Comment by Test0129 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Test0129 | Hacker News Reader

I understand why people are upset but the chest thumping and anger over losing certain aspects of a free tier makes no sense to me. If you're hosting a large community of people that needs to look far back in history then maybe you should consider either self hosting, or cajoling your members into paying. If the community truly brings value you'll be able to find the money. If not, then you have your own freeloader problem you have to address.

This was the same thing as forums a long time ago. Unfortunately they are dead now. However, it wasn't uncommon to have a special member class for people who paid into some tier (usually less than a cup of coffee) to support the host.

It's easy to forget that while you're freeloading someone is paying the bill. Slack is just finally forcing free tier user's hands. For people like me who use a slack channel once in a blue moon outside work this change is effectively a no-op. The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly. Slack is still footing the bill for storage/compute/etc and if the accounts show no real intention to buy into a better tier sometimes you need to twist the screws a little.

My wife has 4 business slacks she's a part of. Because she's got the slack client open all day, she setup a little slack for just her and me to use. We use it during the day to plan things, talk etc etc.

It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old.

I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business ones she uses are all paid. I'm a member of 3 paid slack myself.

Now we need to install a second app for this sort of stuff. As more people do that, it's going to mean more people are exposed to Slack alternatives and might move to them fully.

Making things free also makes them sticky for people using them in more than one way. They've now broken that.

There's kinda of a https://xkcd.com/1172/ vibe to that use case.

Being able to go back through two years of chats with your wife most likely was never an intended use case for Slack. For a free tier, 90 day retention seems reasonable. The issue Slack has in their pricing, for private use, is that the cheapest tier is pretty expensive. This could be remedied by adding a private tier, for $1 per month per user. I think Slack has put a large number of potential customers in a position where they are asking them to upgrade to a paid tier, but not providing a realistic tier to upgrade to.

I am fascinated by the amount of people who use Slack though. While completely off topic, it an absolutely mess of a thing. It has to be one of the worst UIs I had the misfortune to use. It makes Google Chat look reasonable.

It's irc with the ability to share files and pin stuff to channels :) Felt extremely natural to me from day one.

Except threads. Threads are useless.

> 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.

IMO Slack threads are quite good.

I'm sure it depends on your use case etc., but in my work context I find they function really well.

I did try test some concepts around Slack/Discord threads serving as entire "discussions" for a literary community (so you e.g. post a topic and discuss it in the thread under the topic), and in the end there were a bunch of small pain points that all added up and made it unfeasible.

At work though I find Slack threads to be a good middle ground for having discussions in a medium-large channel with interested parties - everyone can see the main channel message, and those who choose to engage further can post in the thread or opt to receive thread updates if they just want to "listen in"... then if some important conclusion is reached you can opt to send that thread message out to the main channel as well to catch other people up on what was discussed.

> but in my work context I find they function really well.

You have only one channel? We have zillions, per topic.

Besides the default/obvious channels, we generally seem to have a channel per "team", a channel per "division" (group of teams), and then some channels for "division collaborations" e.g. data science + engineering. Then we also often set up a channel for big new features/projects and invite stakeholders to them.

EDIT: I guess the last type could be what you mean by "topic" - we are a startup so perhaps the number of feature/project type channels will balloon out over time, but doubt we would end up with "zillions" haha. And loads of them would be old and essentially archived.

A lot of the channels become somewhat bloated over time, with people joining because they are interested in keeping up with stuff in a broad context, but have no need to click into each thread and read over everything.

I would choose threaded discussions over PM groups or short-lived channels any day tbh.

I think the problem is not with threads themselves but with Slack's implementation. Threads provide a much-needed way of creating a discussion around a specific topic that doesn't pollute the main channel. In Slack they seem like more of an afterthought than a primary communication tool.

Yeah, they're very hard to find when you just quickly check where you're needed.

And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and have been getting value for years is not an option, because…?

> $12 p/m

Notably this is a 50% higher price than Disney+

Each subscription takes a toll. The price is set at $0, to make it more expensive is always going to be infinitely more expensive, but $12 is a lot for simple uses, and paying it in perpetuity is undesirable too.

Whatsapp was $1/y when it monetised, and I believe they were profitable, for context.

Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.

A magnetic fridge notepad accessible anywhere in the world.. with lots of advanced features... etc... would probably have been worth $1400/yr (in 2022 dollars) to serious customers back in 2000.

"serious" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because it's a no-true scotsman: anyone not paying is not serious enough.

"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.

Well by definition… how else would you differentiate between serious customers and tire kickers?

It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features.

And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.

Honestly this is just a really poor take.

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.

You claim it's a 'poor take' but you only repeat what you said prior with more words instead of elaborating on how so.

For example.

'Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era'

How did BBS 'solve' this problem?

BBS's, the pre-cursors to forums had real time notice boards and messaging systems.

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)

Sure the BBS ecosystem had a mostly similar feature set if you combine everything here and there but there wasn't a single product a customer could just download that had ALL the features rolled into it.

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.

$4 in 2002 is equivalent to $6-7 with the US treasuries own inflation calculator; but I never really argued that, I argued their current cost.

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.

You seem to have ignored my comment?

I'm not really sure where $4 in 2002 came from.

The question isn’t whether it’s worth that much to someone, it’s whether it’s worth that much to a couple using it to casually exchange messages (and/or what it costs Slack, which is definitely nowhere near that much).

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.

Yeah right, we know, it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. All those Starbucks coffees add up you know.

The problem is that there are many useful tools and services that most of us are using for free: Text editors, browsers, email, forum software, all sorts of apps, cloud storage etc. It's not realistic to pay 5$ or 12$ a month for each.

Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really should cultivate more community organized tooling based on Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's usecase.

Its been great for you to use Slack and to be able to go back and view conversations from years ago. It’s so useful to you that you’ve used it for years, and you love it.

…but you won’t pay $12/month for it?

Yes, you are a freeloader. And you’ll inevitably keep bouncing from free app to free app as services mature and shift focus to making money. You, as a freeloader, are of no economic value to Slack, Discord, or wherever you end up next.

I'm using Slack for productive purposes and still won't pay 12/month/user for it. We're an outlier org that has a lot of mostly inactive users that get active when something's going on. We don't want to pay 12/month just because one of them said happy birthday in the general channel. And no, the guest user feature won't do.

They should switch to fixed pricing for small teams. Something that ends up at far less than 12/user.

$12/month is a lot for a messaging protocol, some scripts, and storage under a few GB a year in a market that is Betrand pricing with a first-mover leader.

SaaS adds up.

$12/month is a LOT of money for sending some messages back and forth with your significant other. I would suggest they use Signal for that.

> …but you won’t pay $12/month for it?

But it’s $24/month, isn’t it? Double that if they invited the kids, in-laws, or neighbors but they don’t use it regularly because those people don’t use Slack for business — which is the whole point of the loss-leader approach: get people used to using slack, get them in the app, and then get them to bring it into larger environments where corporate rates make sense.

This new policy degrades the value of slack significantly for a bunch of long-term, low-volume users. It will cause a few people to move to a paid plan, maybe, and it will certainly cause many to leave slack. The last part will make slack less sticky, less familiar, less generally used, and will save them some amount on storage, maybe? Have you priced out storage recently? I’d bet the cost difference for storage of short text snippets between 90-day rolling and 10k messages is: - Smaller than the variance of MTBF of different batches of disks - Smaller than the variance on overhead in block/page size for their underlying storage system - Smaller than the variance of employee number for their 90th percentile large customers In other words, they’re adding annoyance and losing users for peanuts.

> The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly.

The problem, as another commenter points out, is the price. There just isn't a pricing tier that would make sense for people to pay as individuals to participate in an informal community (especially if even only some members could not afford it). I can't imagine more than $5/yr really working - probably only $1-2.

Well another problem is that they don't actually have a way for individuals to cover their own memberships; you'd need a community leader to set up a GoFundMe/equivalent, fundraise every billing cycle (which is logistically taxing and damages community feelings), etc. Yuck.

For color, I'm part of a professional network slack (alumni of a company) that people derive a fair amount of professional and personal value from. Important business and career networking, fond friendships, etc etc. Roughly nobody in that group is poor, or even US-middle-class, but the willingness to pay the current lowest tier for us is absolutely not there. Not even close.

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