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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

#231

Post by nerdponx »

systemvoltage wrote: post #124
nerdponx wrote: post #90

Earlier 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…

I agree with all this. But I was talking about the full-text search and tags, which (at least in my opinion) is way better than the old forum engines.

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

#232

Post by domador »

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…

The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all if they knew that at some point they'd be forced to go from paying nothing at all to paying $87 a year per user?

I understand that to some companies their free or low-priced tiers end up being more of hassle than it's worth. But an $87 jump in order to access essential, previously available features seems like a good way to chop off your long tail of low volume users. Such a change could be deadly to a service's popularity and long-term prospects. Or maybe not.

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

#233

Post by freddie_mercury »

oblio wrote: post #212
rdbell wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks into the existing banking system. Put that into every browser. Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.

Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?

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

#234

Post by rtpg »

domador wrote: post #232
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…

The need to pay for storage is understandable, but in trying to turn free-plan users into paying customers, companies seem to misunderstand how seemingly small pricing and feature changes can make their product entirely unappealing. How many of Slack's free users would have been willing to sign up in the first place if they knew a 90-day-history limit would be implemented one day? How many would have signed up at all…

low volume users unprepared to pay anything to Slack ever are low value users.

There is an argument for a more granular pricing, but if I were Slack I would also want to jettison the "community" slacks

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

#235

Post by signalblur »

stavros wrote: post #184
alberth wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Did you play Eve-O by chance?

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

#236

Post by rtpg »

gernb wrote: post #223
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse

I agree about the design, but disagree about thriving-ness. There are many Discourse sites that exist and serve their purposes well.

I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.

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

#237

Post by Test0129 »

I understand why people are upset but the chest thumping and anger over losing certain aspects of a free tier makes no sense to me. If you're hosting a large community of people that needs to look far back in history then maybe you should consider either self hosting, or cajoling your members into paying. If the community truly brings value you'll be able to find the money. If not, then you have your own freeloader problem you have to address.

This was the same thing as forums a long time ago. Unfortunately they are dead now. However, it wasn't uncommon to have a special member class for people who paid into some tier (usually less than a cup of coffee) to support the host.

It's easy to forget that while you're freeloading someone is paying the bill. Slack is just finally forcing free tier user's hands. For people like me who use a slack channel once in a blue moon outside work this change is effectively a no-op. The people who were hosting vibrant communities on the free tier now have the hard job of cajoling people who have no intention to pay into paying. I don't see a problem with this frankly. Slack is still footing the bill for storage/compute/etc and if the accounts show no real intention to buy into a better tier sometimes you need to twist the screws a little.

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

#238

Post by flerchin »

stavros wrote: post #184
alberth wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

alt-left to go back. Just like a browser.

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

#239

Post by verdverm »

stavros wrote: post #228
verdverm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying my employer, who pays for slack so this whole thing is a no-op, means I have to have slack open. I'm not adding another chat platform to my repertoire, that is the real problem of incumbent If you read the CUE discussion I linked, you will see several people making this same point

Well yes, how could you? If the rest of the company is on Slack, you using a different service wouldn't work. The question is where does the employer (or, specifically, the CUE team) go if they don't want to pay for Slack any more.

Let's clarify a few things

1: I am not employed by CUE. I am their biggest fan and cheerleader

2: CUE has never paid for Slack

The context is that I have slack open, I am in 12+ groups. I've tried adding other platforms like discord and keeping them open.

The point is that, as a human, I only have so much attention, and having more than one chat program open at a time, in addition to the other messaging streams we are subjected to, it's a non-starter.

For my own sanity, only one chat platform can be regularly open. Thus follows the network effect and incumbent arguments

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

#240

Post by philliphaydon »

systemvoltage wrote: post #67
layoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine. PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/

Some times I get confused at what I’m looking at with discourse. The scrolling timeline thing is super confusing . Much rather have paging.
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