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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

blog.zulip.com

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

#181

Post by projektfu »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #116
Melatonic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful

In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?

Reddit has active communities of people who just repost other subreddits to laugh at, get outraged at, or bully. In theory the bullying and brigading is supposed to be moderated against but weakly moderated niche subreddits can sometimes find themselves under attack.

That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.

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

#183

Post by conductr »

joe-collins wrote: post #35
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…

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…

Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later.

Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.

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

#184

Post by stavros »

alberth wrote: post #174
stavros wrote: post #123

Zulip is a much better communication medium than Slack, is faster, has better UX and is open source. I hope this move by Slack accelerates migration to Zulip.

> Zulip [has] better UX [than Slack] While yes I like the thread model, I don’t believe most users would agree and say Zulip UX is better.

Really? I'm surprised many people would disagree. Slack is slow, bloated, has threading as an afterthought, is really hard to navigate, and is very bad at traversing history.

In Slack, if I've been away and going through channels to see what I've missed, and want to go back to something I just saw, it's impossible to find again unless I remember the channel name. In Zulip, just scroll up.

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

#185

Post by stavros »

verdverm wrote: post #178
stavros wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's improved and is now resizable, still much much better than discord The main problem with alternatives is integrations, bots, and similar. The ecosystems are not as available, at least that is the impression

Yeah, the ecosystem and integrations is definitely where Slack has the advantage. Still, I'd rather give up the integrations than the much improved communication.

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

#186

Post by quickthrower2 »

jmull wrote: post #163

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…

Micropayments! When will this happen?

Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction!

Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card.

Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an example!).

Maybe the solution is an in browser card-free micropayments system that you load up as a browser extension. Something like web3 without the cryptocurrency or blockchain! Chicken and egg problem though.

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

#187

Post by verdverm »

HACK: If you want to save all of your current slack messages, sign up for https://orbit.love, connect it to slack, and then grab the messages from the API. Not sure how much longer this will work, it takes time and they may catch on.

I do like Orbit as a user, still a relatively new product

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

#188

Post by jmclnx »

userbinator wrote: post #29

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.

Yes, and searching history in slack is very painful, I have no use for history in slack, might as well delete it after 2 days.

With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want using any tool you want.

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

#189

Post by xtracto »

samstave wrote: post #146
pygy_ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. - 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 m…

> Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).

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

#190

Post by lazyasciiart »

insightcheck wrote: post #59
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…

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…

Yes, but not for e.g technical help channels. I don't want a personal relationship with another user of xx OSS tool - I want to search for the error message and find previous answers.
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