Slack to destroy >90d history of free communities | Hacker News Reader

Slack to destroy >90d history of free communities

slimsag.com

77 pointsemidoots76 comments

How many times will this same post be shared, each time with an incorrect/sensationalized title?

Free teams already couldn't view history beyond 90 days, and that isn't changing.

Slack originally stored the history forever, but will now delete it after 1 year (not 90d as in the title).

This is actually a good development, because the next logical step from a large corporation's perspective would be to use this trove of user data for training LLMs or selling it to a third party (like Reddit, Stack Overflow etc. have done), and they can't do that now.

>Slack originally stored the history forever, but will now delete it after 1 year.

>This is actually a good development, because the next logical step from a large corporation's perspective would be to use this trove of user data for training LLMs or selling it to a third party (like Reddit, Stack Overflow etc. have done), and they can't do that now.

Except you can envision a world where its no longer recoverable (for you) and also still available for LM training

Agree, there is no reason they can't keep the data. They likely will, probably just going to be a soft delete anyway.

This is most likely driven by the sales team to squeeze a few more conversions.

Is there a reason to believe that they are knowingly violating their ToS and privacy policies, lying in communication and using user data illegally?

Isn't that what all the Silicon Valley companies are doing by default, until caught?

I'm trying to imagine what it must be like to believe that a company you're depending on, for a product that is either non-essential or has viable alternatives, is that untrustworthy, but still continue to rely on them for managing private communication.

I'm not relying on Slack, I'm using Slack because my workplace forces me to use it. I still remember the days when Slack was little more than IRC with a coat of paint. You could actually connect to Slack via IRC clients, and that went away with the introduction of "Teams" around 2016.

In any case, I would prefer company-internal tooling for company-internal communications over some SaaS any day. But I'm not the one in power to make these decisions. So over the years I've used Slack under the assumption everything I write on it will be data mined, sold, and now used for training LLMs.

Recent and related:

Slack updates retention policy for free workspaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40788323 - June 2024 (71 comments)

There are plenty of orgs with legally obligated retention that was satisfied via the "we can pay to get the messages if we need the messages"

Now that that's going away, those orgs are being exposed to a legal liability and need to reconfigure.

Seems reasonable? If you’re planning on staying free forever and are already gated to 90 days of history, why would you care if they delete 1+ year old content? From a privacy perspective, I’d even say it’s a positive update.

Because now you can't pay to see the history, it'll be gone. Previously you could've started paying any time to access the history.

You can, if you pay before they delete it.

Can't you just upgrade to a paid tier? Or would you lose the history in the process?

You can but you only have 30 days to do it before they delete history outside of the previous year if I'm reading this right

But you have a year to decide if Slack is worth it to you. Seems reasonable no?

This seems very reasonable. Free service is still free even.

Maybe I'm not getting it but you're on a free plan, which only gives you 90d of history, but Slack has been keeping all your history, which you can't access but you have an issue with them deleting >1yr old history?

I'm pretty sure they've kept this history as an incentive for people to pay so they can gain access to it. Now they've decided the costs of maintaining history >1yr are larger than the value they get from maintaining it.

If being able to have this history is important enough to you then I guess you'll want to be on a paid plan. Slack doesn't provide a free plan out of the goodness of their heart, they provide it to get people to eventually become paying customers. It's a business.

Slack lets free plans to turn on 90 day retention (i.e. content auto-deletes after 90 days). Free workspace users might want to consider this as a risk reduction measure: free users don't have meaningful access to beyond-90-day content anyway (explained in the article), yet anyone who compromises Slack (via any means, be technical or legal) gets access to extended history that workspace users don't themselves get. https://slack.com/help/articles/203457187-Customize-data-ret...

And anyway, the best UX is that of Zulip, which you can self-host :-)

I'm more interested in the psychology of how people have come to expect free services on a continued basis from strangers when it is behind a keyboard.

Because it is what Google first and other later got us used to

And we complain about it.

But oh man we won't pay ... and if we get really upset we will move and we'll cheer on the next one to offer us something for free ... for now.

Because they have been conditioned to expect it, not realizing that they were the product all along.

Or somehow whole thing managed to operate while pouring untold amounts of money to provide these free services... Whole fundamental idea of how anything operates that is makes more money than spends was distorted for too long time...

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...

I guess anchoring is a powerful thought process.

Heads up, Krispy Kreme is giving out free doughnuts on the 4th of July. But be warned, you will have to buy your own doughnut on the 5th.

Decades of conditioning.

This is probably why they deprecated the IRC servers. I used to use them to log everything, it was great. :'(

A lot of OSS communities, study groups, hackathon groups use Slack. Never understood this choice other than familiarity from work.

I hope more people shift to Zulip. But we all know where people are actually going to shift, even though that is a poor solution for long-term community building, too.

Why do you think Zulip is going to be better? What happens when their VC funding runs out?

Zulip is open source and you can self-host it.

It should be obvious that Slack has the usage it does specifically because the groups you mention don't want to take on the effort and costs of hosting and ongoing maintenance.

They have a cloud offering with import and export tools, so one can still use that and migrate to self-hosted when or if they want.

Your question was why is Zulip better; I'd argue that's a pretty strong reason.

Zulip's free plan allows 10,000 messages of history and 5GB storage, similar to (and arguably worse than) Slack.

That's what slack used to offer, and it was actually usable for small communities.

90 days is useless for basically everyone.

We (Zulip) also have a free Community plan that we sponsor for thousands of communities, that does not limit message history.

https://zulip.com/values explains how we are building Zulip to be sustainable for the long term (without VC funding).

I was just reading this... been getting a few emails. Ha. 92 for people who don't want to click on the image.

https://i.imgur.com/N6hdfU0.png

I knew I had a lot of Slack groups, but I didn't realize it was quite this many. (And there are probably about 2x that many if I could include old emails in the list.)

But I don't really have a problem with them deleting old messages.

A lot of agencies set up private Slack groups with each client... easy way to have team chat, without the hassle of getting approved by the client's security team, or getting on the client's SSO tools. =P

I'm grateful for Slack, but the pricing model never quite worked right for agencies. I don't really want to put everyone in the same basket, the permissions would be annoying to maintain -- and the downside to messing up permissions and showing work from one customer to another would be devastating... easier to just spin off new groups. But... paying for each and every group is also not really appealing.

Anyway, 90 days still allows us "working communication" and I'm still very grateful to Slack for the platform they built. (=

Didn’t they always enforce history limits on free groups? Is this something new?

In the past, you could only see the last 10,000 messages. Currently you can only see the last 90 days of messages.

The key difference: They showed onlymlimited amounts, but kept the data. So once you paid you got the full archive. Now they delete the old data and you can't pay to get the old stuff back.

Considering that I have somengroups where we'll never pay this is a good change l.

Slack previously stored history beyond 90d but didn't allow it to be accessed until the workspace was upgraded to a paid subscription. (For example, Slack recently ran a promotion where workspaces could get a free one-month trial; for the duration of that trial, users could view the full history of the workspace.)

Guess they did the math and figured out most people don't pay to see the history anyway.

If a server stays free beyond 90 days there's probably a low possibility of converting to paid.

Or at least lower likely gain than the cost of storing and maintaining the history.

This post strikes me as incredibly entitled.

Slack started doing this as a loss leader. If it's not working out for them, then they're well within their rights to try and cut their losses by telling people to shit or get off the pot.

This is why you shouldn't use Slack as anything more than a beefed up chat client, and especially not for things like non-ephemeral help/information.

Isn't it just web-styled IRC wrapped up in Electron with an API for extensions?

Isn't that nearly every chat app these days?

Deleting old stuff seems more like a feature to me. I wish everything would delete old stuff automatically.

Can’t we all just get back on IRC and Usenet? I sorely miss both. Blogs too, but .plan files will do fine.

For that last one, check out https://plan.cat if you haven't already.

I don't understand when people complain about things like this. If you aren't paying you should not be surprised that this could happen.

If I were a paying customer of Slack and this change were made then sure, it would be "enshitification", but if you are not paying for anything you aren't really entitled to complain. They are essentially subsidizing your free usage.

If your slack community is that important, then you should be asking the community to help support its history.

For the free communities I'm a part of, this is not a bad thing. Social conversations disappearing after 90d is a good thing, and I'm glad they're purging that data as well.

How is it "enshittify" when people aren't paying for the product? I feel like this was entirely predictable, there's no way that Slack (now Salesforce) would continue to pay for free storage for none paying customers in all eternity.

> How is it "enshittify" when people aren't paying for the product?

Paid for or not, the term refers to the user experience. eg Youtube and Prime, previously free and ad-free products have been made worse over time.

In this case of Slack, you couldn't view messages past 90d as a free user from the initial offering....maybe you could get some older messages if there was an alternate 10k msg limit and you used slack as your own personal notes sent to yourself shrug. I agree that the Slack storing older data at all, is surprising, and this change does not affect the user experience for the vast majority of free tier users.

Salesforce was desperate to build their own LLM and Slack chat history would be a major competitive advantage as their own dataset. Yet for some reason they are going to delete it...

Go ahead, delete what I cannot see and will not pay for.

It isn't clear to me that this is a good business move...

GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store. Which means that by making available only the last 90 days, you can't keep older stuff...

And, in today's AI powered world, in slacks position that old data seems far more valuable to keep than to throw away, even for your non-paying customers.

For one thing, they might be able to make a smarter 'AI slackbot' which better understands your organisation looking at more history.

And they might one day be able to wrangle permission to sell the AI training rights to all your corporate chats if they can find some convincing way to anonymize the result.

> GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store.

My understanding is that Slack doesn't make >90 days available to non-paying users, so by your statement above, they're required by GDPR to delete that history.

Yep...

And that might be why they're doing it.

They also have the option to make the data available but in an inconvenient form - like for example 'sure, you can access your data vault, but it'll be CSV files of chats that you have to download one by one'.

Google Takeout is basically that, since nearly all the data isn't readily usable by most users.

That requires extra effort, though. They may even need to set up a team dedicated to serving such requests. It's not obvious that it's worth the effort.

My wild guess is that they will not delete it, but keep it in reserve for some kind of future value extraction. Instead, this is a short term juicing of subscriber numbers by getting more people to upgrade to paid plans.

Also, I am curious just how much this can be saving. Text is tiny.

Text is tiny, but database rows get expensive far faster than the raw storage costs.

For one thing, you basically can't run any database for small data like this direct from hard disk. Even for ancient data, where say a 100 byte chat message is read once per year on average, a 12 TB hard drive stores 120000000000 messages needs to provide 3800 IOPS to handle that load. No hard drive does that.

Since the data is all cold and immutable, do you even need the database anymore? Especially if you are locking down access to paid plans only (paying clients with performance expectations would still require live db). Shard the old data by community/age into separate parquet files you can retrieve as needed.

You have it just in case, but then you are just paying for storage.

They could have used it to train AI...

“Hopefully one day FOSS can actually compete with these services’ UX.”

Then build it yourself. ChatGPT will help you.

I mean, I get it. @AndrewfromX I don't think it is as simple as a "free TB". If I can afford a few TB on my desktop, Slack can afford many-many-many TB. I feel that these are more to apply pressure to "freeloaders be gone or become paying customers".

There have been many discussions/comments here in HN on this topic (free vs paying) so I bet a penny on the "convert or be gone" scenario.

anyone from slack know how many TB of space this reclaims for them?

slack stores their data on clay tablets so technically 0 :/

I knew it!

it's certainly their privilege to destroy the free hosting people don't want to pay money for.

if they are really genuinely deleting that data and not deleting it just for the account holder, then i would guess slack is not interested in the value of that data for ai.

imagine if reddit tossed their archive cause people wouldn't pay. it's not even the reason they exist anymore. they're data sponges.

Is it just me, or has Slack been going downhill since the Salesforce acquisition? Lots of new features I don't want, the user experience has become too complicated, and they move shit around in the UI for no good reason, screwing up my muscle memory.

Don't build castles inside another's house.

Always good to teach the next generation that most companies aren't altruistic.

No longer a Searchable Log of All Chat and Knowledge. So sad seeing Slack die.

You don't get what you don't pay for

You can't search for old content on the free plan older than 90 days anyway.

Hello Inshitification My Oldd Frienddd

I suppose at least this makes sense, storage is cheap, but it's not free.

I do find it very odd that every established platform with a free version has adopted the same model of "make the free version suck more" in hopes of boosting sales. I'm not sure that's the most effective model to be honest. I'd think that actually looking at why free tier users aren't converting would be a better long term move, being that, if you alienate free tier users via rugpull, they're less likely to give you later, and much more likely to leave entirely.

Also, if anyone wants something slack-ish, pumble.com is pretty good. Sortof a hybrid of slack and discord, we're using it a little and aside from the windows client hanging after its left open for a few days and occasionally needing to restart the app when an audio device is added in order to use it, no real show stopping issues. I don't doubt that the same thing happening to slack with happen to pumble eventually, at very least it's cheap and their tiers fit smaller teams well.

Oh and because they absolutely burry their pricing page, it's /pricing if you want to skip the marketing wank. It's much better when signed in to find it, but, I think an overall shitty onboarding experience if you do actually want to pay for it.

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