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Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

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Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#191

Post by illiac786 »

Doxin wrote: post #187
jayflux wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7. Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that. Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix). It’s also not searchable on Google eith…

> people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there. Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that…

IRC simply a different use case than a forum. I think both are useful and I don’t see a reason why a company couldn’t have IRC and a forum, there’s no contradiction and the overlap is small.

Forum are very useful for example for use cases where the topic is extremely specific and you throw out a post “who else does this and have this issue?” and hope someone will find your post through internet search and the more people find the thread the higher the likeliness to find a solution.

IRC is nice for quick back-and-forth type conversation for topics which are more “common”, where the requirements to participate in teh conversation are lower. For example, a discussion on a potential feature request.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#192

Post by Brajeshwar »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #4

I've heard that Slack becomes gigantically costly once you hit certain thresholds. Another big community is moving away from it after spending nearly $0.5M a year just on Slack.

Sorry for the lack of replies to the comments. Yes, On Deck and it seems to be spending it each month (not yearly, my mistake). I was looking for a public info of their announcement but could not find it.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#193

Post by lenkite »

pronik wrote: post #157
ryanSrich wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is the one I struggle with. I have 30+ slack workspaces, but with the new design I can hide all of them except for the in context one. It's an improvement over the old UI. Discord still doesn't have this, I belong to 100+ discord servers, and the notifications are a pure nightmare, impossible to find the server you want.

The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!

I wish they would just leave the UI alone. Who asked them to change it ? None of their users for sure. They can pay the UI cool kids to make a "Slack Hipsters" edition that can have all the jazzy shit for folks who like to waste their time while corporate and power users can stick to what works.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#194

Post by Doxin »

illiac786 wrote: post #191
Doxin wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there. Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that…

IRC simply a different use case than a forum. I think both are useful and I don’t see a reason why a company couldn’t have IRC and a forum, there’s no contradiction and the overlap is small. Forum are very useful for example for use cases where the topic is extremely specific and you throw out a post “who else does this and have this issue?” and hope someone will find your post through internet search and the more pe…

Oh no IRC and a forum are near perfect complements. Discord and friends try to integrate the two functionalities, but I've yet to see that work even remotely well.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#195

Post by proactivesvcs »

apitman wrote: post #136

I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them. Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to. I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they…

Discourse is currently working on AP federation: https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117

I am pretty excited for the future of the open Web for the first time in a long time.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#196

Post by nottorp »

altairprime wrote: post #156
nottorp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never made sense to pay per user for a public support-oriented slack. Internal slack with a finite number of people, that's another matter.

It could make sense, at the time, if your support staff were on Slack, and you had high hopes for community engagement, and Slack offered discounts to get you hooked.

> you had high hopes for community engagement

If you have high hopes for engagement instead of offering a product people want to buy, you deserve your fate :)

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#197

Post by nxm »

lenkite wrote: post #193
pronik wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!

I wish they would just leave the UI alone. Who asked them to change it ? None of their users for sure. They can pay the UI cool kids to make a "Slack Hipsters" edition that can have all the jazzy shit for folks who like to waste their time while corporate and power users can stick to what works.

Product team needs to add value

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#198

Post by philipwhiuk »

mathgladiator wrote: post #177
philipwhiuk wrote: post #94

It seems insane that the right choice for PostHog is to build (using a CMS) and then self-host their own forum. Surely there's a Discourse or similar that provides a hosted forum solution equivalent to Slack?

Why is it insane? I'm thinking of hiring an intern to build a forum for my saas using my platform. I can have fantastic integration and make it open source to educate on my platform.

It's ridiculous we've had forums for decades and people still feel the need to re-invent the wheel (at the huge engineering time and cost involved).

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#199

Post by rcxdude »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #176
KennyBlanken wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it. But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen. Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could eas…

Voice chat is fairly easy, it's not actually a huge use of bandwidth (in principle it can be basically none and peer-to-peer but that has privacy implications and discord now routes it all through a proxy). The CDN is probably the largest cost, and they have made moves towards cracking down on using it as an image host. But they do have a good income from selling Nitro features, much as many people don't see any value in them. They aren't quite profitable yet, but they're far from burning cash either.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#200

Post by rcxdude »

flohofwoe wrote: post #126

I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).

Discussion forums often turn into a black hole for information as well. IMO they aren't something to aspire for in terms of storing and organising information, whatever their advantages and disadvantages compared to a chatroom.
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