CERN Ends Trial of Facebook Workplace
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A tool that requires none of my time to get benefit out of is a better tool than one that requires some of my time. Workplace drained time with patterns like unnecessary notifications, email notifications without the actual content in and prompts to engage in activity on the platform in ways that weren’t productive.
Business tools should save time, not drain time. I think Workplace either has this wrong, or is designed for workplaces where people don’t have enough to do and spend their days on Facebook anyway.
Given it's so noisy, and full of the same dark patterns as regular Facebook, it's all but useless in sending out comms across the wider organization, let alone for communicating with other team members.
There was a big push last year to get everyone on Workplace, which was kind of ironic since the internal firewall blocked facebook so you had to use an external network (e.g. phone.) They fixed that, but despite the big push, most truly important notices are still sent via email distribution lists and published on internal web properties. It really feels like something forced on the org, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm a year they backtrack and say it's too expensive and doesn't provide any value beyond what email and internal sites already did.
What we really need is a good chat solution with solid search functionality. Slack would do, but I'd prefer something more like IRC with all chats archived and fully searchable. Slack is too meme friendly...
I have a solution for you: https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw Even better, if you go to https://my.workplace.com/groups/ you will see a list with all groups you are part of with options, for each group, to control the notifications, follow settings and leave the group. On the same page there is a button to bulk manage groups.
Both my personal fb feed and the workplace feeds and notifications (both when I used to work for fb and now at the current startup), are fairly clean, with only things I care about. Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy.
At fb, our team had a public group for support requests, a main internal group for team wide comms (release notes for each service we provided, on-call reports, welcome messages for new peeps, social stuff) and a number of groups for each individual team, or service, or even inter team projects. The noise on my feed was minimal.
I never "let" it be noisy, it's noisy by default since I have to opt-out to groups rather than opt-in. I've intentionally subscribed to exactly zero groups in workplace, but auto-subscribed to all. This makes notifications entirely useless to me, since it's all just noise and I don't have the time or energy to go through and change settings every time someone adds a group.
Yes, fb could do a better job at explaining how to use their product, but maybe there is an opportunity here...
By contrast, the feed on Workplace has never been useful to me, since it's just noise. The only way for me to have it not be noisy, seems to be constantly tweaking subscriptions, or just ignore it entirely – the latter option has proven the most effective. Maybe it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me, nor my immediate colleagues who also gave up on using it for anything of consequence.
So you think it's the user's responsibility to manage ?
They disagree.
I'm sick and tired of Facebook, and now I'm forced to endure it at work, unless I want to miss out on important updates.
The article distinctly makes it sound as if they only trialled because they were offered a generous free usage period, without a clear desire to actually integrate it into their daily routine.
The timeline suggests that they were onboarded in the early days of Workplace, and I would blame FB’s nascent enterprise sales team for being too immature to recognise what was a losing battle from the get go.
"The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2016 had 2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,000 users."
Is it 1000 out of 2500 or 1000 out of 14500 or am I using an invalid source and the actual staff count is completely different?
Even if you call it 1000 out of 2500, that’s 40% adoption over three years, for a tool that wants to be the centrepiece of your collaboration architecture.
This is the biggest risk to companies as they evolve their use of products and manage costs.
We found to our dismay that Dropbox do something similar if you decide to migrate off their platform (accounts get downgraded to the free plan and the company loses all control over the data in the account).
Companies are not doing enough to highlight these gaps / gotchas when the decision to utilise the platform are made.
(only a little bitter having had to deal with the fallout of these decisions)
"Reactions were not always positive. Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy."
So the issue is just trust or the tool is not as useful? How would the results differ had someone else offered them a similar tool?
Universally true: Reactions are never always positive for anything. A non-statement which will also be true of whatever replaces Workplace.
> Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy.
Many other people used the tool for 3 years during the free trial; how is this advisable if there are genuine data privacy issues? Seems negligent on CERN's part.
The decision point came at the transition from free to paid, not due to a change in trustworthiness of Facebook.
Often enough they end up writing their own tools, if nothing fitting is available, and this might end up in the public domain (since AFAIK everything at CERN is basically paid for by the public, i.e. various member states, EU etc.).
So far they seem to be searching for the worst of all worlds.
It seems riot/matrix and rocket.chat seem quite popular. I liked the e2e in riot but it seemed a bit cumbersome. Rocket.chat was quite popular at CCC so I guess it's probably decent as well.
I have the utmost respect for CERN as an institution — I want to make that clear. What I don’t love, however, is this trend that seems to be using a PR offensive of “price shaming” whenever contract or license terms change. I understand CERN is publicly funded and that it doesn’t have an unlimited budget. But I’m not sure how necessary the passive-aggressive jab at the three-year free trial now becoming paid is to the fact that CERN is dropping a tool only 150 people actively used.
The critiques of the product (and I’ve never used Workplace and hope I never have to) seen to be totally inconsequential, because CERN seemed to be happy doing the IT work to keep it running/integrated as long as it was free.
It’s fine to drop support for a communication tool — especially one that doesn’t have a lot of adoption. But there seems to be an insinuation that Facebook should continue to give CERN access for free, and that I just don’t like.
It's not price shaming, it's saying that you're not willing to pay the price that has increased. It would've been price shaming if it said that it was so much money for so little services.
That’s not price shaming, that’s just a review of something you bought that turned out to be a ripoff.
It’s a good thing if consumers talk about getting ripped off, whether it’s at a fast food joint or a big enterprise contract.
I'm not seeing why they would post about it publicly unless they wanted to put public pressure on Facebook to let them keep using it for free. To me, that's price shaming.
It's basically an internal memo, except CERN posts them publicly.
I would not.
Yes, I'm talking about you, IT security architects...
I do wonder what the person who posted this to HN's intentions were, though.
(CERN is an intergovernmental organisation, so it's similar to a government research department, except the funding and control is shared between several governments.)
IMHO you're either silent about everything, or open about everything and I support that CERN is open about everything.
Semantically, any discussion point that is arbitrarily elevated to outrage is now disallowed? Obviously off topic here, and ignoring certain perhaps universally accepted things that are disallowed, this stance seems stifling. The whole concept of "micro aggressions" or whatever that means.....just seems like virtue signaling. But YRMV.
I don't see any passive-aggressive jab in that post. It states the facts - namely that Facebook changes the conditions of their offering and the offering is no longer something worthwhile for CERN - and depending on your position this facts may look bad for Facebook. That's Facebooks problem, not CERNs.
> Losing control of our data was unacceptable, as was paying for a tool that was not part of our core offering for the CERN community; therefore, we will end the trial of this platform.
I don't see it. The statement seems matter of fact and not relaying any opinion on the matter of Facebook choosing to end the free trial.
Were you referring to another part?
I didn't read it this way at all. I read it as "CERN was offered, and adopted, a free product with features A, B, and C. Later we were told that terms were changing and we could not longer get all of A, B, and C for free and in addition the free tier would include factors that were the cause of concern to some parties, as already described above." In other words, "no longer meets our needs so we will change." As it happened one of those "needs" wasn't really that well satisfied (only 150 people used it) but they didn't say that here so weren't shaming the product at all.
In general I consider it uncool when license changes don't grandparent in existing users as much as possible.
Centralization of the web is a huge problem, More and more we see companies paying 3rd party services (like Facebook, MS, and Google) to run communications infrastructure instead of running your own infrastructure based on Open Source software. I find that to be a TERRIBLE trend.
If price shamming is a way to open peoples eyes to go back to running their own serivces then I am all for it
CERN is very public about its procurements and does cross marketing agreements with many vendors. That’s well known and Facebook probably sought out CERN as a customer for this reason. When those sorts of things are done, the end of the agreement is often publicized as well, as there’s an implied endorsement.
I used an earlier version of this stuff at a bank, an it was very monitored. The way we were instructed to write, like and shares things made me feel even more oppressed by an already pretty stuffy job.
Can you imagine, if CERN had patented HTML, HTTP, the Web server and the Web browser?
Great technological advancements are rarely the work of one genius in isolation. Usually it requires the imagination of a great many people to be captured. By which point the world is already ready for such an invention so it becomes more of an evolutionary breakthrough rather than a one idea that couldn’t be recreated.
1. CERN wouldn’t have been able to patent anything too generalised because there was prior art (Gopher)
2. Thus if the patent was too expensive developers would have just used a similar technology (bare in mind it took quite a few years before the web to evolve from a toy, then something that companies “needed” but it wasn’t contributing massively to their bottom line, to what it is today where a great many businesses sole market is web based).
3. Even if it had somehow became part of industry standard or CERN had achieved a vague patent that prevented similar implementations from coexisting, Europe has this thing called (if I remember the acronym correctly) FRAND patents where patents which are required as part of a standard have to be fairly licensed.
None of this means CERN couldn’t have potentially made a lot from HTML & HTTP. But I also think part of the reason it was the success it was, was because it was a royalty free open specification.
Do you have any idea how multi-national government-funded research institutions work?
It seems that they were pretty open about the reasons they dropped Workplace and suggested Mattermost and Discourse as replacements.
There’s a real value in blunt feedback, even if it occasionally hurts.
I didn't interpret the announcement as insinuating any such thing. It looked like a fairly comprehensive summary of a cost/benefit analysis to me.
"roughly 150 active users of the platform per week."
This is a distinction with a difference, "per week", casts the active user count in a different light.
> passive-aggressive jab at the three-year free trial
That's exactly how I read this.
Not strictly true.
With a budget of €7.5 billion (approx. $9bn or £6.19bn as of June 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments[1] ever built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
That being said, it does seem publicly funded institutions do seem to have a lot more money to devote to plant and equipment (or anything you can put someone's name on) than software, services, or other small equipment that you cannot put someone's name on.
A $5-$50/mo Linode + a tiny bit of ops overhead has to be less expensive than anything anyone else is charging (whether Facebook, Slack, Teams, etc.). Plus, then they at least have complete ownership / control of their data, which for an organization like CERN seems a little important...
Of course, you can't actually rely on workspace notifications either, if you really want to know if another team did something, you need to skim through all their posts. Of course, if you asked someone directly, they would send you to their group feed, like an outsider would be able to skim it with ease.
I may still be unpacking a bit
another example of paying with the data.
Do I understand correctly that they changed their pricing model to paid during trial, or have all control over data revoked? In a place like CERN that would probably be even security breach, even though its international project, US 3-letter agencies (and for-profit corporations) shouldn't have internal access like that.
Edit: Maybe pastebin? Though pastebin will honor takedown requests.
It would be cool to hear what these reactions were. How did it suit their workflow, compare to alternatives, etc
Right now all this article says is that they had data privacy concerns (valid) and that the free trial ran out.
People's trust in FB has eroded greatly over the last three years. That may be all there is to it.
In addition, however, the post clearly says it was a trial. The people who pushed for it were not necessarily the ones who had to eat the dog food.
For some organizations, the value of their data/information is worth much more than the £€$5k/10k/50k that their collaboration tools cost. CERN is one of them. I prefer to pay £€$10 per year more taxes so they don't use scum like Facebook.
(angry words yes, but hey.. they tried hard to earn them feelings - perhaps if they evern become less scum-my, maybe people will trust them more)
Someone has been reading too many Dan Brown novels.
I work at CERN, no we do not.
Also keep in mind that there actually existed many predecessors of hypertext systems (EDIT: see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_hyper... ); just for some reason (let's say because the world wide web was in the right spot at the right time), the world wide web became hugely popular.
This is a matter of GALACTIC SECURITY.
Wat.
Didn't kill him, but "fatigue of mental work increased markedly," lost hearing in one ear, and half his face was paralyzed.
That was a 76 GeV proton beam, compared to the LHC at 6.5 TeV, or 85.5 times the energy per proton.
While joined to around 100 groups in my global organisation the wall/feed thing becomes a very poor way to deliver technical information. Its intermingled with personal messages or a reminder about Jason from accounts upcoming birthday drinks.
Everyday i'm reminded why i left Facebook in 2012 and never looked back.