Slack Price Increase beginning Sep 2022
slack.com
slack.com
This seems, if anything, more of a noticeable change.
I guess Slack doesn’t mind losing these users. Of course we are free communities, but had also bought some seats for other projects.
But this means I won’t be able to use them any more.
https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/30/welcoming-rocket-chat-to-...
To ease the migration for your existing Slack users, you can even bridge Matrix channels to Slack channels, so people in either place still see all the messages.
As silly as Discord is in some places with all its ads and artificial limits, Element is glitchier, even slower and has even weirder UX choices, which I tend to find more impairing. As far as I know Discord also has better integration with other tools (bots for Github and Jira).
That makes it more suitable for professional use in my book - as long as you don't mind compromising on privacy and availability, but it's the same deal as with any other SaaS.
From an idealistic perspective I like Matrix and dislike Discord, of course, but the usability differences are hard to ignore.
We’re improving glitchiness & perf.
Why? Discord servers can definitely be serious.
If anyone from Slack is reading this - I desperately want Slack to be the thing people reach for everything in their professional sphere. I want people to be exposed to it when they're working on that side project in college, or when putting something together for a family project. Because Slack's search is far better designed for documentation-style posts... but more importantly, the world needs a tool that feels native to colleagues and collaborators from all different generations. If younger collaborators never experience free Slack and their entire view of professionalism is Discord communities, they'll demand Discord. And Discord, with gaming culture still writ throughout its design system, is a big ask for a non-gamer business professional to take in - Slack is quite correctly designed to be the level of approachable it needs to be. So communities will splinter on age boundaries, and opportunities for collaboration will be lost. Some of them might have even made bridges that would have accomplished tremendous social good. All wiped out in the blink of a little rotating gamepad icon.
It's not too late. You could change the update to say "90 days of history, or the most recent 10k messages, whichever is higher." You could even do this silently so you don't need to walk back your posts. Doing so is at least a first step to preserving Slack as a cultural keystone into the far future in an evolving messaging environment. Please make the right choice.
Chat needs to be ephemeral.
Did you know that SLACK was originally an acronym?
On Slack, there's no such thing as a discussion-level subject, and people frequently end up replying outside the thread, or at a minimum there's other context outside the thread that people don't bother linking to because they think of chat as ephemeral, not that they are constantly building up an internal wiki.
There are often more durable options like a forum within the community, but that doesn't stop the Slack companion community from having high value discussions.
You often don't know you're having a conversation worth having until it's done. Kind of like when you see really good discussion in Stack Overflow comments that you wish were upgraded into a community wiki question, but that's not how it emerged.
If you need the distinction, label it "discussion" instead of "chat", and assume that important discussions need to be kept around for reference.
We have tons of one liner tickets with only a title and a link to a Slack thread, and it saves crazy amount of time and effort.
You could accomplish the exact same thing you’ve done by pasting the Slack discussion into the ticket or a text file with a link. Except you’d now control your future. So you’ve saved less than five seconds by copy pasting a Slack link instead of highlighting a bunch of Slack messages to copy paste.
I see this as the same philosophy as leasing computers or company cars, relying on third party delivery companies to ship your goods etc. It's a business choice, and solving some of your problems with money is usually a valid strategy. When it stops making sense you reevaluate your options, check competitors etc.
PS: on pasting Slack text into tickets...it's really not optimal. If you really want the info in the ticket, spend the time to write a clear summary and still link to the original discussion. Formatting gets lost, or you're sticking screenshots of whole threads which is still horrible.
To note, our ticketing system is basically a fancy reminder/todo list and we're not SCRUM, if that gives more perspective into why time spent writing detailed tickets hasn't a stellar ROI.
Surely, you meant to say "Slack used to be permanent...".
It's a valuable lesson that, it seems, each generation of engineers gets to learn anew. If it's not under your control (direct or contractual), you will lose it at some point.
For instance I can't think of any document or design discussion I wrote in the past 10 years that would still matter today. Either the system is still somewhat live and running, and it's probably too far away from the original design for these docs to matter, or it's dead and buried, the company potentially not existing anymore.
In a way, actual permanentness is overrated for many many applications.
Now, people would be more sensible to disruptions of the current business, but arguably services like Slack or JIRA have a better track record than home made internally managed systems.
FWIW I also quite enjoyed using Discord when I used it for a project (even though I generally dislike it for many reasons).
Self-hosted or it's not yours.
Excuse my ignorance, but do people really do this? I use Slack for work, and have no desire to use it for personal reasons or with family. Especially when there are free messaging services that have fewer limitations.
I've used it as a chat app with friends for > 5 years.
I was about to say that due to the new 90-day policy, we stand to lose pretty much allof the content in those channels but as it turns out, except for one message from July 2020, we already have. I suppose it doesn’t matter to me now if it’s 10k messages or 3 months of history but the former amounted to 24 months.
if you rely on slack to plan your family vacation you have other problems
As someone who worked at a company Salesforce acquired, I can say from experience that tinkering with pricing and packages is how it starts. Next will be tight integration with Salesforce's nightmare monolith, and then a mountain of compliance bureaucracy burden as salespeople try to convince government agencies that they need something they don't and that making compliance burdens more and more insane is good for them (when in reality it's just a transparent attempt at giving Salesforce more of a "most" around their business to keep out any upstart competitors who might otherwise enter the market with the same or better product for cheaper).
If the current pattern holds, this will culminate in mass exodus from engineering and a promotion for some execs for "strengthening Salesforce's position in the marketplace" while "cutting costs" in the form of reducing the number of salaries they pay out)
Management has already left, in true Salesforce and Oracle fashion they'll be pushing Salesforce VP's into senior leadership roles at Slack - starting with regions.
1 year acquisition anniversary is next week, so you'll see an influx of more, and then the final exodus will be 1 year later when KPI's for 2-year employee retention bonuses runs out.
> "In a true digital HQ, you can move all communications—even those with external partners and customers—from siloed email inboxes to channels and direct messages in Slack." Siloed email inboxes? Slack's solution is precisely putting everyone into THEIR silo/walled garden.
I'm still waiting for the EU to enforce at least some degree of inter-compatibility between chat apps. I'm tired of switching between FB Messenger, Instagram, Discord, Slack, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix and whatnot.
Being able to use slack to talk with their clients / suppliers who don't use slack (and who often have their own preferred chat system) would definitely be important/valuable to many of them. Hell, I've worked at more than one place where you couldn't use slack to talk to a different department and this was an issue recognised by management.
If Slack didn't exist, leaders would have to come up with documentation, rules and processes to shuffle work around, probably much more efficiently.
Companies really don't like you can escaping their walled gardens and users/customers never made compliance with internet standards a requirement for the services they use.
You might argue this sort of communication is unnecessary but it's very hard to get big orgs consistently on the same page. An all-hands is just not the right tool for that.
(fb messenger, slack, whatsapp, hangouts/gchat, and more used to be accessible through a single client. That said, I recall federation was mostly unsupported by the various hosts, so you still needed to be logged in to each service.)
Well, it's happening. The final phase of the legislation passed today: https://twitter.com/SamuelStolton/status/1548955978166575104
See https://www.beeper.com/ or https://element.io/element-one for a hosted product, or use https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy to self host.
Hopefully my customers will keep using Slack.
I have clients that create external accounts for me under their domain. Once signed in, I can no longer sign into a different account, so my meeting with other clients have Company A in my email... kind of odd.
Of course, I can't actually create a personal Teams account, because my company does not use Teams.
So, I decided to burn everything MS Teams related out of my home directory, and start fresh. I am now a guest user for every company that needs calls done via Teams.
Arguably a worse off solution, no?
Assuming homedir is on a Linux machine.
I can’t imagine why someone would build that and then think “This is it. This is good enough.”
Almost everything about Slack is better. It's easier to manage conversations/channels. It's easier to read. It's easier to write. It's easier to customize.
The only thing I've heard is that Slack is unstable for some people. I haven't experienced any stability issues in 3+ years using the MacOS app. I've heard that the Slack web interface may be the cause of stability issues.
We have Slack in my organization, but corporate has started using Teams for the past year. I think the writing is on the wall, and I'm dreading it.
It may sound silly, but “we use Slack instead of Teams” would not be insignificant in the consideration of whether to accept a new job.
It doesn't even matter if the choices and ergonomics are better or worse... Since it's just not-Slack, it gets rejected by a certain (IMO quite large) share of the population.
My company tried to switch to Teams and there was practically an employee uprising... it now sticks to Teams for all non-eng while eng does Slack.
Why did the other depts stick to Teams?
Your comment seems to precisely prove my point, when reading it from my seat :D
You misunderstand. They didn't have a say.
eng usually knows about tech tools better than other departments.
For programs: Ask the finance department about Sage and excel and they will have opinions.
Main thing though is the default-open. If you don't get that, well that's ok, many people don't.
My bigger problem with teams is their multi-Team model. In between my current and last job, I (part time) contracted with a handful of groups and every single one added me to their Slack or Teams group. With Slack, they popped up as separate orgs and I could move between them as I needed. With Teams, I had to log out of one to open the other.
I will never know how many questions I missed (aka billable hours) and people I annoyed by "ignoring" them when I had simply had to join some other group's Teams to take a call and forgot to come back to their Teams.
It's been like this for at least a year and a half, and I've submitted it through the "feedback form" countless times.
Ps.: Interestingly enough, in Pavucontrol the application shows up as "Skype", with the icon and all.
I feel so sorry for those who continue operating in such soulless, life-sucking work environments that they're down to choosing which horrible attention-grabbing SaaS product they'd rather use.
Have you not considered simply using neither? What is wrong with email? Hell, what's wrong with a phone call?
>attention-grabbing
Your solution is to add more and more annoying things unnecessarily in an effort to side-step the problem.
I think there should be an examination of the root causes and more post-mortems to actually understand what went wrong and why the solution didn't work either.
You want to keep piling on in a rather psychopathic manner:
Phone tag --> SMS --> Email --> AIM --> MySpace --> Facebook --> Twitter --> Instagram --> Snapchat --> TikTok --> ???????
You even do this in other posts, defending the idea of the suicide prevention hotline before even discussing wtf might be causing people to be suicidal. [0] People like you are why we are rapidly shedding any semblance of progress in the Western world.
You have to remember to take notes.
I hate going to find something in Slack history and seeing a phone call right around where I think important information may have been conveyed. At best, I have to go look other places to find it. At worst, there's nothing. And since I may not have been on the call, it may not even be possible for me to have notes, short of bugging the people who participated and hoping they took notes.
This even goes for personal stuff. I much prefer when my wife sends me important info via chat (not Slack, in this case) rather than calling, unless it's super time-sensitive, for basically the same reason.
Email evades the objection to calls, sure, but I've yet to see an email client that doesn't suck for low-friction multiparty chat. Yes, including gmail. I'm pretty sure this could be solved by a client, but I've not seen it, and I think part of the problem is having to accommodate other clients' default quoting behavior and threading and such, so it may be something that could technically be solved by a good client, but couldn't in fact be solved by a client.
Better for you and better for the team! Cause I wouldn't want to work with someone who would do that.
It's as if people had never before considered that what they are doing is actually very toxic for the world and our planet. It's as if you hate being reminded that people that support Slack and Microsoft are basically the devil incarnate.
With all that money, maybe they'll finally be able to create an app where ctrl+k does not have between one and ten seconds of delay before showing the menu? Surely that's possible.
At some point they refactored some things, made stuff faster, and wrote a nice blog post about it, and the emoji autocomplete was lightning fast again.
Then of course, it slowed down incrementally over the next couple months until it is now unbearably slow again.
I was really big into Deep Work's hyperactive hivemind and saw Slack as a negative until I took a full remote job and found it to be a critical tool for async communication.
The solution ended up being really simple: cmd + q when I want to focus.
ZenDesk's 300% hike still stings over a decade later.
Besides the price, Google Meet is miles better than Slack video chat. I know most people just pay for Zoom, but for those of us that are stuck in Slack calls, Meet is a huge improvement.
I wonder if there is a tool to migrate all public messages from Slack to Google Chat?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/so-nice-they-killed-...
The one thing I will say that's great about it is their search functionality is top tier.
However, many of our other clients use Slack internally and I use it to communicate with them... And I much prefer Slack. There's nothing really wrong with Google Chat, it just doesn't have the same polish or some of the really nice features that you might take for granted, like sane threading, custom emojis, or the ability to collapse a GIF so you can't see the animation out of the corner of your eye.
So why switch to an inferior product just to save a few comparative pennies? I'd gladly ask my company to just remove the cost from my salary to not have to use teams.
To be honest, the only complain I have about Teams is how resource hungry and unresponsive the application is. But I think it does (or should I say "attempts to do") some things better than Slack. I like the way Teams displays the chat threads as conversations instead of a long, narrow and claustrophobic column on the right, for example. But, again, nobody asks me :)
Blocking javascript causes every page on slack.com to continuously refresh. Why?
(I am also a weirdo)
Fun fact, Slack also started blocking Fierfox 78 ESR last winter, which was the default browser in Debian stable until just a couple of weeks ago. They don't merely show an unsupported browser message, but actively prevent the app from loading. It still worked fine if you spoofed the user agent string to report a later Firefox version. It felt like unnecessary hostility to users for no actual security benefit.
Slack, either the web version or the desktop version, will not work without Javascript. So its reasonable to expect that their customers will have javascript enabled (or more aptly, not-disabled) - allowing them to use more dynamic features to showcase their tool.
Probably easier to expect that the users browser hasn't loaded the Javascript and cause a page refresh to show them the site, than expect a non-Javascript user.
"Switch to a yearly plan to keep our current rate for a year Your team’s current rate for the monthly Slack Pro plan is $8 USD/user/month.
Our current rate for the yearly Slack Pro plan is $6.67 USD/user/month, and we are offering monthly subscribers the opportunity to lock in that rate for 12 months by committing to a yearly Pro plan. To take advantage of this offer, switch to the yearly Pro plan before September 1.
If you take no action, your monthly Pro price will adjust to $8.75 USD/user/month and will be reflected in your account on September 9th, 2022."
I probably once a month start a group chat and need to add somebody to it and all context is gone
https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-di...
Interesting.. In both this thread and the linked article.