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.
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.
True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies):
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.
It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community.
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.)
I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands.
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.
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.
> 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.
This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click.
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."
Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation.
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
> "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.
To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project.
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.
Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.
No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord, migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But discord and pals not so much.
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.
This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me, especially coming years after launching free instances. For smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces them to pay or lose months or years of history.
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.
IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged...
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.
My initial reaction to Slack's change was that it's not a big deal. In the small communities I've worked with through Slack, we generally assumed that Slack messages are temporary, and we'd hit the former 10,000 message limit someday. We used email for more permanent communication, so the expectation of permanency wasn't changed.
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.
We have a paid slack for our team & customers, and a free slack to support our community, and Slack continuing to kneecap our community zone keeps pushing us towards dropping slack in general.
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.
I have like 7 Slacks. 2 of them are paid, 5 of them are hobby that I may use once a month. What are you suggesting? That I pay an extra $40/month just so that maybe I need an old message in one of those? I'd agree with you if Slack were indie devs but does Slack need my $40?
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
I’d be willing to pay, but not that much for my brother and I to chat every now and then.
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…
I would be excited if it applied to paid plans too so "oh the documentation is this ancient Slack thread" would stop being treated as a viable option. ;)
Honestly... good. For company-private communication sure but for FLOSS projects it genuinely irks me that Slack (Discord too) is _ever_ used as a communication medium. Make a forum, use IRC/Matrix or even Gitter/RocketChat.
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.
If Zulip became an overnight success, five to seven years from now I see them making similar changes. Resources cost money and Slack achieved what it needed to in order to establish itself as the dominant company in the space.
If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
For research groups, it seems to work exceedingly well. The UI is unobtrusive, and values my screen real estate. (Slack only devotes < 50% of the screen to the actual conversation. On Zulip, the list of users and threads are delegated to the margins, so that the actual messages have the center stage.)
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 wish they would integrate an IRC or XMPP gateway per default. I know that #isabelle is visible in isabelle.zulipchat.com, but if the instance admin does not enable it, there's no way to participate using the standard IM protocols.
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.
Stop using chat for things that you want to keep long term. It's not just about retention. Even with long term retention, it's nearly impossible to find things in a huge dump of unstructured conversation.
EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search engines.
Do you think most Slack teams on the free plan are active enough to send 10,000 messages every 90 days? That’s 111 messages every single day, or 156 every weekday!
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.
I haven't seen Mattermost [0] mentioned by anyone here, especially considering it's open-source and you can self-host. Admittedly, it has been a while since I've done some research on these platforms, but is there something I'm missing that makes Zulip or Rocketchat better?
zulip really is an amazing piece of software. Don't let the looks deceive you. They are "brutalist" because they are spending all the effort on UX and UI. If you download their terminal client, there is nothing to learn if you already know vim, and more importantly everything is very intuitive. Their messaging model is a bit different and needs an initial familiarization until it dawns on you that this is how messaging should be done anyway.
Extremely agree. After having used Zulip, Slack feels like going back to snail mail after email.
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).
[+] [-] jmull|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnarn|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshspankit|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JadoJodo|3 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] nmcela|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Test0129|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] muppetman|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rattray|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|3 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] pygy_|3 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202...
https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic
[+] [-] deadbeef57|3 years ago|reply
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
[+] [-] insightcheck|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lebaux|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sdwr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mritchie712|3 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pleb_nz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aero-glide2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|3 years ago|reply
https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-196-signal-you-were-the-chose...
Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32244795
[+] [-] aeturnum|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] insightcheck|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alberth|3 years ago|reply
They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely revamped/ended their free tier this week.
[+] [-] lmeyerov|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nakedrobot2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EamonnMR|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbr0|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] a1371|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] withinboredom|3 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] ceejayoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbs|3 years ago|reply
The better solution for that is to use open-source software.
[+] [-] majormajor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsujp|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LtWorf|3 years ago|reply
#ubuntu requires a registered nickname, so that's terrible as well :D
[+] [-] ptman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olingern|3 years ago|reply
If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
[+] [-] kareemsabri|3 years ago|reply
I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?
[+] [-] williamstein|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deadbeef57|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zaik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyellin|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andybak|3 years ago|reply
EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search engines.
[+] [-] danjc|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aeolun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] d3fault|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://mattermost.com/
[+] [-] cutierust|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|3 years ago|reply
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).