Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#161

Post by kareemsabri » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:22 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #149

kareemsabri wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Teams is horrible, of course. Like I said, Microsoft won cause of enterprise market dominance.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#162

Post by icelancer » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:23 AM UTC

Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack?

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.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#163

Post by jmull » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:23 AM UTC

People should understand this:

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.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#164

Post by stavros » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:23 AM UTC

cutierust wrote: post #99

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 messagi…

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).

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#165

Post by derefr » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

JadoJodo wrote: post #21

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/c…

> Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident)

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.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#166

Post by Nowado » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:25 AM UTC

throwaway1851 wrote: post #96

joe-collins wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server , but they're utter black boxes to the outer world. I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find t…

Discord’s UX is a disaster for most of the things I’ve seen Discord used for. Lately, I don’t even bother trying.

It just keeps happening.

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.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#167

Post by icelancer » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:26 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #147

hcurtiss wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mothe…

MS Teams is garbage. When I did some consulting for Microsoft recently I was added to a Slack channel. Even the engineers at Microsoft I work with don't use it.

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.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#168

Post by stavros » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:27 AM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #8

jbotdev wrote: post #4

What is it about free services that brings out the worst complaints from people? I understand the paid plans aren’t cheap for small projects, but then maybe don’t rely on a free service for archiving important information.

The CUE team was looking at a $8k monthly bill for keeping Slack. The money Slack wants can be pretty outrageous when most users don't even chat. Add on top that a single user is likely in several orgs, the money they make per user is approaching usury, if you'll pardon the pun CUE is keeping Slack for now and accepting limited history https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/discussions/1839 has an overview of the situation…

Zulip is a very good fit for open source communities, and much much better for communication than Slack. I hate how Slack encourages you to say everything in the main channel, threads are close to impossible to use.

They're a tiny section off to the side and you can't easily navigate between them, it's really badly done.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#169

Post by hotpotamus » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

carom wrote: post #68

insightcheck wrote: post #5

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…

I hate slack and chat in general being temporary at basically everywhere I have worked. So often a colleague will give you instructions on some process then the next time you need it, it's gone.

Huh, I worked at a place that used it for several years and kept all the history. It was actually amazing to be able to search through conversations within the company for problems that other people had run into and the solutions they came up with. Once or twice I ran into an issue and found the answer in a conversation I had actually had with a colleague and then forgotten.

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.

Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

#170

Post by icelancer » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #17

asah wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just migrate to Zulip?

Just migrate to Mattermost?

I tried this and the server crashed a ton and was unstable; I used their official deployment guides to a DigitalOcean VPS. Nuked the VPS and stuck with Slack.

I'll probably give Zulip a try before I go back to Mattermost.