I hate the state of chat right now. IRC is the kind of open standard and FOSS technology we need, but terribly outdated, Slack and Co. are shiny but inflexible and locked in.
Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
141–150 of 790 posts
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation. 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 sente…
On the one hand, I met my partner in a community that uses Discord, so I can't disagree that developing relationships there can work. On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, " "check the pins".
>endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, " "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.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#143http://discord.com
No, discord is not a good alternative. We just have to wait until they pull the rug from under their free users in order to aggressively monetize. And I think that will hurt much more than Slack.
not just that, they're also incredibly hostile to users trying to retain privacy.
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.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.
If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so.
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.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.
Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want t…
> not a giant scrolling doomswheel
Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#146This 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…
Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind. 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
DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX.
Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
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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.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#147I mean, where are we gonna go? Microsoft Teams? Damn thing is terrible. I guess Discord can be a option.
Maybe our needs aren't terribly great, but Teams works pretty well in our enterprise. ~3000 users.
If teams works great for you I don’t think I want to work there.
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.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#148This will catch a lot of small teams unprepared, but to be honest they should've considered chat as ephemeral, and if something was worth keeping they should've persisted that elsewhere. Also that reminds me of the old days of IRC and how simple it was to keep logs of conversations.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#149If 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
Slack isn't dominant. They sold to Salesforce because they couldn't beat Microsoft on distribution in the enterprise, and saw the writing on the wall. I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?
Slack only lost because of Microsoft using their near-monopoly in one space to take over another. Almost like this is a pattern of behavior for them.
Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. It could never survive in the marketplace on its own merits.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#150If 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
I can self-host Zulip, so I don't care what they do, as long as they're alive.