Every multi-user communication system invented after Usenet tries to fix some shortcoming in Usenet while (sometimes intentionally) throwing out some part of the essential usefulness of Usenet.
Zulip comes pretty close, though.
Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
291–300 of 790 posts
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.
As a moderate user of both, they seem almost indistinguishable to me. Slack probably has more integration with productivity tools and a better auditing/compliance story, but it’s not at all obvious to me that Discord couldn’t become a drop in replacement.
How would you rate mattermost and zulip compared to slack and discord? I've only used slack, mattermost and skype. Of those I prefer mattermost by a fair margin, but I'm still not sure I like it. It seems like the ui could be better. Something about the way both it and slack handle channels or groups feels clunky.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#293People 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…
Not necessarily. I offer a free tier because I want to, as a service to hobbyists and makers. It is not intended to be temporary. It's also not an upselling tool: features are distinctly different and there is no paid plan that would make sense for hobbyists. Not every business is a VC-funded growth-above-all meat grinder.
Thank you!
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#294guilded.gg is a great alternative for this use case (and many others). Transparency: I work there.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In the EU at least, this is impossible because of invoicing and bookkeeping/accounting requirements.
Hmmm...Starbucks does this by charging me a lump sum in one transaction and then allowing me to spend it down over time in smaller chunks.
I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited support issues around reversibility.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#296Does 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 for…
Integrations is the main deal for me as well. Discord might have some integrations here and there, but slack is virtually on every dev tool.
Like nextjs for deployment/fail messages.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of video games and gaming platforms that invent their own micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so asks for some of their allowance to go into their ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with nearly no friction.
That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#298People 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 Sla…
And it is even worse than losing your positive word of mouth, because people burned by this change will start recommending against using slack now.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a moderate user of both, they seem almost indistinguishable to me. Slack probably has more integration with productivity tools and a better auditing/compliance story, but it’s not at all obvious to me that Discord couldn’t become a drop in replacement.
How would you rate mattermost and zulip compared to slack and discord? I've only used slack, mattermost and skype. Of those I prefer mattermost by a fair margin, but I'm still not sure I like it. It seems like the ui could be better. Something about the way both it and slack handle channels or groups feels clunky.
I might get backlash for this, but IRC (what all these platforms are emulating) handled channels pretty terribly also.
Re: Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
> I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit
For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least: