Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
blog.zulip.com
blog.zulip.com
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.
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.
If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.
Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.
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".
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.
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.
You put it better, just have any layer on top of IBANs. 0 need for crypto.
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.
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.
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".
currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"
https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited support issues around reversibility.
I should probably clarify that by "impossible" I really meant "does not make business/economic sense". You can do microtransactions with individuals, but if you're spending €2 (rough estimate) per transaction for invoicing, accounting, VAT processing, etc, it no longer makes any sense. Thus "impossible".
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.
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.
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edit, I thought I was on the Heroku thread... though a similar argument might be made still
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.
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.
Most apps have no good open source alternatives.
There are dozens of products and countless open protocols to base new products on. We could even just use IRC again.
(they’re technically in beta but a bunch of popular discords use them)
Slack does app integrations and bots pretty well.
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.
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.
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
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.
Auto-archived threads automatically unarchive themselves when you send a new message. Locked-threads, on the other hand, require explicit unlock.
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.
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'.
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.
Some people like this kind of constant distraction, though.
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.
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.
Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very different reasons.
About IRC you're obviously wrong :)
Discord is the best thing I’ve found. My group and I love it.
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.
Which is exactly why the IRC clones (Slack, etc) have taken off
Salesforce bought Slack in 2021.
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.
None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.
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.
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.
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.
They also own Tableau, which has stagnated as well and is pretty badly handled.
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.
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
someone hav[ing] 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
I am sharing that I have an equal and opposite opinion, which is that the someone having used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work sometimes IS enough to justify spending on those personal use cases
You are right that data can inform the decision, of course, keeping in mind that the benefits include intangibles like goodwill, which goes further in the techie community than in a layman community imo
For legit freemium users who to "try before they buy", indeed... it's a sad day for Heroku to lose this audience.
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.
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?
Genuine question, has there been any evidence to substantiate your claim?
[1] https://github.com/features/copilot#what-data-has-github-cop...
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
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.
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.
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.
I started using Slack in 2015, and never in my life used a free Slack account.
Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.
Users pay for convenience and for more, not just slightly better.
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.
They did that already. Years ago, they did that. Now everyone knows about slack.
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.
There is an argument for a more granular pricing, but if I were Slack I would also want to jettison the "community" slacks
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not every business is a VC-funded growth-above-all meat grinder.
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.
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.
- "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
- 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.
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.
All of a sudden everybody is happy, while nothing changed
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These users will either move to on-premise systems or pay to a competitor now.
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.
I also do want "easy" things to be free, like a note-taking app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think they have note limits on exporting notebooks.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
It has no business being the default chat of open source projects. Especially when there's something amazing and fully free like Matrix.
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.
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.
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.
But it’s probably a small amount because SaaS has figured out to basically milk slacktivism. People will complain but pay.
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/
> 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/
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.
You are talking from a buyer's perspective (the museum visitor) whereas he is talking from the seller's perspective (the museum / artist). The seller hopes that by allowing you free or cheap access to the art, you may be tempted to buy a copy of it or some memento of it (which is one of the ways museums / artists make money).
It increases prestige and pride of ownership for actual buyers.
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.
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.
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.
But I agree, in the eyes of the business suits this doesn't matter at all as long as it ticks boxes on a spec sheet.
In what way have they back-pedalled? I'm affected by this and hadn't heard anything.
(And, if you’re affected by Ukraine vs. Russia, deferred indefinitely.)
I have now selected it, thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
The problem is that the per-user model is really crap for public communities.
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.
What did they do now?
Especially considering all of Google's products/services, people still cry about Youtube ads/having to get Youtube premium.
People are so freaking self-entitled.
the reason big SV VC are shilling web3 so hard.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.)
[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
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.
Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.
PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/
Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.
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...
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.
The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.
Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?
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.
It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.
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.
Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.
So far we're hitting that goal.
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.
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
I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.
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.
I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/
Vs these, orders of magnitude more users, multiple orders of magnitude more posts
https://www.forumrankings.net/
Also
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.
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.
Optimizing responses has diminishing returns once you're below 100ms, but 250ms is far too slow.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
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.
On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is 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.
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.
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.
That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
The docker install is super easy.
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.
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.
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?
Discourse is 100% open source.
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.
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
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.
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.
My point was that I'm tired of not being able to trust any SaaS company long term. The service generally only gets worse over time, and then your data is at risk. So I decided I'm not gonna take any more chances with these and just try hosting everthing I need myself. So far so good.
> 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?
In general I only select services that are easy and fast to install and backup and have a nice UX so it won't go unused. I always install a service into a virtual machine first and take notes about the process. If there are any red flags like too complicated configration, missing documentation, heavy reasource usage, crippleware aka paywalling core features, then I just skip it and move on the next one.
After the service has proven itself trustworthy and useful, it's nice to start contributing to the project too. Everybody wins. And I gotta say, there are some incredible open-source software out there.
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.
Honk honk.
I had two slack workspaces for completely different projects/companies. I set the other one up early this year and we were slowly migrating to it after another SaaS went bust.
I was going to start paying for that workspace too, because I needed the extra features. Luckily they showed their true colors first and I got a chance to migrate away early. I don't want to deal with their whims long-term.
I also don’t see it as a moral failing for a company to cripple/take away it’s free offerings unless it promised/guaranteed otherwise (like Google did with the Workplace Apps).
However I do see a major issue with Slack’s pricing structure - the per user pricing means it’s a lot more suited for communities or companies with small number of highly engaged users than large number of low engagement users, the latter end up costing a LOT more for the same server load, which seems like a major missed opportunity.
Unless of course Slack determines that they could earn more by doing it this way, even with the number of potential customers they’re losing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have only one channel? We have zillions, per topic.
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.
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.
"advanced features" is also vague enough to be true no matter what you mean.
Practically speaking "magnetic notepad on a fridge accessible from anywhere" has been solved over and over and over again, and often in better ways.
Slack is a shiny UX on a middling bit of software with a good marketing department.
It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features.
And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.
There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible.
Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.
For example.
'Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era'
How did BBS 'solve' this problem?
The only bad part of it was the fact that nobody had a BBS compatible device in their pocket, but the core functionality of a centralised message board accessible from anywhere in the planet in essentially real-time was definitely at hand.
The major difference is that things these days are quite a bit more usable and we have little devices that are many hundreds of times more powerful than those BBS clients in our pockets.
But there have been so many iterations on the same idea that it's absolutely FALLACIOUS to say that Slack has innovated in anything other than marketing, they are so far from the first and so far from the best that it's sickening that you would defend $12/mo PER USER for a family.
yeah, they're not serious enough, but it's not costing Slack $48/mo to host 4 people, it probably costs $4 (very generously, taking all costs into consideration)
And even if there were such a product, why do you think that the $4/month in 2022 terms wouldn't have been $40/month or more, in 2000?
To me it seems intuitively obvious, much smaller adoption rate, much more niche or wealthy customer base on average, etc., in 2000, which would have made 2000Slack a boutique product.
Other than that it is obvious to me that you’re out of touch with reality entirely. $12 per user per month for a chat tool is a legitimately unjustifiable amount for the majority of the current slack user base.
You can argue that free is freeloading, perhaps I agree, but saying anyone not forking over €12/user is not a serious user is just insanely dismissive to the point of absurdity.
You also completely missed the point: BBSs were a one stop shop for all the features and more that slack has, IRC was the same but lacked persistence, which was bolted on, XMPP also had all the features slack had and is being sold to you as things like google talk and Facebook messenger (which is XMPP underneath!).
Slack innovates in marketing, telling people that they want this stuff. The product is not innovative and for the average/prosumer user the value simply isn’t there.
Zulip is so superior it is actually disgusting; and it’s FOSS.
Not to mention “matrix” or the multitude of fantastic walled garden chat tools.
Slack enjoys a niche because of rugpulling, bringing people in with marketing and UX and the promise that you can work with your existing client and cheaply so don’t worry about it! (IRC/XMPP gateways; generous free tier) before removing them.
That you defend this makes me believe you have a financial incentive.
I'm not really sure where $4 in 2002 came from.
Feels like regressive AWS style pricing. The casual users are overpaying to provide the basis for advanced features only a fraction of users, who have sufficient resources to optimize their efficiency, need.
Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really should cultivate more community organized tooling based on Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's usecase.
…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.
They should switch to fixed pricing for small teams. Something that ends up at far less than 12/user.
SaaS adds up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
You're not missing much
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”
You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit is.
Plausible, but if it really does happen it will be a landmark. Modern losing against old and ~crippled UX.
https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...
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.
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
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.
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.
[1]: https://element.io/get-started
[2]: https://element.io/matrix-services
"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...
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.
A Space is a list, phone book, a map that lists a bunch of rooms so you can join many of them conveniently.
https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-196-signal-you-were-the-chose...
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.
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.
https://export.fountstudio.com/
The export is in a proprietary JSON format and only contains links to attachments, plus it has a limit on the number of messages you can export if you don't pay for it. But after jumping through various hoops one afternoon I was able to export all the messages and attachments from a family channel that we've had going for a few years - since our kids were first active on computers. The total number of messages was about 3500, but we would have lost the vast majority of them with Slack's new approach.
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.)
I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with, but I haven’t met any so short-winded
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you expect Salesforce to?
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.
no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)
The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want using any tool you want.
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.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.
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.
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.
Oh well. Time for the industry to move on.
If you're not paying, it's not a sale.
They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely revamped/ended their free tier this week.
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.
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.
> 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.
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…
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.
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.
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
What do you mean? The analogue to rooms would be channels, which falls under a server.
It seems to me that the main organization model of Slack and Discord are the same.
What about any of that is embarrassing or childish? That it's not specifically designed for corporate drudgery hell?
The better solution for that is to use open-source software.
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.
#ubuntu requires a registered nickname, so that's terrible as well :D
If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?
Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. It could never survive in the marketplace on its own merits.
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.
- leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages / week)
- coq.zulipchat.com (~1200 messages / week)
- categorytheory.zulipchat.com (~600 messages / week)
- isabelle.zulipchat.com
- hott.zulipchat.com
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.
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.
EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search engines.
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.
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.
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).
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!!!
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.
Like nextjs for deployment/fail messages.
https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/slack_incoming
It probably deserves another pass on the documentation; it's been improved a few times since then and may no longer deserve the "beta" designation.
See also https://zulip.com/integrations/ for native integrations that often provide a better experience, taking advantage of topics to thread notifications together nicely.
Can you provide a link to the 4-year-old GitHub issue you found? I'd like to clean it up to reference what has changed since then.
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
If the employees were agnostic about the choice, it’s highly likely that many of these companies’ IT departments would choose Teams instead, because MS is certainly more company friendly (and its bundles tend to be cheaper).
I think Slack may end up regretting losing these non paying customers, who usually end up being their biggest and only cheerleaders in paying contexts.
The other problem for Slack is this decision makes open source alternatives more popular which means more users of the open source alternatives which would likely lead to more maintainers and developers for those projects, leading to them becoming increasingly competitive with Slack. That would squeeze Slack from all sides, with MS hitting them from the enterprise end and these alternatives from the open source end.
It would be difficult for a company to justify paying Slacks high prices when they have all these options instead.
I hope this move by Slack accelerates migration to Zulip.
While yes I like the thread model, I don’t believe most users would agree and say Zulip UX is better.
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.
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.
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
(Salesforce developer here)
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.
I always thought it was replacing irc and other previous chat platforms (google chat, hipchat, skype, icq, etc)?
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...
Outrage for outrage sake. #2020s
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
1. Destroy low-maintenance forums and IRC (often fully owned by their owners) by providing 'better' and more convenient services, let them 'own' a virtual channel and a promise (no public history in order to force the creation of more accounts, paid for by investors but that's a detail)
2. discontinue or make free plans unusable in order to force users to pay and bring investors huge profits
3. sell the company and live your life, laughing at the stupidity of the users who now have no history and no money
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.
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.
In other words, don’t rely on “free”, as there is no such thing.
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.
Zulip comes pretty close, though.
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.
And the people here shouting matrix and "don't go to discord" have never tried to push more non-technical people onto it. It starts with differently named apps on desktop and mobile (sure there are a few multi-platform clients). But then the naming? Back in the old days, IRC for a lot of people was not IRC, but mIRC. Why? Because the icon they had to click had that name. Thank goodness it at least resembled the name of the actual thing they were connecting to, where they could go "IRC? you mean mIRC?".
If I now tell someone to go on matrix - they don't have a matrix app on their phone, Mac or pc, and I have no idea which-one it'll be. Branding and name recognition is important here.
same thing with heroku
I do like Orbit as a user, still a relatively new product
Unlimited storage; 90 day retention! Whee!
Smart move from Zulip.
Not to mention that Zulip has some nice features like sane markdown and latex integration.
What has your problems with Zulip been?
What kind of issues did you hit? Doesn't sound fair to me to call Zulip an unfunny joke without providing any serious reason.
It would be nice if there were a good fail over or cluster model so we could run it at multiple sites.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Buy the product.
Or they can keep jumping from free tool to free tool, while complaining some good ones end up vanishing.
From a business perspective, this makes perfectly good sense.
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.
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...
Do you have any issues with the article?
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.
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.
(sigh) If meetings and analysis are required to assess alternatives to freemium collaboration apps, then you can afford the $9 per month :-/
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.
I guess Discord can be a option.
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.
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.
I had to install containers in firefox, and open 4 tabs to be able to use the 4 accounts at the same time. And of course, because Im using firefox, I can't use the camera in video calls because microsoft allows only chromium browsers to do so.
And the linux client is bug as hell.
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.
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
Distributed forums. Tada!
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.
Yeah, don't recommend something you have no control over DONT DO IT....EVER!!!
Second, it’s FREE. Case closed.
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.
What do you feel it brings for these very small and low volume use-cases over alternatives?
An exodus of free tier users whom Slack doesn’t want anyways, or an exodus of paying customers?
> What is the current stage of Niche Community?
> Niche Community is in the early stages of its development.
Yeah, no kidding
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
They're a tiny section off to the side and you can't easily navigate between them, it's really badly done.
The main problem with alternatives is integrations, bots, and similar. The ecosystems are not as available, at least that is the impression
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
If you read the CUE discussion I linked, you will see several people making this same point
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
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.
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.
I'll probably give Zulip a try before I go back to Mattermost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.