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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

#201

Post by egypturnash »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #69
chx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.

> The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...

Gotta make a profit.

Gotta make the most profit possible. At any cost.

Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.

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

#202

Post by ysavir »

dalmo3 wrote: post #145
systemvoltage wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a competition, though. Nothing stopping a forum from having both features. A forum I'm on has the classic-style forum navigation as well as feeds, and customizable feeds at that. Each user can read through the forum in whatever fashion they like.

Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?

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

#203

Post by kmeisthax »

piperswe wrote: post #139
nerdponx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.

There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.

Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.

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

#204

Post by ajkjk »

nyellin wrote: post #196

Slacks pricing model makes sense for business workspaces, but it doesn't work well for public communities. 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.

Same. I have some slacks with friend groups on the free tier. We'd like to see message history and would pay a bit for it... but the enterprise rates are way too high for random social groups.

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

#205

Post by AceJohnny2 »

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…

> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely

May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.

I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.

The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.

Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.

In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?

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

#206

Post by cauthon »

price wrote: post #74
jimvdv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay or lose months or years of history. You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat history. Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don’t think anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.

No, some certainly were. There's one quoted in the blog post, for example. In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-) (I'm one of the Zulip…

> ather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages

I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with, but I haven’t met any so short-winded

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

#208

Post by joshspankit »

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…

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.

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

#209

Post by rdbell »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #186
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…

> without the cryptocurrency or blockchain

If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.

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

#210

Post by k099 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #186
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…

Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...
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