Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by radicalbyte » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #379

xyzzy123 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's complicated; the fact that I use a free slack instance for note taking / bots is one thing, but I'm on 2 company slacks right now (paid), 2 non-profits (1 paid 1 not) and a handful of open source communities. Am I a user who won't convert? Everyone on a free slack instance is NOT using a competitor's product. There's a tipping point where having to check multiple apps will push people towards consolidati…

This. Companies should be charged, sure; but an upside of Slack is that I can use various tech community’s Slack, the union’s Slack, and the coworking’s Slack in the same app. None of them can pay, and they should be sponsored by our usage of Slack for our main job.

They can all better use Discord, whose model works on a per-user (not per-user-per-community) billing model. So less good at separating money from corporations but better aligned with non-commercial organisations as you don't need to pay $2k/month as none-profit just to keep chat history.

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

#392

Post by masklinn » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:39 AM UTC

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

Thank you. I’ve been feeling really alone.

> Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.

The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a much higher content/ui ratio.

They’re also full of bullshit gamification and immediately start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with it.

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

#393

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:40 AM UTC

It is about time newer generations understand no one lives out of thin air, and other professionals pay for their worktools.

Or they can keep jumping from free tool to free tool, while complaining some good ones end up vanishing.

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

#394

Post by Vespasian » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:41 AM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #233

oblio wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Different ones for different markets.

A working standard could simply define "seller endpoints", "buyers bank endpoint", "supported payment protocol" and a message passing system and let the parties figure it out.

Not global, but few things are in the world of finance.

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

#395

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:42 AM UTC

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…

They also have to understand, every single business outside computing, pays for they work tools, even if they got them at some flea market.

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

#396

Post by masklinn » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

dalmo3 wrote: post #324

folkrav wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily dislike anything infinite-scrolling...

Have you tried it? Check it out e.g. [1]. 1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it. [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-ht…

> Have you tried it?

Yes, it’s awful.

> Check it out e.g.

Oh lord. 40 comments? That’s a single page of traditional forums.

How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I do mean threads of a million comments.

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

#397

Post by masklinn » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:45 AM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #357

julianlam wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse, I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for and against pagination. You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose. Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.

The issue with discourse is it isn’t infinite scroll. They break up the timeline into the right side and if you have an exceptionally long timeline it will skip time periods thinking you just want the original post and the new stuff. It makes it difficult to follow the conversations. Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.

> Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.

Not necessarily, pagination is often configurable, so either way you need a per-comment permalink for linking to be reliable.

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

#398

Post by hnaccount_rng » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

saurik wrote: post #305

k099 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions. I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10. Instead, this discussion is about h…

But that's not the correct comparison right? It's not that you have to initiate a transfer for the flipping-on of the light. You pay integrated, at the end of the month (or really, the utility trusts you to not change your behaviour dramatically and you pay an expected usage, which is then corrected at the end of the year).

That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you need to initialise a complex utility that involves the trust of multiple parties and the need to verify identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much above that, you'll loose to friction.

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

#399

Post by tsujp » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

Honestly... good. For company-private communication sure but for FLOSS projects it genuinely irks me that Slack (Discord too) is _ever_ used as a communication medium. Make a forum, use IRC/Matrix or even Gitter/RocketChat.

Almost all the time whenever I reluctantly decide to join a FLOSS project's Slack it works out like this:

(1) Hunt for the invitation link and hope I can actually join because a lot of them have that annoying error where if your email doesn't end in `@theirproduct.com` you cannot join. Unless I really, really, REALLY want to join I give up here 99% of the time. (2) If the invite link hasn't expired, and if they allow any email to join then I am in but the channels are all basically ghost towns even for big projects like Kubernetes.

I suspect the friction in being able to easy join versus just visiting a website (forum) or opening a chat (IRC/Matrix, even Gitter) is why.

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

#400

Post by KronisLV » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 6:48 AM UTC

I think that something like this is basically inevitable for most free offerings that deal with data storage.

We saw something similar planned by DockerHub because there were a lot of abandoned container images, GitLab briefly wanted to do something similar to dormant projects and I'm sure that there are plenty other cases like that out there.

That said, this always comes with quite the backlash, so quite possibly it's better to bake in data expiry and cleanup from day 1 if you can get away with it.

Personally, though, I think that more people should host their own Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Nextcloud Talk or other chat solution instances.