control over DONT DO
| IT....EVER!!!
| cutierust wrote:
| zulip really is an amazing piece of software. Don't let the looks
| deceive you. They are "brutalist" because they are spending all
| the effort on UX and UI. If you download their terminal client,
| there is nothing to learn if you already know vim, and more
| importantly everything is very intuitive. Their messaging model
| is a bit different and needs an initial familiarization until it
| dawns on you that this is how messaging should be done anyway.
| stavros wrote:
| Extremely agree. After having used Zulip, Slack feels like
| going back to snail mail after email.
|
| Catching up on messages after days of being off is a breeze in
| Zulip. Threads are a joy to use, not an afterthought like in
| Slack. It's just superior in every way (except popularity,
| sadly).
| lmeyerov wrote:
| We have a paid slack for our team & customers, and a free slack
| to support our community, and Slack continuing to kneecap our
| community zone keeps pushing us towards dropping slack in
| general.
|
| Just as Slack emerged to fill a social networking gap not quite
| solved by irc & hipchat, the steady mishandling of community
| pricing & usage (web indexing, ...) is keeping the door open for
| a good competitor to knock them out from the bottom. Discord is
| an obvious possibility, but it can be anyone new too. In a world
| where Teams is already knocking them out of the enterprise
| market, Slack intentionally losing their main advantages in
| community, vs pulling up the ladder on competitors, seems pretty
| dumb.
| nakedrobot2 wrote:
| No one is stopping you from using a different free product.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| We are paying users with a growing annual account, this is
| not about free.
|
| We want 1 product for chat, enjoy that Slack solved much of
| community side of chat (cross-company, ...), and Slack's UX
| is slightly better than Discord's + significantly better than
| Team's. Likewise, there is gravity keeping us there: text
| history + customer accounts.
|
| My point is Slack's lead is tenuous, and they are steadily
| eroding their primary moat for us -- community-minded
| features. Our community account already has limited search
| and customization, and this update obliterates that further.
| If/when we move our free community channel, we will move our
| paid account too.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Good free IRC on mobile would be killer.
| [deleted]
| jbotdev wrote:
| What is it about free services that brings out the worst
| complaints from people? I understand the paid plans aren't cheap
| for small projects, but then maybe don't rely on a free service
| for archiving important information.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| People don't value things that are cheap or free. Anyone who
| has spent enough time doing work on commission knows this. If
| you set your price too low, you'll get customers of quality
| proportional to that price, some of whom will believe it's
| their right to ask the moon of you (or their money back). By
| raising your price, you won't have as many customers, but the
| customers you do keep will likely be high of quality and much
| easier to work with. Even if they request more work of you,
| they will likely make it worth your while.
|
| I noticed this as an independent web developer. When I charged
| very little, all my clients believed they could make unlimited
| changes to the expectations of the project, no matter how
| impractical or time consuming. When I charged what at the time
| I thought was way more than I was actually worth, someone still
| ended up paying me and they actually respected my expertise
| while leaving me alone most of the time.
| verdverm wrote:
| The CUE team was looking at a $8k monthly bill for keeping
| Slack. The money Slack wants can be pretty outrageous when most
| users don't even chat. Add on top that a single user is likely
| in several orgs, the money they make per user is approaching
| usury, if you'll pardon the pun
|
| CUE is keeping Slack for now and accepting limited history
|
| https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/discussions/1839 has an
| overview of the situation and a discussion of alternatives
| being considered
| stavros wrote:
| Zulip is a very good fit for open source communities, and
| much much better for communication than Slack. I hate how
| Slack encourages you to say everything in the main channel,
| threads are close to impossible to use.
|
| They're a tiny section off to the side and you can't easily
| navigate between them, it's really badly done.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's improved and is now resizable, still much much better
| than discord
|
| The main problem with alternatives is integrations, bots,
| and similar. The ecosystems are not as available, at least
| that is the impression
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, the ecosystem and integrations is definitely where
| Slack has the advantage. Still, I'd rather give up the
| integrations than the much improved communication.
| verdverm wrote:
| I think the real problem is that people can only really
| support having one chat application open continuously at
| a time. Maybe two for some, if you account for the non-
| chat things like text & email. Notification / source
| burnout. I have to use slack professionally, I'm not
| going to add another tool.
|
| That's why someone was suggesting mattermost (iirc on a
| friday), as something that bridges all the chat platforms
| and gives you a single tool
| stavros wrote:
| Hmm, what do you mean? I'm talking about using Zulip
| instead of Slack. If I'm going to use another similar
| service, I might as well use Slack itself. Zulip is miles
| ahead.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'm saying my employer, who pays for slack so this whole
| thing is a no-op, means I have to have slack open. I'm
| not adding another chat platform to my repertoire, that
| is the real problem of incumbent
|
| If you read the CUE discussion I linked, you will see
| several people making this same point
| stavros wrote:
| Well yes, how could you? If the rest of the company is on
| Slack, you using a different service wouldn't work. The
| question is where does the employer (or, specifically,
| the CUE team) go if they don't want to pay for Slack any
| more.
| verdverm wrote:
| Let's clarify a few things
|
| 1: I am not employed by CUE. I am their biggest fan and
| cheerleader
|
| 2: CUE has never paid for Slack
|
| The context is that I have slack open, I am in 12+
| groups. I've tried adding other platforms like discord
| and keeping them open.
|
| The point is that, as a human, I only have so much
| attention, and having more than one chat program open at
| a time, in addition to the other messaging streams we are
| subjected to, it's a non-starter.
|
| For my own sanity, only one chat platform can be
| regularly open. Thus follows the network effect and
| incumbent arguments
| gspr wrote:
| I've been super impressed with Zulip's thread system in
| technical chats. But how is Zulip itself in situations
| where you _mostly_ want channel-wide banter, with the odd
| thread spawning off of that?
| stavros wrote:
| It's been fine for us, just detach that thread or create
| a new one and link.
| bombcar wrote:
| In general your worst customers are the ones who see no value
| in your service; which tends to collect in the "free" tier.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is about time newer generations understand no one lives out of
| thin air, and other professionals pay for their worktools.
|
| Or they can keep jumping from free tool to free tool, while
| complaining some good ones end up vanishing.
| isnhp wrote:
| Saleforce's style, force you to sale
| MexicanJoe wrote:
| It's $6.67 per user. Just get a paid account. But no... people
| will spend hours or days switching to an alternative, and then
| they have to maintain it which will be even more time. I guess it
| ends up with: what is your time worth?
| bachmeier wrote:
| So if you have 15 users, pay $100/month? I suppose a senior
| engineer for Facebook wouldn't have a problem that. More
| seriously though
|
| > what is your time worth?
|
| What time are you talking about? If you're doing basic chat
| stuff on Zulip, and the free plan works, what exactly are you
| going to "maintain" that's worse than paying $1200 a year until
| you die - or until Slack decides decides they need revenue
| growth, so they bump up prices to $2000 a year.
| MexicanJoe wrote:
| If you are a company, then you have to move everyone over and
| they have to learn the new software, and Karen from
| accounting and others needs a lot of help switching and what
| the app on her phone. "The old one was much nicer", "I don't
| know Markdown". Now Karen hates the new system.
|
| If you self-host then you have to pay for a server. That
| server needs updates and backups so that is even more time. A
| server on AWS can just disappear overnight, so you need to
| prepare for that.
|
| And yet people still go to Starbucks and buy expensive coffee
| without thinking.
| MexicanJoe wrote:
| I don't know of any other industry, where (I assume everyone
| here is connected to IT) IT people have such a hard time
| paying other IT people. Slack has to pay salary, servers,
| networks, devops, health insurance, rent, etc etc. And people
| just expect them to be able to send out a free service to
| everyone, and yet they are even keeping their free tier. They
| are just changing it a little.
|
| The same would be true for Zulip. I assume their developers
| need to pay rent and provide for their families. But it's
| open source, you might argue. Okay, if you have contributed
| to the project you get 20 free accounts for life. The rest of
| us can pay a small fee every month, so their developers can
| pay rent and actually focus on making a better product for
| us.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Anything self hosted you pay twice. You pay for the
| infrastructure and you pay for the time lost setting things up.
| Engineers are really bad at time estimates and they'll argue
| it's easy and not a big deal. And then they'll end up spending
| hours/days on it, which by their hourly wages means you are
| getting a much worse deal than a paid service. And even if you
| are saving some money, you are still losing time that you might
| have used more productively.
|
| And if you cut corners and don't do a proper job of self
| hosting, you are going to pay a third time when it inevitably
| blows up and needs more time and attention to be fixed; all
| while your company has no access to whatever the thing was you
| were self hosting. I've seen Jira go down, self hosted gitlab
| servers running out of disk (without backups), irc servers go
| down, jenkins build servers blowing up, etc. Very disruptive
| when that happens. And preventable if you do a proper job. But
| that costs extra and you need competent people to be on this.
| People that could be doing more valuable things instead.
|
| We use freemium accounts Github and Slack. So, we have Github
| Actions, issue tracking, chat, etc. without actually paying a
| single dollar. Github actually used to charge and the company I
| was CTO for at the time was happily paying for it (we upgraded
| from our self hosted Gitlab because I got tired of dealing with
| that). But then they removed the limitations on private
| repositories. So, these days, using Github and Slack for free
| is kind of a no-brainer for me. I'd consider paying for this
| stuff even but there simply is no need currently and the added
| value of the paid only features just isn't that high to me.
|
| MS did what Slack should be doing. They realized that the value
| of being the number 1 choice for a commodity service is that
| you end up with an insanely valuable thing: every developer
| joins your service. They have Linus Torvalds hosting the Linux
| kernel on Github even. The percentile of developers without a
| Github account is ridiculously low. And their dominance as the
| number 1 choice in the corporate world is huge because of that.
| And there are plenty of ways to monetize being that large other
| than asking companies to pay per month per user. As soon as
| they'd force companies to pay, they'd inevitably open up the
| market to competitors and lose their dominant position. Gitlab
| is the obvious one. But it is merely the largest of a very long
| tail of alternatives. As long as MS keeps their pricing as it
| is, they get to keep their position.
|
| Slack is dominating corporate chat in a way that MS never
| really achieved despite trying very hard with various products.
| However, chat is a commodity and Slack succeeded in on-boarding
| lots of companies and teams by giving it away for free. As soon
| as it stops being free, people will vote with their feet
| because there are plenty of other free/cheap options. They
| should prevent that at all cost and focus on finding better
| ways to convert some of their users to paid users. Shrinking
| their user base is counter productive for that.
| fragmede wrote:
| More power to Tabbot and the team over there, but for an active
| community slack I'm on, 90 days is an extension from 10k messages
| [deleted]
| MrOxiMoron wrote:
| my first thought was: why not move to discord for you hobby
| project?
| deadbeef57 wrote:
| my first thought was: why not move to Zulip in general?
| icelancer wrote:
| Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack?
|
| Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and
| integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and
| there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking
| about it.
|
| Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and
| save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev
| salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah forget it.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Can't speak for Zulip, but Discord seems to be better than
| Slack in almost every way. It's not open-source pr self-
| hostable, but they are a lot more generous (e.g. unlimited
| message history, https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-
| discord-comparison-wh...). They're also a lot faster and have
| less downtime. And they do have channels and threads and bots,
| though there may be less integrations than Slack, there are a
| lot.
| dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
| There's some kind of problem with Discord's privacy history
| (either country of ownership, or founder) that makes it
| unsuitable for a lot of firms.
| icelancer wrote:
| I use Discord for some personal stuff where the groups use
| it, and I don't think it's anywhere close to as usable as
| Slack for a small business unfortunately.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Integrations is the main deal for me as well. Discord might
| have some integrations here and there, but slack is virtually
| on every dev tool.
|
| Like nextjs for deployment/fail messages.
| cheald wrote:
| We tried it, I even made some contributions trying to get it to
| work. In the end we just migrated to Mattermost, which speaks
| Slack webhooks natively and is a very competent Slack
| replacement. We self-host it, too, which is a big win.
| icelancer wrote:
| Huh, that's pretty enticing. Unfortunately last time I set up
| Mattermost it exploded on a VPS so that wasn't too good...
| cheald wrote:
| My employer's Mattermost instance has been running on a
| small VPS for a few years with no issues, fwiw. It's
| braindead simple with docker+compose now, too.
| dotcoma wrote:
| How many new users is Zulip picking up every day?
| jmull wrote:
| People should understand this:
|
| A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the
| paid product.
|
| If too many "...have been happily using Slack's free plan for
| years", then Slack will _have_ to change the terms.
|
| Generally, storage and access to storage cost money. If you
| aren't paying for it, it is definitely temporary, whether anyone
| says it explicitly or not. I don't just mean in a "nothing lasts
| forever" way, but that it will gone in the relatively short term.
| This is just reality.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| My family has been using Slack for several years to share/store
| odds and ends like recipes and bookmarks. When I heard about
| this change, I did a full data export. After 5+ years of not-
| infrequent use, the data blob was all of 1.5 MB. Virtually
| nothing.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Micropayments! When will this happen?
|
| Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs.
| 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction!
|
| Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to
| $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference.
| Suddenly you need a credit card.
|
| Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink
| because of convenience (convenience stores are an example!).
|
| Maybe the solution is an in browser card-free micropayments
| system that you load up as a browser extension. Something like
| web3 without the cryptocurrency or blockchain! Chicken and egg
| problem though.
| nottorp wrote:
| Slack is $9/user/month :)
| Jill_the_Pill wrote:
| You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that
| it's $9 per workspace per month, and as a professor, if you
| include all the workspaces I was maintaining for my past
| classes, I have . . . or had . . . about 25 of them with
| hundreds of users. Maybe I wasn't using it the most
| efficient way, but I had no reason to think I needed to be
| strategic. And to think: I used to tell classes we were
| using Slack so their access would persist after they got
| kicked out of Canvas when they graduated!
|
| It should have been possible for Slack to start the new
| limitations on new workspaces only. This term, because I
| started the change too late, I will continue to use Slack
| without enthusiasm while keeping a shadow archive (possibly
| in piazza but they have also begun to charge for larger
| classes). For next semester we will find and use a
| different service.
| nottorp wrote:
| > You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression
| that it's $9 per workspace per month
|
| It's per user sadly. Apparently $8/mo now if paying
| monthly. Of course if you go to their pricing page they
| lie and give you the price for paying yearly.
| rdbell wrote:
| > without the cryptocurrency or blockchain
|
| If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution
| other than the technology that already solves this problem.
| oblio wrote:
| That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks
| into the existing banking system. Put that into every
| browser.
|
| Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it,
| crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The
| Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?
| oblio wrote:
| The Ancient Roman one.
|
| The one most people use. SWIFT.
|
| And yeah, blah blah sanctions, Russia, Iran, like most of
| the world's business is happening there and like the
| crypto Ponzi schemers really care about the "under-
| banked".
| runjake wrote:
| The "ancient Roman one"? Enlighten me.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| SWIFT isn't remotely suitable for micropayments. Most
| banks have to go through a correspondent bank that is
| going to charge at least $5 per transfer.
| oblio wrote:
| Ok, then use anything else or get banks to come up with
| another one.
|
| How, pray tell, would a cryptocurrency help here? You
| have all the crypto disadvantages (either untested or
| slow or scams or boiling the planet...) plus the same
| issue with adoption. We already have banks and they
| already have bank accounts. We have SWIFT, SEPA, etc.
| They know how to talk to each other. Get them to modify
| an existing protocol or make a new one for
| microtransactions.
|
| It's a super hard task but with crypto you still have
| that super hard task (adoption) plus crypto itself (a
| million drawbacks).
|
| It's not scientific and it's not engineering.
|
| You solve a problem with the simplest equivalent
| solution, no more.
|
| Crypto is like God. It gets sprinkled over every
| discussion. There's a reason science doesn't go: "A
| equals B plus God" to prove anything.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| How's swift suitable for micropayments?
| immibis wrote:
| Any. Every. Whatever the user has. Banks already figure
| this out amongst each other - the browser just needs to
| convey an IBAN (or other format), currency and amount to
| the user's bank and let it be their problem.
| oblio wrote:
| Exactly. I proposed SWIFT and people latched onto to it
| to criticize when it was just a detail.
|
| You put it better, just have any layer on top of IBANs. 0
| need for crypto.
| immibis wrote:
| However, the API should also be able to _support_ crypto
| payments, by getting a crypto address and then forwarding
| the request to e.g. a local instance of Metamask, instead
| of my bank.
|
| Perhaps if the user has multiple bank accounts linked,
| they would have to choose one, to avoid leaking to my
| bank that I'm making a crypto payment.
|
| Of course, a crypto transaction has a significantly lower
| chance of being compatible since there's no foreign
| currency team working at the bank - if the website wants
| a payment in BitWhatsits and my primary wallet is in
| DOGEMONEY 20000!!!!! then it's up to the user or at least
| the extension to figure out the routing. Probably, the
| website would offer a different button to pay with each
| supported cryptocurrency, so the user would choose.
| They'll be accustomed to that, being a cryptocurrency and
| all.
| oblio wrote:
| I don't mind that. People should be allowed to shoot
| themselves in the foot with their favorite Dogecoin.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Different ones for different markets.
|
| A working standard could simply define "seller
| endpoints", "buyers bank endpoint", "supported payment
| protocol" and a message passing system and let the
| parties figure it out.
|
| Not global, but few things are in the world of finance.
| k099 wrote:
| Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's
| because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to
| pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I
| click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better
| not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted:
| https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-
| pio...
| bentcorner wrote:
| They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of
| video games and gaming platforms that invent their own
| micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so
| asks for some of their allowance to go into their
| ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with
| nearly no friction.
|
| That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for
| links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with
| "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I think the only micropayment people are usually willing to
| make is watching an ad.
| saurik wrote:
| And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue
| every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an
| appliance due to the electricity transactions.
|
| I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue
| --this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being
| too large still: the industry has often used this term to
| describe transactions on the order $1-$10.
|
| Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat
| app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not
| the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge.
| My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for
| incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of
| $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".
| philsnow wrote:
| Look at tarsnap's pricing: https://www.tarsnap.com/
|
| currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of
| encoded data"
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I can't tell what stance is being taken on Tarsnap here,
| but for the interested the background is worth a read.
|
| https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-
| pricing-...
| Vespasian wrote:
| There isn't a price tag on my light switch. Also light is
| of course a must have, news articles or chatrooms aren't.
|
| If I could use micropayments this way and be sure that
| the final price is
|
| a) somewhat predicable
|
| b) usually not ruinous
|
| It would work better.
|
| Cloud Services for companies like AWS are using this mode
| and it's working well for them.
|
| But I have a feeling it's not easy/legal to do away with
| the immediate price tag for consumers. At the very least
| it would require the a constant price per "thing" and a
| hard spending limit.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| But that's not the correct comparison right? It's not
| that you have to initiate a transfer for the flipping-on
| of the light. You pay integrated, at the end of the month
| (or really, the utility trusts you to not change your
| behaviour dramatically and you pay an expected usage,
| which is then corrected at the end of the year).
|
| That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you
| need to initialise a complex utility that involves the
| trust of multiple parties and the need to verify
| identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs
| macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be
| O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much
| above that, you'll loose to friction.
| imron wrote:
| > I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of
| whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is
| tedious.
|
| I think Brave has the right general idea.
|
| Fund an account and then split that per month among the
| sites I visit, or according to a breakdown of my own
| preference.
| oblio wrote:
| Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro
| payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb
| pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.
| philsnow wrote:
| I really wish there were room for a "your margin is my
| opportunity" player in spaces like this, but the existing
| cast already executes the "dumb pipe" role too well.
| tpxl wrote:
| Europe seems to be doing something on this front. SEPA
| Instant is... instant just like credit cards. All we need
| is an interface that's as easy to use as credit-cards
| (type number, money go) and the visa/mastercard monopoly
| is going to either get real cheap or real non-existent.
| jwr wrote:
| In the EU at least, this is impossible because of invoicing
| and bookkeeping/accounting requirements.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm...Starbucks does this by charging me a lump sum in one
| transaction and then allowing me to spend it down over time
| in smaller chunks.
|
| I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited
| support issues around reversibility.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I am a little frustrated that there are services I would pay
| $1 per month for, but the floor for monthly services is
| usually $10, occasionally $5.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's very expensive to charge someone $1. It wouldn't make
| much sense to charge $1 / month for a service like that;
| you'd want to charge $12 / year.
| nottorp wrote:
| Who charges 12/year? It's more like 10/month and 100/year
| :)
| immibis wrote:
| IIRC I paid $15/year upfront for Nebula+CuriosityStream.
| Doesn't seem a bad way to do things. (Whether $15/year is
| a sustainable price for N+CS is besides the point)
| kyrra wrote:
| This is such a hard problem. The very much not a secret
| secret of consumer payments is that all actions that people
| take are reversible.
|
| Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer
| friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers.
| The problem when things are not reversible is an account can
| get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions
| and lose a bunch of money and have no way to get it back.
|
| People love credit cards and similar products because there
| is a way to get your money back. In case you were defrauded
| in some way. Most systems have a chargeback mechanism of some
| kind.
|
| If you start building a system that supports micro payments,
| the cost of running such a service scales with the number of
| payments going through it. Such a system needs ongoing
| support to deal with chargebacks and fraud. And the people
| running a system need a way to make money. They can't just
| lose money on the operational support that comes with dealing
| with chargebacks and fraud.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| You didn't fully read the post you responded to. They were
| not suggesting a non-reversible medium.
| kyrra wrote:
| Oh, I read it. I'm saying that building a system that
| supports microtransactions that are reversible is cost
| prohibitive due to the customer service aspect required.
| If someone could pull it off, it would be a game changer.
| I believe many people want to do this, but no one has
| been successful yet.
|
| I point out Bitcoin as it is non-reversible, and there is
| no central agency you can complain to if you get your
| bitcoins stolen. This prevent adoption from much of the
| public.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| That makes sense, it seems that I was the one who didn't
| properly read your comment.
| frxx wrote:
| Makes me remember flattr. That was great and I still miss it.
| baby wrote:
| The same is to be said to a company no? If you offer free
| tooling for too long, pulling the plug will upset a lot of
| people
| threatofrain wrote:
| Would one say the same thing about GitHub?
| verdverm wrote:
| There is an argument to be made that while it looks like a loss
| in a limited time frame, having all those new developers become
| advocates later on will pay itself back
|
| ---
|
| edit, I thought I was on the Heroku thread... though a similar
| argument might be made still
| oxfordmale wrote:
| If Google had bought Slack, the free tier would almost
| certainly have stayed. Of course the compromise would be that
| you would be served ads and you would have to agree your Slack
| messages would be used to target those ads to your specific
| interests.
|
| Salesforce is where products go to die. Slack will eventually
| get integrated in their Frankenstack and lose functionality.
| Salesforce can afford this strategy as long as they can keep
| charging $$$ for their CRM software that genuinely deserves its
| own circle in hell.
| shrimpx wrote:
| They should make an exception for low volume/infrequent users.
| Yes free-tier power users should get incentive to level up. But
| if you have a slack with your spouse for house ideas where you
| post a few times a year, I think this is the type of user that
| gets the most pissed off by limits, because leveling up to the
| paid tier for a few messages a year seems like a
| ripoff/moneygrab.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >but that it will gone in the relatively short term
|
| I've had data stored by Google and Dropbox for free for over a
| decade. Even Discord has stored all my messages and files for
| over half a decade.
| joshspankit wrote:
| True, but there's also something vital that does not show on
| the balance sheet (and can sink companies):
|
| Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth.
| Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further.
| There's no way to know how many corporate plans were sold
| because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work,
| or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was
| visiting a Slack-fluent friend.
|
| And because there's no way to know; the cost-cutters look at
| the numbers and say "cut the free plan enough to stop the
| hemorrhage". Worst part is the next quarter looks great. And
| maybe the one after that. But soon enough the income starts
| dropping and there's no "clear reason why" and then it's too
| late to recover it. It has to be built again by building trust
| from scratch.
| dkrich wrote:
| _There's no way to know how many corporate plans were sold
| because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work,
| or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was
| visiting a Slack-fluent friend._
|
| So why assume it's positive ROI? The people who make
| purchasing decisions in the organizations Salesforce plays in
| don't typically make them based off recommendations of people
| happily using a free tier on outside projects but rather
| those made by massive sales teams.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Underneath both, they make those choices based on _trust_.
| If a massive sales teams gains their trust it means sales.
| If employees have gained their trust it means sales.
| saimiam wrote:
| This is not my experience. But don't take my word for it.
|
| Why else do you think students get software or checking
| accounts for free or much lower cost? The net LTV of
| getting users accustomed to your product who later
| evangelize it for free is priceless.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| By now, I'm pretty sure everyone who was going to use Slack
| has used Slack.
| joshspankit wrote:
| There's an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/1053/
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| How can you possibly measure that?
| oxfordmale wrote:
| This concept of market saturation is a well known
| concept, however, you forgot one important part, the next
| generation. It is well known under marketeers that is it
| is hard to change habits. An 80 year old is not suddenly
| going to change toothpaste brand because they saw an
| amazing ad on television. However, a rebellious
| teenager/young adult will want to pick their own
| toothpaste brand, and are susceptible to marketing
| campaigns. Personally I have been using a different
| toothpaste brand because my teenage children want it, and
| they offered bulk discount, so not worth buying my usual
| brand in addition.
|
| This is the same with Slack/Discord. If I can attract
| bright individual to work for me if I offer them Discord,
| I don't really mind switching to Discord.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of
| mouth.
|
| They did that already. Years ago, they did that. Now everyone
| knows about slack.
| joshspankit wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| techsin101 wrote:
| dark ages of A/B driven blindness
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Not only that but there are decisionmakers in organizations
| that also use free tiers for stuff in their private lives.
| Piss one of them off enough and suddenly you can lose a big
| sale or existing customer.
|
| So tinkering with free plans downwards can have unforeseen
| consequences.
|
| And with the amount of data slack uses so low and costs of
| bandwidth and spinning rust approaching zero - the idea that
| free tier limitation are anything other than create a
| painpoint for people to upgrade is a joke.
| xmprt wrote:
| Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their
| enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using
| Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those
| kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and
| intuitive product too.
| chillfox wrote:
| I wish we used Discord for work. It's superior to Slack, MS
| Teams and googles chat thing by far.
| p1esk wrote:
| How is Discord superior to Slack?
| chillfox wrote:
| Discord is just way more polished. Everything works
| reliably every time.
|
| The voice channels are flawless, even when there's people
| on shitty internet connections.
|
| The client is always responsive and snappy.
|
| Their design of how the server/chat/voice/videos/users is
| laid out is is clearer, easier to see what's going on at
| a glance and it manages to do that while it fits more
| information on screen.
|
| Their dark mode is much better.
|
| Their code display/highlighting is better.
|
| The user groups/roles which is more like tags is much
| better than others.
|
| It's way easier to find where notifications come from.
| claaams wrote:
| Roles and channel permissions. I can't assign a role to
| someone and grant them granular permissions in slack like
| I can discord. I'm either a guest, user, admin or owner.
|
| Slack does app integrations and bots pretty well.
| p1esk wrote:
| Example of granular permissions?
| input_sh wrote:
| Think of it as "tagging" users. Instead of a user fitting
| a single pre-defined category, you can add tags to a
| user.
|
| To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord
| channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people
| working on a project, 7 of which are software developers.
| To mention the developers, your Slack option is either
| @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually.
| On Discord you can create @developers and add only those
| seven, not bothering the other 3.
|
| You can really go buckwild with that basic concept: only
| admin can tag @everyone, only @talkers can join a voice
| channel, only @projectmanagers can run some bot, only
| @collaborators can post to #project, @watchers can read
| #project but not post, while those that are neither
| @collaborators nor @watchers don't even see the
| channel... And in #otherproject you can have those same
| people in totally different groups and with different
| roles.
|
| Way more customizable than by just having public/private
| channels and @everyone at your disposal, as Slack does.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Tagging users is also possible in slack. I don't know if
| permissions by tag is possible, but the basic concept of
| "@ these 7 people" has been there for a while.
| t-sauer wrote:
| You can do that in Slack as well. They call it user
| groups: https://slack.com/help/articles/212906697-Create-
| a-user-grou...
| Macha wrote:
| Slack user groups are much less powerful than Discord
| roles. Slack user groups are _only_ a way of bulk
| notifying users. Discord roles control effectively both
| views of your server, and permissions (though why "Pin
| Messages" and "Delete Other User's Messages" are still
| combined into a single "Manage Messages" checkbox is a
| glaring flaw in that granularity).
|
| And some other features like colours which are nice when
| you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams
| for some sort of competitive event server.
| barbazoo wrote:
| User X is admin of channel Y but guest of all the other
| channels or something like that I imagine.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I like that in Discord you can choose to spin off the
| conversation into a separate thread, or you can reply
| within the main chat and it quotes the comment you're
| replying to (and the quote is clickable) in order to see
| context. You can't do the latter in slack, and it's easy
| to not realize that others have started a thread when
| it's above the fold.
| dagss wrote:
| Isn't this like replying to a thread and clicking "Also
| post to channel" in Slack?
| Macha wrote:
| No, discord threads are siloed off into their own world.
| They're effectively more so temporary channels (and
| discord itself enforces the temporary nature - they get
| locked after disuse). Parent poster seems to like it, but
| for my use case I'd rather slack threads.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > they get locked after disuse
|
| Yikes, here's hoping you mean "after a year" or
| something, because having to make a fake new thread just
| to comment on an existing locked thread would make me
| rage quit
| Macha wrote:
| Nope, it's after 24 hours of inactivity.
|
| Someone with the manage threads permission can unarchive
| it, but like the pinning thing that also comes with
| permission to delete it, so you can't just grant that to
| everyone in your server.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Then that squares with my mental model of discord being
| for the gaming community, because imagine one's surprise
| about coming in to work on a Monday to have something to
| add to a thread made on Friday but unable to contribute
| to it. Or, what's this "vacation" stuff I keep hearing
| about?
| darthrupert wrote:
| Discord has the worst ux of any chat software I have ever
| used, fwiw. There's a fascinating race to the bottom in
| this area.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| What chat software do you use? I find Discord to be among
| the best when it comes to UX. Not perfect (and it is
| still an Electron app) but when you have atrocities like
| MS Teams, it passes off as good.
|
| In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for
| IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of
| course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open,
| simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and
| image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down
| and you need ad-hoc solutions.
| m8s wrote:
| That's surprising. In what way? I find it to be the most
| consistent and the most correct out of any chat software
| I've used, including IRC, Slack, Mattermost, and
| Microsoft Teams. They seem to just get a lot of stuff
| right.
|
| The only thing that took me some time to adjust to was
| how overwhelming joining a new server can be. So many
| channels! Everything needs my attention! But after using
| it for a long time, I think this is actually a feature. I
| can mute channels and categories I'm uninterested in, but
| how many channels on Slack are never found due to poor
| discoverability?
|
| We run both Slack and Discord at my work and the
| engineers vastly prefer Discord, for what it's worth.
| dongping wrote:
| Discord's UI is seemly optimized for dopamine release,
| just like a game.
|
| Some people like this kind of constant distraction,
| though.
| chillfox wrote:
| Nope, it's possible to control the notifications to a
| much better degree than any of the other options allows.
|
| I could see Discord as made for power users where Slack
| and Teams would be aimed at casuals. But I do think that
| Discord does a pretty good job at being intuitive.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I think I could be considered as a high openness, hacker-
| ish type keen to try new things, and my avoidance of
| discord isn't that it's complicated (hard to use), it's
| that it's complicated (unnecessary busy). From the
| notifications being a lot of noise by default to threads
| being so much work to catch up on after the fact, it's
| just heavy and dense and complicated.
|
| _Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who
| commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join
| (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you're
| paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I
| have a lot of interests and really just want the gems
| whenever I "sit down" to work with a particular
| interest._
| einherjae wrote:
| MS Teams? Skype 4 Business? IRC?
|
| Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very
| different reasons.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Okay, for the first two. I didn't think of those as
| actual non-joke options.
|
| About IRC you're obviously wrong :)
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I'm surprised to not see more comments like this. I think
| chat clients are a product which is used so frequently
| that after adapting, users become blind to defficiencies.
| I consider myself pretty technically literate and have
| used probably a dozen chat clients over years. Discord is
| the only one where I couldn't understand how to do the
| basics straight after installing it. I don't use it much,
| and when I come back to it there's always an element of
| guesswork. (fwiw I'm not a fan of Slack's UX either)
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Because on the flipside, there are users like me who
| found Discord far more intuitive than anything else. I
| don't think your 'technical literacy' overcomes a
| difference in expectations and culture when many others
| feel it works just fine. It's not the best UI, but it is
| acceptable given the status quo.
|
| Neither you nor GP are articulating or giving examples.
| Start there and we can have a proper discussion,
| otherwise it'll be just another case of 'he-said-she-
| said'.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| I've been "chatting" on the web since the mid 90s when I
| used IRC.
|
| Discord is the best thing I've found. My group and I love
| it.
| robryan wrote:
| Discord seems like the best UX to me. Only things I can
| think of is some weird UX around new call features and
| search could be better compared to say gmail (although I
| generally have no problem finding things I want to find).
| hardware2win wrote:
| Thats crazy, ive used various voips, skype, teams ans
| discord is #1
| echelon wrote:
| Discord is way better than Slack for B2C if you're reaching
| that demographic.
|
| I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a
| 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic
| way to find customers and business use cases, too.
|
| For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with
| lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.
| dqpb wrote:
| My experience is that discord is basically just a vector
| for scammers to directly message me.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| If you join any cryptocurrency related Discords you can
| dial the random scammers up quite a bit.
| tpxl wrote:
| You can turn off random people messaging you for what
| it's worth.
| toastal wrote:
| While I understand that approach EF going Discord-
| forward, it's one that's prevented me from joining many
| circles now as I've pledged to take my data privacy more
| seriously and proprietary apps aren't it. I hope you
| offer at least one alternative (but if you're not
| targeting open-source users or privacy advocates, there
| likely wouldn't be a difference).
| LunaSea wrote:
| In this day and age that is simply not possible anymore.
|
| Most apps have no good open source alternatives.
| MaKey wrote:
| Zulip is a pretty good open source alternative to Discord
| / Slack.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Despite the looming narratives that tell us to give up
| our data, it's _always_ possible.
|
| There are dozens of products and countless open protocols
| to base new products on. We could even just use IRC
| again.
| RunSet wrote:
| One nice thing about IRC is it is sure to remain an
| alternative as services which purportedly lack
| alternatives build paywalls or become the center of
| scandals relating to mishandling user data.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Discord lacks features like SSO, auditing and security
| controls, making it impossible to adopt in many business
| environments.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| As a moderate user of both, they seem almost
| indistinguishable to me. Slack probably has more
| integration with productivity tools and a better
| auditing/compliance story, but it's not at all obvious to
| me that Discord couldn't become a drop in replacement.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| How would you rate mattermost and zulip compared to slack
| and discord? I've only used slack, mattermost and skype.
| Of those I prefer mattermost by a fair margin, but I'm
| still not sure I like it. It seems like the ui could be
| better. Something about the way both it and slack handle
| channels or groups feels clunky.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I might get backlash for this, but IRC (what all these
| platforms are emulating) handled channels pretty terribly
| also.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| it's an old car that gets you places without breaking
| down
| [deleted]
| davedx wrote:
| Zulip is very "channels first" and once you get used to
| it it works pretty well. I constantly run into issues
| uploading files > 10Mb to Zulip though, it just sits
| there "Waiting" forever. I have to put things like
| screencasts somewhere else. Otherwise it's pretty good
| though
| iratewizard wrote:
| Guilded over discord in my opinion. More features like
| forums in a channel. Long term, I only see discord and
| their company culture turning it into twitch or other
| zealot infested dumps.
| MattRix wrote:
| Discord has forum channels already:
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/6208479917079-...
|
| (they're technically in beta but a bunch of popular
| discords use them)
| thayne wrote:
| And it is even worse than losing your positive word of mouth,
| because people burned by this change will start recommending
| _against_ using slack now.
| nine_k wrote:
| Slack's leadership likely think that Slack is already so
| ingrained in corporate settings that people will go for it by
| default, without word of mouth from people using a free plan.
| There is enough word of mouth from people who used it on a
| previous job. Sort of like Jira.
|
| I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a
| free Slack account.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There's not many ways to know many things with 100%
| certainty, but you can have a decent probability of knowing
| the impact the free tier has.
| balderdash wrote:
| This is so important - if it's not quantifiable, people have
| a tendency to ascribe no value to it...which can be a
| horrific mistake
| jwie wrote:
| After the Salesforce acquisition SF may believe they no
| longer need this funnel, since Slack now has access to all
| Salesforce customers and vice versa.
| rattray wrote:
| GitHub is a good example of an enduringly useful (to the
| company) free tier.
|
| Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at
| work. Simple.
| tomrod wrote:
| That, and their paid-for subscriptions are natural
| extensions of the already super useful platform. Either
| more quantity (actions) or more useful features on top of
| an already fully useful feature set.
|
| Users pay for convenience and for more, not just slightly
| better.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I agree with the idea, at the same time I'm sure there's some
| income vs expense graph that shows expenses raising faster
| than income and at some point surpassing it.
|
| I wonder when it will hit github. At the moment they offer
| free hosting for open source projects, including github
| actions. It seems pretty clear at some point they'll have to
| back off in some form or another. Maybe the "open source"
| part is enough of a filter?
| stemlord wrote:
| Well I thought github was a "you are the product" sort of
| deal with Copilot?
| ggsp wrote:
| How so?
| joshspankit wrote:
| They scraped all the code submitted to GitHub and used it
| to train the AI behind the now-paid Copilot product
| ggsp wrote:
| In their FAQ [1], GitHub state: _GitHub Copilot is
| powered by Codex, a generative pretrained AI model
| created by OpenAI. It has been trained on natural
| language text and source code from publicly available
| sources, including code in public repositories on
| GitHub._
|
| Genuine question, has there been any evidence to
| substantiate your claim?
|
| [1] https://github.com/features/copilot#what-data-has-
| github-cop...
| joshspankit wrote:
| > _including code in public repositories on GitHub._
|
| You just provided the evidence. I was incorrect to use
| the term " _all_ the code ", but they clearly and openly
| used GitHub code to train Copilot
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think all of this is possible through sampling and customer
| interviews. Besides Slack has fairly high awareness. The
| marketing strategy changes as your product moves through the
| awareness curve.
| joshstrange wrote:
| It's very similar to Salesforce's Heroku move. They either
| just don't care about that sales funnel and they remove it
| completely or they will keep squeezing until they kill it.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| In Heroku's case, it could be argued the free users were a
| net-negative liability, causing service outages, DNS
| issues, etc...
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| What? Those _free_ users are practically providing free
| infrastructure testing. Those low-no profit margins are
| hiding a lot of stuff underneath. Intel and Cloudflare
| are famous for reaching scale by using cheap /free end of
| the market to expand and solidify their positions.
| nikanj wrote:
| I fail to see how letting crooks mine cryptos on Heroku's
| free boxes would lead to improved sales. Slack is a
| different story, but all hosting/CI/etc providers have been
| pulling back free offerings as they get abused for crypto
| mining
| michaelje wrote:
| Very..
|
| Salesforce bought Slack in 2021.
| speed_spread wrote:
| But just think of the promotion opportunities!
| kristianc wrote:
| I would say they are acutely aware of the sales funnel.
| They weren't making any money from those users who were
| 'happily using Slack's free tier for years' and neither was
| there any prospect of converting them into paid users in
| the coming years. Very little point in keeping users (and
| paying to maintain them) who are going to be perpetually at
| the top of the funnel.
| thejosh wrote:
| Salesforce doesn't even care about paying customers.
| Heroku has stagnated for years. Recent Heroku massive
| mistakes they've been making have been absolutely
| terribly handled by them.
|
| They also own Tableau, which has stagnated as well and is
| pretty badly handled.
| LtWorf wrote:
| It's not that simple.
|
| People who are used to slack will pressure their boss to
| buy slack for work.
|
| The slack company will just see a boss reaching out and
| buying. They will not relate it to the fact that it's the
| employees requesting it.
|
| Bosses want to use microsoft teams, because it's included
| in the company's subscription. They accept to use slack
| because of the employees.
|
| But if the new employees will not even know slack
| exists... they will not be asking for it.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| It is not that simple too. Tools used for reasons outside
| of work may not always be perceived as good tools for
| work. And tools used professionally are not always
| considered to be good for use for personal reasons. If
| someone have met Slack for the first time at their job,
| they may recommend it at their next job, because they
| associate it with work - this conversion channel is
| pretty clear and established. But the conversions
| work<->personal are not so obvious and may perform worse.
| I'm pretty sure Slack marketing team controls awareness
| part of the journey and they understand well their
| conversion funnel. Ditching some non-converting users is
| a bold move, but it may be worth it and it may fit well
| in whatever sales strategy Salesforce has in mind.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| it's not that simple either:
|
| tools used for reasons outside of work may be perceived
| as good tools for work;
|
| and tools used professionally are sometimes considered to
| be good for use for personal reasons.
|
| tl;dr it doesn't need to be true always, only sometimes,
| which it is
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Well, if I wasn't clear enough: the fact that someone
| have used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend
| it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify
| spending on those personal use cases. You need this to be
| a healthy conversion funnel and valuable brand awareness
| channel, otherwise you are wasting money. To make a call
| you need data from marketing research and I would assume
| that Slack marketing team knows more about it than HN
| crowd, simply because they are in position to have this
| data and HN crowd is not. It can be the case that they
| are not acting professionally, but I would not assume
| unprofessional behavior by default.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| They were saving them advertising money.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free
| slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but
| I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits
| (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities.
| Am I a user who won't convert?
|
| Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a
| competitor's product.
|
| There's a tipping point where having to check multiple
| apps will push people towards consolidating in a single
| client if they possibly can, which (in the long term) may
| not be slack if it doesn't support "ad hoc" communities
| or personal use-cases at a reasonable price.
| bootsmann wrote:
| > Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a
| competitor's product.
|
| Arguably this is even worse from slaks POV, no? Everyone
| on free slack is on free slack because they aren't
| willing/able to pay and slack would indirectly benefit if
| those customers were freeloading (and incuring costs) for
| their competitors.
| lhoff wrote:
| Not the OP but I think if free slack becomse unattractive
| enough people might start to look around. There are
| enough alternatives (self-hosted like Mattermost,
| Rocket.Chat or free tiers from other vendors e.g. Zulip,
| Discord). That presumably has two effects: 1. People are
| used to them and if the decision at the workplace comes
| up to choose a solution the other product is on the
| table. Or worse if Slack messes something up with the
| paid tier people might be more willing to switch to
| something else that they know already.
|
| 2. Every private group chat might involve people who
| never used something like it before. For these people the
| software they use first is the baseline. And they are
| more likly to recommend the solution they already know to
| a organistation that is willing/able to pay for a higher
| tier.
| Kye wrote:
| We can't assume someone who won't pay for Slack won't pay
| for the thing they move to. How many people do you think
| pay for Discord's paid features that never would have
| paid for the forums Discord killed? The almost $15
| billion dollar valuation suggest _a lot_.
| luckydata wrote:
| I guarantee you that the people making that call have
| thought about it and decided it's not worth it anyways.
| eastbound wrote:
| This. Companies should be charged, sure; but an upside of
| Slack is that I can use various tech community's Slack,
| the union's Slack, and the coworking's Slack in the same
| app.
|
| None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our
| usage of Slack for our main job.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| They can all better use Discord, whose model works on a
| per-user (not per-user-per-community) billing model. So
| less good at separating money from corporations but
| better aligned with non-commercial organisations as you
| don't need to pay $2k/month as none-profit just to keep
| chat history.
| kristianc wrote:
| > I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free
| slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but
| I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits
| (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities.
| Am I a user who won't convert? Everyone on a free slack
| instance is NOT using a competitor's product.
|
| I'd suggest the answer to that is probably no - an open
| source community is by its very nature going to want
| costs and overheads down, and all but the largest non
| profits and NGOs are going to try to get by by stitching
| together free tools and services. The one that is paying
| in your example is the one in Slack's target who is going
| to be most likely to pay. Does Slack care about a few
| open source communities potentially churning? Probably
| not. Does it care about lowering average Time to Revenue?
| Absolutely.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I think this, combined with Heroku, marks end of an era.
|
| These tools built themselves on being free (as in beer) up
| to a certain extent, and now they're big enough, and trust
| their momentum, so they change their stance.
|
| This will inevitably create some changes, both how they
| perceived and being developed, but we'll see...
|
| However, web application development is much easier and
| scalable infrastructure is democratized now. Their moat may
| not be as robust as they imagine.
|
| This will get interesting.
| joshspankit wrote:
| They may not immediately recognize it, but they are
| "cashing out the social capital"
| iratewizard wrote:
| Salesforce doesn't care. There about to roll out slack-
| first infrastructure that turns slack into the only chat-
| based CRM. Their core users aren't on the free model.
| They're paying a small fortune for Salesforce and see
| Slack's cost as a drop in the bucket.
| michaelvmata wrote:
| That's not necessarily true.
|
| I have several free Slack groups that I've used for years. I
| haven't paid a cent. But it means I've also have Slack
| installed by default. At every company I've worked, I've
| supported using Slack because I'm a happy user and these
| companies have shelled out for paid plans.
|
| It feels similar to how MS Office is given out for free to
| students and sold to companies.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| On one hand that's true, on the other hand search is mostly
| about text data which has negligable storage size requirements
| (they could just say: we'll keep the search history for ever,
| but drop large binary blobs like images and videos after 90
| days).
| hnarn wrote:
| Everybody understands this.
|
| Here's what companies don't understand: if you promote your
| product through a loss leader -- which is arguably how Slack
| became popular in the first place -- changing your pricing at a
| later date will piss people off.
|
| You're trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never
| makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-
| leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the start,
| that's on you.
|
| It doesn't matter if the product is "worth it" because when you
| piss people off, they will gladly put in effort into migrating
| to another provider they can trust, because that's what it's
| all about: trust.
|
| The latest Google Apps fiasco is a great example of this, where
| Google eventually had to backpedal due to the massive backlash.
|
| It's simply a consequence of just staring at the numbers,
| without properly understanding the psychological effect of
| taking something away from what is, despite the zero income but
| rather in a sense of trust, a customer. It's just a customer
| you failed to get any revenue out of, and that's your fault,
| not the customers.
|
| Changing pricing pisses people off. Killing features pisses
| people off. Bad communication pisses people off. It's really
| not that hard.
|
| At the end of the day you're making a deal with the devil with
| these overly optimistic loss-leaders, because you're getting
| growth you never would have gotten otherwise. Failing to
| capitalize on that and then blaming the users while throwing
| features out the window is just not good business practice.
| wpietri wrote:
| > If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable
| from the start, that's on you.
|
| Yes, exactly. Companies can't tell consumers "it's free" and
| then be surprised people get upset when they change the
| terms. Do sufficiently sophisticated people know that free
| plans are always at risk? Yes. But clearly a pretty small
| percentage of people have fully internalized that, or there
| would be a lot fewer companies talking up their free plans in
| ways that suggest they're unlimited along important
| dimensions like time.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I think this should be outlawed. So many industries destroyed
| by cheap vc money, and then trying to raise prices once
| everyone else is gone. You can lose money doing research all
| you want, but the moment you start interacting with the
| market there should be a time limit until you can get your
| unit economics to work, or get out.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I agree - "free" should be anti-competitive. Today it is
| incredibly hard for any startup to compete with the "free"
| products of BigTech. And that is why in this industry,
| getting acquired by them is the only really viable exit
| option available for many startups.
| soheil wrote:
| So you're suggesting any startup that can't get its unit
| economics to work should have its founders sent to jail?
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Under certain circumstances, the IRS will consider your
| business a hobby if it fails to make a profit. The
| consequence being that you may no longer write off your
| business expenses on your taxes.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Not too jail, where did I mention jail? Stop selling and
| messing up the market, just shut it down and go do
| something else that creates value
| cortesoft wrote:
| How would this proposed law work? I am really curious how
| you would word a law to enforce this.
| woofcat wrote:
| Isn't there already laws against established companies
| using their market position to price under cost to cut
| out competition?
| mstipetic wrote:
| I really have no idea. Since the market values uber or a
| buy now pay later widget (or at least used to) at 50+
| billion I'm not sure I understand much how things work.
| Maybe we need a reluctant philosopher king like in
| Plato's Republic.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Here's what companies don't understand: if you promote your
| product through a loss leader -- which is arguably how Slack
| became popular in the first place -- changing your pricing at
| a later date will piss people off.
|
| I'd argue that most companies understand that perfectly well.
| They have a generous free tier to drive growth. Once that
| growth is attained and demand starts to level off, it's time
| to trim the resources devoted to free and force users (to
| greater or lesser degrees) to either start paying or go use
| someone else. There's great wailing and gnashing of teeth for
| some period of time on HN, Twitter, etc. but life moves on.
|
| It's a pretty predictable playbook. See also Heroku of late.
| It should probably also come as no surprise we're seeing a
| number of examples of this going on at the moment.
| ryeights wrote:
| Note that Heroku and Slack are both owned by Salesforce.
| ghaff wrote:
| True. So the timing is probably not entirely
| coincidental.
| gdilla wrote:
| Yup, and they think pissing people off is worth it (for
| their expected benefit). And... they're probably right.
| People have short term memories and other things to worry
| about.
| nxss wrote:
| They are right for now, but will start loosing clients
| soon. Zulip & Discord provide better plans without major
| feature set downgrade.
|
| We tested Zulip not too long ago, in short - UI is not so
| good, but in general still useful:
| https://nixsanctuary.com/zulip-review-through-slack-
| glasses/
| madeofpalk wrote:
| What's the cost of pissing free-tier people off? None of
| this has really impacted paying customers, right?
| bombcar wrote:
| Some percentage of free tier people are also paying on
| other accounts, and some will be lost.
|
| But it's probably a small amount because SaaS has figured
| out to basically milk slacktivism. People will complain
| but pay.
| mooselaker wrote:
| Opportunity cost to an extent: instead of convincing them
| into becoming paying customers, and having them word-of-
| mouth promote you, they slip away to a competing service,
| which they may also indeed decide to pay for.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > Here's what companies don't understand: if you promote your
| product through a loss leader -- which is arguably how Slack
| became popular in the first place -- changing your pricing at
| a later date will piss people off.
|
| This is part of the game: 1) work hard to make something
| popular by offering a part of it for free, 2) once enough
| people get hooked, start tightening the terms, 3) most people
| will be pissed off but your profit is from those who stay
| (because they invested too much to just migrate away).
| voakbasda wrote:
| If those companies had a shred of integrity and respect for
| their customers, they would be upfront about such plans.
| Without a roadmap, user trust will eventually be shattered
| by step 2. Most people understand this shell game, and they
| will put up with it if they know what to expect.
| kennend3 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but are the plans not obvious?
|
| Companies are not some altruistic group, and this pattern
| of "free to get you hooked then convert to a paying
| customer" is almost as old as computing itself.
|
| What is odd here people depending on slack for search
| history and not creating a proper KB?
| [deleted]
| rkangel wrote:
| > The latest Google Apps fiasco is a great example of this,
| where Google eventually had to backpedal due to the massive
| backlash.
|
| In what way have they back-pedalled? I'm affected by this and
| hadn't heard anything.
| Terretta wrote:
| They delayed the cutover multiple times. They gave people 3
| months free. They gave people a year at 1/2 off. And
| finally they gave anyone who declared themselves as
| personal/family use only back the free option, even after
| having migrated to a billed option.
|
| (And, if you're affected by Ukraine vs. Russia, deferred
| indefinitely.)
| rkangel wrote:
| I didn't know about the last option! They didn't exactly
| notify us about the option...
|
| I have now selected it, thanks!
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah they were very good about announcing the paid
| version. The backpedal was quiet.
|
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?hl=en
|
| For those watching at home, if you signed up to pay you
| may still be able to switch back.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Very true. Reminds me of what Seth Godin wrote on how the
| internet has changed people's behaviour:
|
| > Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's
| a free substitute available. A hundred million people hear a
| pop song on the radio and less than 1 percent will buy a
| copy. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very
| few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art in
| their homes. (In the former case, the purchased music is
| better-quality and convenience-than the free version, in the
| latter, the print is merely more accessible, but the math is
| the same-lots of visits, not a lot of conversion).
|
| > We don't hesitate to ask a consultant or doctor or writer
| for free advice, but often hesitate when it involves a
| payment. ("Oh, I'm not asking for consulting, I just wanted
| you to answer a question...") And yes, I'm told that some
| people cut their own hair instead of paying someone a few
| bucks to do it. The bet a creator makes, then, is that when
| she gives away something for free, it will be discovered,
| attract attention, spread and then, as we saw in radio in
| 1969, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying
| something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is
| necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier
| for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the
| gap between free and paid. It turns out that there's a huge
| cohort that's just not going to pay for anything if they can
| possibly avoid it.
|
| > As the free-only cohort grows, people start to feel foolish
| when they pay for something when the free substitute is
| easily available and perhaps more convenient. Think about
| that- _buying things now makes some people feel foolish_. Few
| felt foolish buying a Creedence album in the 1970s. They felt
| good about it, not stupid. This new default to free means
| that people with something to sell are going to have to push
| ever harder to invent things that can 't possibly have a free
| substitute.
|
| > Creators don't have to like it, but free culture is here
| and it's getting more pervasive. The brutal economics of
| discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless
| path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many
| things that can be free, will be.
|
| Source: _The game theory of discovery and the birth of the
| free-gap_ - https://seths.blog/2011/06/discovery-free-145/
| watwut wrote:
| One obvious difference is that hairdressers don't run
| around yelling "free haircuts we will give you free
| haircuts look at us how we give away free haircuts".
|
| What the companies are doing here is that they are trying
| to kill paid competition, hold on longer and raise prices
| once competitors don't exists. They really dont have a
| standing to complain about situation they themselves
| created in the hope that competition will die sooner and in
| the hope users will be locked too much without any chance.
|
| > Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very
| few have prints, posters or even inexpensive original art
| in their homes.
|
| Now, this analogy does not work at all, because going by
| the painting in the museum in no way implies you would want
| it at home. And that many people dont go to the museums in
| the first place ... and those who go are more likely to buy
| some serious art. The other reason it does not work is that
| people have tons of inexpensive art in their homes. It is
| ridiculously competitive market. Posters, cups bought only
| for their pictures, figurines, people buy all of that.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > if you promote your product through a loss leader
|
| To be fair, I don't think Slack ever actually did this. Slack
| has always been pretty terrible for semi-public communities,
| and I don't think they did anything to promote this. Free
| slack has always had pretty annoying retention and storage
| limits, and others like limits on how many integrations you
| can add.
|
| I think Slack's problem has been that reasonably (at least in
| the beginning before Discord got popular and copied all of
| Slacks features), people liked Slack from their experience at
| using it for work. Indeed, Slack's advantage has/had been in
| appealing to the hundreds/thousands of employees making
| something they would want to use.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed?
|
| My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive
| some sort of network effect so business (which actually pay
| for services) start adopting a product.
|
| It's meant to kickstart recurring revenue, not to last
| forever.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I mean.. it kinda does.
|
| If a small opensource dev group gets pissed at slack, and
| those people have a say in a chat solution at their
| workplace (paid plans there of course), pissed people won't
| recommend slack but other alternatives.
| tyingq wrote:
| >Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are
| pissed?
|
| I think a fair amount of their actual sales come from non-
| tech companies reluctantly paying for it because their
| developers are pushy about wanting it. Those developers
| want it because they were exposed to it in some context
| where it was free.
|
| Lacking that pressure, those companies will just tell their
| developers to use something they already have...MS Teams or
| whatever.
| Kye wrote:
| The people who use Slack for their weekend DnD group are
| the same people who bring it into the companies they work
| for during the week and ultimately suggest a paid plan.
| That's the entire idea behind freemium: just because
| someone doesn't get their own credit card out doesn't mean
| they don't influence the person who does.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That's exactly how I ended up having a paid slack
| subscription. It looks like discord is going to take over
| several companies exactly for this reason.
| TheGeminon wrote:
| Don't know if it is their intention, but this is probably
| more of a cost-cutting measure than a revenue-increasing
| one (or maybe even a technical one, with their data
| strategy/partitioning it may be much easier to do
| everything time-based).
|
| Many people expect free things to stay the same forever,
| which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to
| have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the
| free tier, there are a ton of OSS projects, community
| groups, etc. that will no longer be using Slack, and the
| network effects will drop substantially. This has been seen
| a bit with Discord, so maybe they are going all-in on
| dropping these types of customers.
|
| There can't be _that_ many people who are on the free plan
| that will now be migrating to paid with this change. If
| anything, it now incentivizes larger groups (which would
| generate more revenue) to use the free plan since data is
| gated by time, not by usage. A slack instance with a few
| thousand active users on the free plan was basically
| unusable, 10k messages can be eaten up rather quickly. Now
| if you only care about the last 90 days (which honestly,
| isn't a bad idea with Slack to not use it as permanent
| storage) you can have a much larger group on the free plan.
| klibertp wrote:
| What's wrong with Discord? Most of the projects I want to
| follow have Discord server, often connected with an IRC
| channel. I miss a few features from Slack, but in general
| I'm happy with Discord. It's still free from what I can
| see. So, what happened to make "OSS projects" etc. to
| stop using Discord? (Honestly asking, I don't follow
| Discord itself at all)
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| That makes sense. It was a race to the bottom. Now we're at
| the bottom.
|
| It's like 2001 in a lot of ways. Spesh the terrible economics
| of websites, or apps, or call them almost whatever they want,
| platforms, anything.
|
| Giveaways bring users. Free beer people show up.
|
| Like there's no business here. No excludability. It was a
| prettification of IRC, which of course nobody pays one fuck
| of a cent for, and now they want to charge...well guess
| people will go to IRC directly. And maybe there'll be an FOSS
| prettification.
|
| And that'll be it.
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| >It was a prettification of IRC, which of course nobody
| pays one fuck of a cent for
|
| It's a lot more than that. Addimg a persistent message
| history and multi-device identities to IRC is pretty huge,
| otherwise bouncers would never have existed.
|
| And the number of paying customers shows that people are,
| in fact, very willing to pay for it. Slack just really
| sucks at b2b marketing, which is why Teams eclipsed them so
| quickly.
| watwut wrote:
| Teams eclipsed them, because they are by Microsoft. For
| business people who do make these decisions, they are
| serious product, they integrate with office, unlike weird
| things like slack or discord or what have you. And it is
| free, so.
| redler wrote:
| Regardless of their B2B marketing strategy, it's hard to
| compete with "this Slack-like thing is included with the
| mega-expensive Microsoft license your company already
| pays for every year, around which you've built a
| Microsoft-specific IT group".
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well there's different market segments. Me on one market
| segment, I'm the guy (nice to meet you) basically the way
| a sow has a runt, on the off chance she can feed it,
| that's the same basis companies hire me. And only very
| fucked companies.
|
| The basic reason is because I got tortured with an
| amnestic lobotomy. I had a very marketable curriculum
| until that point, and after that if for instance I was
| asked where I worked during April 2009, I would ask "are
| we talking about the Gregorian Calendar, that shit?"
|
| So for me you have to provide amazing shit for me to
| subscribe to anything. And it can be done. Not often. I
| can't have 7000 apps draining me $5 a month. That is why
| I identified a natural limit to the number of web-app
| subscription-model startups there could be, the first
| limit was remembering all the credentials to use them,
| which 1Password and similar surpassed. One user here
| talked about having 800 web app username-password
| credentials on his 1Password, obviously doesn't pay any
| scratch for most of them. Veteran of the freemium model,
| like I became a veteran of the psych ward in my
| remarkably successful struggle under torture, including
| not caving to the torture.
|
| I talk about this at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620302
|
| So my segment of the market, I'm gone. Neither feature
| you mentioned seems...wantable. And that goes for most
| web apps, like I predict their business model and then
| operate on that basis. So for instance most VPN's are, as
| a business, honeypots. Like yeah you can steal from the
| labels who steal music from the artists, that you can do,
| but for tricky nitty gritty, nah. It's just too obvious,
| it's just too instantaneous an erection the founder gets
| thinking of cutting deals with Kuwaiti Intelligence
| during the commercial of them going on TV saying "We
| never have and never will cut a deal with Kuwaiti
| Intelligence."
|
| So with the paying users it's like ice on land, they need
| the ice on the sea in order to hold them back from
| falling into the sea. Non-paying users provide a lot of
| value to Slack, in that for instance you can do a trial
| release on them to debug your product for the paying
| users. For example.
|
| "Slack just really sucks at b2b marketing" well compared
| to Microsoft yes. Slack sucks at marketing compared to
| Microsoft, for B2B. I buy that. The guy Butterfield
| (Stuart? Something) was busy getting on magazine covers
| like it is still the previous millennium, which for
| businesses loses credibility.
|
| So I went to slack.com and tried finding what they
| charged, they wanted me to see all their flair first. So
| I went to the URL which said https://slack.com/features
| and replaced "features" with "pricing" and there it was,
| the chart with the numbers they want. So they want $8.00
| USD a month for their product, and assumptively propose
| you buy it for the year at a pro rata price of $6.67 as
| the default. I looked for their asterisk at the bottom of
| the page, but it wasn't there. No this was a javascript
| asterkisk, no relation to asterisks in eg legal document.
| So $8.00 a month, per user.
|
| So that right there is a turn-off to an informed buyer,
| which B2B is. There's typically a designated person in
| the office for this sort of purchase and she herds the
| company's users through the spam, the spear-fishing, the
| shitty deals like this one, every everything. Apparently
| Teams is in fact the better product, and that might be
| because the terms of service aren't demonic (though I
| vaguely recall them yes being demonic which is why I
| couldn't use it, but then from the dodginess in revealing
| the price I divine Slack's terms are demonic too).
|
| But whatever. In for a penny, in for a pound, sell your
| soul, no reason to pray. Microsoft already has telemetry
| on like blood type in the first 18 minutes so it's not an
| additional leak to work with them.
|
| And that's saying as someone conflicted about the
| company, I like the way they didn't fuck up github for
| instance. Didn't nix it. Like they never even bought it.
| It works better now, in fact, I can tell it has more
| integrity and reliability. Backend stuff.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > will piss people off
|
| Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you anything.
|
| It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because
| now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't.
| jylam wrote:
| Not that the price will go down. Now they subsidize
| shareholders, which is quite worse in my book.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Same way my customers subsidize my dinner, I'm sure
| shareholders didn't get in for free.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Most paying customers are businesses. Those businesses are
| definitely not going to be pleased because they have people
| who personally depend on Slack's free plan. So, they've
| probably pissed off a significant number of paying
| customers.
| chillfox wrote:
| Yeah, people tend to forget that companies are just
| groups of people working together.
| minusSeven wrote:
| >It probably pleases the people who were paying you,
| because now they don't have to subsidise the people who
| aren't.
|
| Bullshit. It's unclear communication and indecisiveness
| that pisses people off. If you can't afford it, there is no
| reason for you to give something for free and then later
| take it away. People who are paying will feel that
| samething will happen to them in other ways. You want
| consistency.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Well it pisses off the people who aren't paying you
| anything.
|
| These users will either move to on-premise systems or _pay_
| to a competitor now.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If they're willing to pay a competitor or self-host why
| wouldn't they be willing to pay Slack?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Because self-hosting may be easier due to an in-house
| sysadmin who advocated this for a long time but turned
| down, or a competitor offer more value with a better
| price.
| kzrdude wrote:
| But the company was built on that user growth. They were
| reporting the numbers to the investors and claiming "2.???;
| 3. Profit" all along. Especially now, with recession coming
| (interests rise => expectations of profitability increase),
| it's unfortunately suddenly important to show real profits.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > But the company was built on that user growth.
|
| Yeah... and now they're grown to a size where everyone
| knows the product and they don't need to get people
| interested from scratch in the same way.
| pid-1 wrote:
| If subsiding free users isn't attracting more paying
| customers, then slashing free tiers is a no brainer
| though.
| kennend3 wrote:
| > You're trying to put the blame on the consumer here which
| never makes any sense from a business perspective.
|
| Consumer:
|
| noun 1. a person who purchases goods and services for
| personal use.
|
| It is sort of weird that people don't pay for a product, yet
| expect to be able to use it forever? It should be obvious
| that companies intend to convert "users" to "customers"?
|
| You call them "consumers" but they are not given the have not
| paid for the services. Maybe "users" is more appropriate?
|
| Do let us know what products you produce, and give away for
| free for years and dont want to monetize, it is just a
| charity thing for you even thought it costs you money to
| offer the service.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Users generally don't like surprises.
|
| As a user or consumer, it an unpleasant surprise that feels
| like a bait and switch when the free product you used now
| requires payment without prior warning.
|
| At least smaller apps are upfront about the duration of the
| free trial, and there are no surprises (or uproar) there.
| kube-system wrote:
| If those people wouldn't have purchased the product, does
| it matter that they're pissed off?
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| Who says they wouldn't have purchased the product? I've
| been hoping that Slack would provide communities like
| mine better plans or options to support them and access
| some of the improved features.
|
| But, this move makes it pretty clear they're never going
| to, so I'm finally going to bite the bullet and set up
| Matrix.
|
| [Just to add to this, I've had my users asking me why
| we're on Slack when everybody else is on Discord. (Most
| of us use Slack at work, so it's convenient in that
| sense.) I've been interacting with the company since
| Glitch/Tiny Speck. But, with pushback from users and from
| the company, at this point I just can't justify Slack for
| our particular use case.]
| bombcar wrote:
| Using X at work is the specific reason I do NOT use X at
| home and instead use Y. Personal and work life separate!
| digitalengineer wrote:
| Same with Evernote. Massive 'growth' on the free plan. No
| good way to capitalize, so they just started deleting
| features and locking people's content in. There is no regular
| export to get everything out and you need to jump through a
| lot of hoops. I wish I never updated that app...
| soheil wrote:
| Not to mention 1Password
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I want a password manager to be paid.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yeah grounds for a suit. Unless of course they don't fuck
| up, that's a different story, then no suit and payment
| will be forthcoming. Like a bank. Password managers are
| banks.
|
| Subscriptions are highly fetishized by the current
| accounting system, because they seem more predictable
| basically, and plus there's a lag between no longer using
| a service and discountinuing the subscription, that's
| like four free months at the end with no support calls no
| use no opening the app, nothing. Not even electricity
| costs. For that user in those months you might as well
| have 0% uptime. It's cheap. Except billing because you
| keep getting paid! And when they leave it's generally not
| a chargeback, plus you can be a bitch to unsubscribe from
| to the narrowest extent permitted by the law, ask Google
| not to lead people to the answer to how to unsubscribe on
| the first try or SEO it, in some way, hey that's solid
| business plusses and minusses. Especially the plusses for
| the first-person, the business owner, the first-person in
| economics too, for whom the price and quantity axes on
| economics charts are switched. There's also the idea that
| for a business to be a business it has to be repeatable.
| It's a sound idea.
|
| And there's tons of businesses that make sense as a
| subscription. If you want to reward a business for doing
| a great job, try to subscribe to it under some pretense
| because that revenue will go much farther in business
| terms to strengthen it. I've done that, I did that for
| Beorg. I already bought all their unlockables. Even the
| ones I didn't want. Tipped them (him? I think it's a one-
| man show) a bunch of times. Then I subscribed thinking of
| all the good that subscription would do for the startup,
| instead of eg tipping.
|
| Then it broke and I couldn't use it, like the calendars
| got out of whack. Plus, it's a todo app, ie I nag myself
| with it. It's like an alarm clock. There's the alarm
| clock effect.
|
| Alarm clock effect: no matter what song you choose for
| your alarm clock, Beethoven's 9th the Beatle's biggest
| hit ("Yesterday" I think it is), any song any any song:
| in a week you will hate it. If it's your alarm song you
| will hate it. Hatred. Somethings are beloved, this is
| behated. I think it takes one year of not hearing it in
| any context to recover from it for every single time it
| wakes you up early. It's all in the interest of not
| getting fired for 8 more hours or not getting denied from
| an institution. Protects against existential threat of
| sleeping in.
|
| Agendas are similar. And password protectors are similar.
| Existential threats. But in the case of password
| protection, I don't want a subscription, then what
| happens when I can't pay? Basically lock me out of
| everything, either explicitly or with hexes or nags or
| giving me a longer and longer runaround every time,
| slowbanning me, that kinda shit. For password protection,
| it needs to be one-and-done _or_ work for some long event
| horizon, like ten or twenty years.
|
| Especially because of the intricate relationship between
| cryptography and torture, in the endgame. If your crypto
| is strong and the bad guys are still determined to get
| your information the only option is to torture you. Elite
| cryptographers talk about this all the time.
|
| So any half-assed password manager has to be really
| strong in that scenario. And it was, I bought 1Password
| in 2008 I think and it worked great, I felt very secure
| despite getting hacked by amnestic interrogation, which I
| had no idea of for like a decade. 1Password of 2009
| failed only under torture. That is the exact unique kind
| of next-level shit that is a legitimate situation for a
| password manager to fail.
|
| 1password is basically a bank. A password bank. They
| should act like a bank instead of acting like I don't
| know patreon dancer.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Pretty sure 1Password was always paid? And you had to pay
| for different platforms. I bought it a couple of timesand
| paid for a couple of major updates too.
|
| I bet it was the App Store and the Mac Store where you
| couldn't pay for updates that started them thinking about
| a subscription model.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I wouldn't mention 1Password. It's a cornerstone for your
| digital security, if you're using it. As such, I _don 't_
| want it free, I want to pay for it. My current family
| plan suits us very well and I'm very happy. Security is
| hard and I want it done right. Not to say that free tools
| are bad and paid tools are always good, but it certainly
| helps.
|
| I also do want "easy" things to be free, like a note-
| taking app.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I _think_ OP is talking about how 1Password stopped
| letting you use the one-time-purchase version and pushed
| everyone to the subscription.
|
| Personally, I was pretty frustrated at that shift because
| I successfully and happily used old versions until it was
| "time" to update (2 then 4 (which was at the upgrade
| cost), then one more before I was pushed to the
| subscription). It always worked great. Tbh I'm still
| frustrated that their choice to self-host the syncing
| service became our costs (I used Dropbox just fine and
| that didn't cost them anything), but now that I'm past
| the sticker shock (my costs easily went up 8X) I'm more
| comfortable with the stability of their company and
| breathing room they have to build the hard technology.
|
| Thanks for bringing it up: 1Password is a necessary
| example for this debate.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I, too, have fond memories of the old one-time purchase
| modality of software vending, but I have to admit such an
| arrangement is largely untenable for any software company
| which wishes to maintain a high quality product across
| multiple platforms over the long haul.
|
| Regarding building in their own sync, I think it's
| actually a good thing. Naively syncing encrypted files
| can't achieve the reliability of conflict resolution that
| a semantically aware app-level sync can.
|
| On a side note, I moved away from Dropbox a couple years
| ago as their product became bloated as they seek growth
| with increased desperation. That is not a trait that I
| want in a company I allow to install kernel extensions on
| my machine.
| distances wrote:
| The "naive" apps, like KeePassXC/Keepass2Android do have
| app-level syncing of conflicting files. Granted it's more
| cumbersome than it would be to use a cloud service, but
| works very well. I end up using it more often than I'd
| like to.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Just curious (I'm using professional for a very long time,
| and plans page doesn't clarify), can't you just get the
| ENEX files per notebook and import it to something else?
|
| It contains everything, incl. the files as far as I can
| see.
|
| The file format is open, and there are many conversion
| tools out there.
| jelling wrote:
| Yes. But as someone that's been meaning to switch off of
| Evernote - never has a project bloated their own software
| with so many unasked for features / desperate attempts to
| grow valuation - it's a non-trivial project. One needs to
| have a high degree of trust in the import tool and new
| repository.
| bayindirh wrote:
| While it's not perfect, I like Evernote and its new
| incarnation. Feature parity between platforms is what
| saved it for me, and use almost all of the features they
| offer. I was getting ready to leave it for good.
| Nevertheless, I don't expect everyone to share the same
| sentiment.
|
| On the other hand, you don't need to import anywhere at
| first. Just convert your files to Markdown, put the files
| aside and create your local knowledge base. You can
| import these Markdown files to somewhere new when you
| find the correct place, why not?
|
| This is what keeps me at Evernote most. I can just move
| out in 2-3 hours, or in half day if I want.
| Kye wrote:
| Did they finally add exports bigger than 50 items to the
| new app? Last I checked, you still had to install the old
| one for a full export, and I don't expect it will work
| forever.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You can export a whole notebook by right clicking to
| notebook and selecting export.
|
| I don't think they have note limits on exporting
| notebooks.
| Kye wrote:
| The help doc says there's still a 50-note limit doing it
| from the note list, but they did finally add a full
| notebook export. Maybe I'll give it another try.
|
| https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/209005557-Export...
|
| The lack of a whole-account export is still an issue, but
| not as big as not being able to export notebooks.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yeah vendor lock-in starting with a capitalist subsidy
| provided by venture capital.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I think if you are on a free tier and your business depends
| on it, you should anticipate for changes in said free tier.
| If you want guarantees, you need to be a paying customer.
| paulgb wrote:
| I agree, but what's happening here is largely not
| businesses behind the exodus, but loose organizations like
| open source communities.
|
| You could argue that these are freeloaders and not Slack's
| problem, but I'd be wary about sending so many users
| running into the arms of their competition. Part of the
| appeal of Slack was that I could use one app for
| everything, which is increasingly not the case.
| jwr wrote:
| Not necessarily. I offer a free tier because I want to, as a
| service to hobbyists and makers. It is not intended to be
| temporary. It's also not an upselling tool: features are
| distinctly different and there is no paid plan that would make
| sense for hobbyists.
|
| Not every business is a VC-funded growth-above-all meat
| grinder.
| marklubi wrote:
| Thank you!
| gridspy wrote:
| Admirable!
|
| But there is still a profit incentive. Users who have been
| running a hobby or community on your SaaS today might be
| creating a startup or advising a corporate tomorrow.
|
| So while the community might never need your paid product,
| the very same users might create separate, paying accounts.
| klelatti wrote:
| Doesn't have to be reality. Even when a firm is profitable and
| has scale it can still act as a funnel for new business.
|
| It also helps to keep some competitors out. One less toehold
| for newcomers to get traction in a market. Just look at the
| comments on the recent Heroku announcement - how many will now
| consider an alternative option.
|
| More likely management have lost interest in growth and are
| looking to squeeze as much out of the existing customer base as
| possible. Not usually a good sign for investors or users.
| onion2k wrote:
| _A free tier is a loss-leader, intended to support sales of the
| paid product._
|
| Or to stop people moving to a competing product in order to
| stifle competitors.
|
| Or to leverage a network effect to grow the user base to
| support investment.
|
| Or because the company simply believes their product should be
| accessible for free.
|
| Using a 'freemium' model is a common approach to revenue growth
| but it isn't the only reason for a free tier to exist.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > If you aren't paying for it, it is definitely temporary
|
| the reason big SV VC are shilling web3 so hard.
| davnicwil wrote:
| The free tier usecases don't themselves need to convert for
| this to work out long term. They _do_ need to convert the same
| customers for other usecases though - usually work.
|
| Keeping the free tier indefinite (in time, if not in storage)
| helps to keep the product used, therefore top of mind,
| therefore the default choice for the latter when those
| decisions come around. Or, even where the user is not the
| decision maker, they will likely still be an advocate / non-
| complaining user at the least.
|
| Just directly trying to convert the free usecases by time-
| limiting them so as to make many of them unusable feels like
| more of a short term 'upcoming quarters' geared strategy. For
| sure they will convert some 'real work' usecases here who are
| able to function in the current space-limited free tier, as
| well as saving some costs on compute and storage, and it may
| boost numbers in the short term.
|
| But long term, is it the best strategy? If all those free users
| now switch to, say, discord, guess which tool gets picked more
| for the 'real work' usecases by those same people in 5 years.
| Over that timeframe, will the savings in resources have been
| worth it? I guess this analysis must have been done, but it
| feels very possible the answer will turn out to be no.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Long term, users learn not to trust cloud services that are
| based on taking the customer's data hostage: not only the
| loss leader free tiers that are too good to be true, but
| anything.
| [deleted]
| victor9000 wrote:
| Yeah, but this is the equivalent of Costco raising food court
| prices to match real production costs. Costco would never do
| that, of course, because they understand how a loss leader
| works. The real solution is to reduce costs using vertical
| integration, so if AWS storage is your main cost driver then
| start building your own data centers. Instead, this move will
| harm their best customer acquisition channel, negatively
| affecting long-term growth.
| marricks wrote:
| Saying we should expect companies to destroy the free tier is a
| bit of an insult. The internet was full of free things and
| companies have been shoving them in our faces for decades.
|
| - "Free gigabytes of mail storage!"
|
| - "Free communication with your teams"
|
| - "Free internet hosting for hobby projects!"
|
| The free tech offerings are just good enough to kill open
| source or entrenched alternatives. The goal is to suffocate
| them. Once the competition is gone or investors demand more
| money destroy the tier/raise prices.
|
| FB is trying to do that to Craigslist with marketplaces, Uber
| and Lyft and doing that with Taxis, AirBnb with... etc etc etc
| wolpoli wrote:
| Don't forget how "free unlimited photo storage" ended too
| after competitors shifted their business model.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Yes, and I believe the model is as follows:
|
| - infra costs sustainably decreases, exponentially;
|
| - user signups almost-sustainably increases, exponentially;
|
| - OpEx may increase, linearly;
|
| - therefore, profit and scale almost-sustainably continues
| explosion to a rather enormous scale, landing founders with
| astronomical wealth.
|
| - and this, by the way, is why charging users for actual
| costs is pointless. Harmful even! We're offering values, not
| collecting fees. We're going for the moon! Forget about gases
| for cars, we can pay out of the pocket. That's irrelevant.
|
| This actually worked for decades, hence the free tier. And
| the first two bullet points stopped working last midnight.
| And now Houston is working on a solution.
| [deleted]
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well there was this episode of I think a16z, where initially
| they used the free accounts in their numbers (around, churn,
| etc). But later around those to marketing and cac instead.
|
| All of a sudden everybody is happy, while nothing changed
| hn17 wrote:
| I think they made a mistake disallowing single user upgrading
| to paid plan.
|
| Non-corporate users will migrate to Discord, Slack will cut
| resources costs = more money without new users. Everyone happy,
| just allow us to export data ;)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Well, what you said applies even if you are paying for
| something, if the price is unsustainable for the service
| provider at scale.
|
| The real question you have to ask is, "is my use of this
| service providing a sustainable benefit for the owner". If not,
| you can guarantee it will go away or change eventually. If it
| is, it's probably OK even if its free. For example, I don't
| expect Google search to go away, even though it's free.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They also have to understand, every single business outside
| computing, pays for they work tools, even if they got them at
| some flea market.
| domador wrote:
| The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to
| turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to
| misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes
| can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of
| Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the
| first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be
| implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all if
| they knew that at some point they'd be forced to go from paying
| nothing at all to paying $87 a year per user?
|
| I understand that to some companies their free or low-priced
| tiers end up being more of hassle than it's worth. But an $87
| jump in order to access essential, previously available
| features seems like a good way to chop off your long tail of
| low volume users. Such a change could be deadly to a service's
| popularity and long-term prospects. Or maybe not.
| rtpg wrote:
| low volume users unprepared to pay anything to Slack ever are
| low value users.
|
| There is an argument for a more granular pricing, but if I
| were Slack I would also want to jettison the "community"
| slacks
| californical wrote:
| I use Slack's free version in a 2-person workspace with
| just my partner. We use it to message each other during the
| day. It probably costs Slack almost nothing, but now we're
| getting somewhat cut-off.
|
| I've also advocated for Slack at my company of several
| hundred employees, at multiple previous companies, and
| would've continued to at future companies. Mostly because
| they've had goodwill and been a joy to use in my personal
| life.
|
| But now I'm mad at them, and going to move to a new chat
| platform, with my partner, on our tiny little instance.
|
| Will me being mad at Slack affect their bottom line?
| Probably not today... but when more people like me have
| moved past Slack and see it as old annoying tech, maybe
| it'll start to have an affect. We'll see.
| rtpg wrote:
| Sure, I get the theory. My glib response is that I do not
| believe a business tool kicking out "freeloaders" (in the
| nicest sense of the term) is a factor to me using it for
| a business. Why would I care? I want a communication tool
| for a business! Having to pay for loss leading is
| annoying!
|
| Free tiers exist to help with onboarding and testing, the
| existence of free plans that allow more or less
| indefinite usage is an obvious mistake for something like
| Slack IMO.
|
| I think if Slack had shown up with a free plan at 90 days
| history (really, 90 days/5 GB would be the "reall"
| thing), then people wouldn't bat an eye. It feels obvious
| that the solution here would be to grandfather old
| workspaces into the old model but .. shrug.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Low value users should be okay though, because they should
| also be low-cost users.
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| The pricing step is crazy. There's no way it matches the
| expense from Slacks side, but I guess they're just saying
| "you're not our target market" by charging that much per
| user.
|
| The weird thing is that if that's the case, their target
| market doesn't really need a free tier at all - maybe a time
| limited demo. So I expect more restrictions in the future.
| insightcheck wrote:
| My initial reaction to Slack's change was that it's not a big
| deal. In the small communities I've worked with through Slack, we
| generally assumed that Slack messages are temporary, and we'd hit
| the former 10,000 message limit someday. We used email for more
| permanent communication, so the expectation of permanency wasn't
| changed.
|
| However, it was interesting to see the company's data that is
| supporting the headline's assertion (in terms of migrations to
| the service after the Slack change). I'm also part of a smaller
| Slack group of a few people, and in abstract, it's understandable
| that it will be sad to see the older messages disappear. But then
| again, even in the tiny group, I always thought we'd hit the old
| 10,000 message limit someday, and never personally expected the
| messages to stay permanently.
| carom wrote:
| I hate slack and chat in general being temporary at basically
| everywhere I have worked. So often a colleague will give you
| instructions on some process then the next time you need it,
| it's gone.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Huh, I worked at a place that used it for several years and
| kept all the history. It was actually amazing to be able to
| search through conversations within the company for problems
| that other people had run into and the solutions they came up
| with. Once or twice I ran into an issue and found the answer
| in a conversation I had actually had with a colleague and
| then forgotten.
|
| When the company moved to Teams (because it was free with the
| other Microsoft stuff), I asked if it would be possible to
| get an archive saved somewhere and I got the brush-off,
| "we'll look into it". It's a shame how much was just thrown
| out.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| argh, or worse yet: you search and find someone had the exact
| same issue! You click on the response to their thread and it
| says "oh yea this, I'll call/email/whisper the answer
| personally to avoid helping anyone else in future"
| earleybird wrote:
| And then there's the folks that use Slack/Rocketchat for
| support - zero ability to curate any useful info.
| hedora wrote:
| I thought the only selling point of slack was that your chat
| history was archived and searchable.
|
| Oh well. Time for the industry to move on.
| oblio wrote:
| Yes, it is a selling point.
|
| If you're not paying, it's not a sale.
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| _Do you think most Slack teams on the free plan are active enough
| to send 10,000 messages every 90 days? That's 111 messages every
| single day, or 156 every weekday!_
|
| Maybe my team uses Slack too much, but that doesn't sound like
| very much to me. We have 11 devs, and a few non-dev roles, across
| 8 channels and we must be sending at least 500 messages in total
| on a busy day, and I doubt it's ever less than a couple of
| hundred. If I include the JIRA, CI, and bug reporting
| integrations it's _far_ higher. We pay for Slack but this would
| be a good change for us if we didn 't.
|
| This is also a good time to point out that Slack conversations
| are not documentation. If you're losing access to important
| things because you can't go back more than 90 days in your chat
| history then you _need_ a better knowledge capture process.
| Recognise when important information has been shared in chat,
| _especially_ in a private chat, and put it somewhere that 's easy
| for the whole team to access and that you know will still be
| available in a couple of years time. You won't regret it.
| vel0city wrote:
| So many people talking about how extremely valuable it is to them
| and yet they won't bother paying for it.
| kelsolaar wrote:
| If you are running a small Open Source community, it is close
| to impossible to pay for it.
| icelancer wrote:
| If you run a small open source community, you should run an
| open source community-enabling piece of software probably.
| Like Zulip.
| vel0city wrote:
| A cheap VPS could run something like Zulip or Mattermost or
| phpBB or other ways to communicate. Then that open source
| community would be in control of their own data.
| paulcole wrote:
| We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
| [deleted]
| paulgb wrote:
| I pay for Slack, but I'm also part of a number of non-
| organization communities. They're more like the phpBB
| communities of the 2000s. Even if I were willing to pay to be a
| member of those (which I probably am, but not to the tune of $8
| each), the organizational overhead of collecting dues from
| everyone towards Slack fees wouldn't be worth the effort.
| hit8run wrote:
| ffs just use IRC. Not proprietary. You can host it yourself. All
| your base are belong to... yourself.
| aabhay wrote:
| Just migrate to Discord?
| insightcheck wrote:
| The main advantage that Slack has, especially for many people
| in non-technical roles, is the just-professional-enough user
| interface over the casual look of Discord.
|
| I've been in Discord servers for volunteer work, and while it
| generally works pretty great, the system feels a lot more
| casual to users (e.g. with non-human profile pictures). On the
| other end of the spectrum, Microsoft Teams is almost too
| professional, and has an emotional association of being too
| corporate/formal for more pleasant use.
|
| Discord is also tougher to create group conversations easily
| (you need to be Friends first). Though, if message history is
| really that important, it could be a worthwhile tradeoff.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| > The main advantage that Slack has, especially for many
| people in non-technical roles, is the just-professional-
| enough user interface over the casual look of Discord.
|
| 1) That's not much of a moat for Slack. If Discord were
| serious about entering the enterprise market, and there's
| sufficient user feedback on this point, I'm sure they could
| adapt with a few month's work.
|
| 2) I've heard similar critique about Slack in the past as
| well. IMHO professional vs casual comes down to expectation
| and familiarity. As more youths who are accustomed to Discord
| enter the workforce, the casual connotation would go away.
|
| There was a time when e-mail was considered too casual and
| unfit for professional communication, too.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > Microsoft Team is almost too professional
|
| The problem with Teams is not that it's "too professional".
| The problem is that there is more spacing in the interface
| than there is actual text. You know, the conversations - the
| thing it's meant to do best. Threads are a mess to follow,
| channels are awkward... If professional == terrible UX, then
| you may be right.
|
| And let's not even talk about how unstable and unreliable it
| is.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 100% agreed; Teams UX is awful
| insightcheck wrote:
| It depends on the user. You could argue that many users in
| technical roles would see a professional interface, as one
| with less white space that allows for more information on
| the screen at once. However, many users in non-technical
| roles actually prefer more white space. This is why the
| default options for newer software redesigns (e.g. Outlook)
| favor more white space, with a "compact" options in the
| settings for users who prefer more information.
|
| I think the Teams design team tried to compromise by making
| the interface approachable enough for the greatest number
| of users. But for one reason or another (strategy to
| differentiate from Slack, company DNA, or other reasons),
| they couldn't make the interface subjectively feel more
| casual and less professional.
|
| Everything from the name ("Microsoft Teams") to the logo (a
| bunch of people, versus the Slack logo with eyes and a
| mouth) is more serious, even if the team tried to soften it
| a bit by using less formal language in the interface.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| > Microsoft Teams is almost too professional
|
| Teams target is Corporations so it should be professional?
|
| Microsoft has tries to make Teams "less professional" or more
| causal and people hate the changes. They recently changed the
| theme of the emoticons "Microsoft Fluent Emojis were brought
| to life to embrace expressiveness and play" they seem to be
| well received by non-professional users, or even
| professionals in "creative" fields, but for traditional
| corporate users they look terrible and are not well received
| at all, the feedback asking for the return of the traditional
| emojis has 10's of thousands of votes.
|
| for work I want a professional platform, I want teams to be a
| professional tool for professionals
| insightcheck wrote:
| Microsoft is in a tough place in that respect, because its
| user base is so broad by design (as a default program in
| Windows 11 now). It can never be fully optimized for
| professionals in formal environments, nor professionals who
| prefer more casual environments.
|
| This Pirates of Silicon Valley scene comes to mind [0].
| Teams may not be the most optimized software for formal
| versus informal users, but that doesn't matter because it's
| trying to have a broad appeal.
|
| https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=131
| phpisthebest wrote:
| They are in a tough space by their own making because
| they keep refusing what the market has been telling them
| for decades. They need to SEPARATE their consumer making
| business from their Corporate business.
|
| For example
|
| Lync was separate from Skype... Business and Consumer
|
| Then they got rid of Lync in favor of Skype for
| business... Bad
|
| Then comes Teams, designed from the Ground up for
| Corporate. Dropping Skype for Business like many many
| wanted, a separate corporate app
|
| Now with Win11 they are making the same mistake again
| with "Teams" the default app in windows 11, which is
| different client than the "business teams app" and at
| launch could not even connect to organizational teams
| tenants only "Microsoft" teams accounts which should be
| called Skype....
|
| Skype should remain the consumer / family platform, if
| they want to bring "teams like" features to that great.
| Teams should remain a business app
| mproud wrote:
| Discord doesn't have any limitations on message history, or the
| amount of messages.
| asah wrote:
| Just migrate to Zulip?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Just migrate to Mattermost?
| icelancer wrote:
| I tried this and the server crashed a ton and was unstable;
| I used their official deployment guides to a DigitalOcean
| VPS. Nuked the VPS and stuck with Slack.
|
| I'll probably give Zulip a try before I go back to
| Mattermost.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I can say plenty of bad things about Mattermost, but it's
| been completely stable on my cheapo Digitalocean VPS,
| running night and day for at least three and a half
| years.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Just migrate to RocketChat?
| [deleted]
| worstestes wrote:
| Just migrate to SMS?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Just host your own IRC server and migrate to IRC? /s
| Teckla wrote:
| Or just use a popular, stable, free IRC network such as
| libera.chat.
|
| A lot of very good IRC clients are available for free.
|
| IRCCloud is a good starting point for a lot of people:
| excellent UI/UX, a free tier, and a very inexpensive paid
| tier (around 4 USD/month).
|
| Create as many channels as you like.
| zaik wrote:
| This, but without the /s.
| balls187 wrote:
| Slack makes no momey from free users.
|
| So how does free users being upset and leaving hurt slack?
|
| Maybe that will help bolster a competitor.
|
| But ultimately Slack wins, some free users will convert to paid
| subscribers.
| surjithctly wrote:
| Imagine if Google announced:
|
| We are improving Gmail Free plan.
|
| Earlier we limited free users with 15 GB storage.
|
| Now, we are giving full access to the past 90 days. Unlimited GB
| yay!!!
| andybak wrote:
| Stop using chat for things that you want to keep long term. It's
| not just about retention. Even with long term retention, it's
| nearly impossible to find things in a huge dump of unstructured
| conversation.
|
| EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search
| engines.
| danjc wrote:
| Agreed, chats as your organizational memory are a disaster.
|
| We've set our Slack to cull content older than 30 days.
|
| Knowing that information posted on Slack is transient nudges
| our team to use the appropriate platform for information that
| needs to be persisted.
|
| Also, it's more comfortable to chat casually knowing that what
| you say isn't indefinitely retained and searchable.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Or better yet, pay people for what you want to keep long term.
| bfung wrote:
| According to the analytics of number of message, those infrequent
| and long running slack channels and users probably can just use
| email.
|
| Outrage for outrage sake. #2020s
| insightcheck wrote:
| It's a normal, universal human response to protest when
| something you're used to is no longer there. Even though I
| don't share the outrage, there's nothing 'current
| year'/particularly contemporary about it.
| markmark wrote:
| If you were using a free product with limited history and
| expected not to lose history then I have exactly zero sympathy
| for you. Even if the free product you were using changed their
| terms.
| bfung wrote:
| I don't use slack outside of work, so nothing from me. Just
| sayin' how people are so easily outraged w/o really thinking
| about their needs and technologies. I have no sympathy for
| those slack users either, cheers.
| tsujp wrote:
| Honestly... good. For company-private communication sure but for
| FLOSS projects it genuinely irks me that Slack (Discord too) is
| _ever_ used as a communication medium. Make a forum, use
| IRC/Matrix or even Gitter/RocketChat.
|
| Almost all the time whenever I reluctantly decide to join a FLOSS
| project's Slack it works out like this:
|
| (1) Hunt for the invitation link and hope I can actually join
| because a lot of them have that annoying error where if your
| email doesn't end in `@theirproduct.com` you cannot join. Unless
| I really, really, REALLY want to join I give up here 99% of the
| time. (2) If the invite link hasn't expired, and if they allow
| any email to join then I am in but the channels are all basically
| ghost towns even for big projects like Kubernetes.
|
| I suspect the friction in being able to easy join versus just
| visiting a website (forum) or opening a chat (IRC/Matrix, even
| Gitter) is why.
| ptman wrote:
| (gitter is backed by matrix these days)
| LtWorf wrote:
| Yeah an IRC channel is a /join away... I refuse to engage with
| projects that use things that require accounts.
|
| #ubuntu requires a registered nickname, so that's terrible as
| well :D
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Not all software should be or can be free. If you're using a FREE
| product you should have zero expectation of service or reliance
| on that product.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Specially no service you don't host yourself can be free. It
| can be paid by adds, but expecting someone else to run servers
| for free for you is insanity.
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