371–380 of 1001 posts
I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids.... https://hackclub.com/ (They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.
Slack's business model has always been that you give them all your most critical data and they sell you access to it. This is basically the business model of the traditional kind of ransomware, before people got better at making backups. You probably should expect large bill increases over time from ransomware-as-a-service companies like Slack. Not all of them—people are capable of behaving decently—but probably the…
I was cancelling my annual slack premium last month and had to click to acknowledge that some of my members are using the AI features and they will lose access to them. They then offered me a discount and if I refused there was another checkbox where I accepted that I was about to cause disruption for other staff. I was tempted to take the deal until that point, but I'm the only member of the organisation and I absol…
(*not actually Slack just annoyed by this scheme, boo)
There are also reports of this happening with their CRM customers[0]. One look at their YTD stock chart (-27%) may suggest why. Very Oracle behaviour from the company started as the anti-Oracle. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/1n93cl0/crm_pri...
That's a 40x increase all at once with a very short grace period, it's bait-and-switch territory. If only 2.5% of targets pay the ransom, Slack breaks even on this racket, so in absence of any protection this strategy is most likely profitable for Slack. This is something you pull if you want to squeeze in the short term, and don't mind losing customers.
Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically." So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed…
Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.