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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

#471

Post by Sharparam »

masklinn wrote: post #396
dalmo3 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is navigating millions of comments in a paginated thread any better? That's more than 25 000 pages.

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

#472

Post by luckydata »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #368
kristianc wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say they are acutely aware of the sales funnel. They weren’t making any money from those users who were ‘happily using Slack’s free tier for years’ and neither was there any prospect of converting them into paid users in the coming years. Very little point in keeping users (and paying to maintain them) who are going to be perpetually at the top of the funnel.

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…

I guarantee you that the people making that call have thought about it and decided it's not worth it anyways.

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

#473

Post by Sharparam »

mjr00 wrote: post #153
joe-collins wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they are exceptions.

There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0]. As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as…

What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.

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

#474

Post by oxfordmale »

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…

If Google had bought Slack, the free tier would almost certainly have stayed. Of course the compromise would be that you would be served ads and you would have to agree your Slack messages would be used to target those ads to your specific interests.

Salesforce is where products go to die. Slack will eventually get integrated in their Frankenstack and lose functionality. Salesforce can afford this strategy as long as they can keep charging $$$ for their CRM software that genuinely deserves its own circle in hell.

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

#475

Post by deadbeef57 »

Big fan of Zulip here. Admittedly, I haven't used Zulip in the context of a company. But I'm a happy user of

  - leanprover.zulipchat.com     (~4000 messages / week)
  - coq.zulipchat.com            (~1200 messages / week)
  - categorytheory.zulipchat.com (~600 messages / week)
as well as the quieter

  - isabelle.zulipchat.com
  - hott.zulipchat.com
For research groups, it seems to work exceedingly well. The UI is unobtrusive, and values my screen real estate. (Slack only devotes Besides that, I find that Zulip found the Goldilocks-equilibrium with its threading model. It works really well for both synchronous and asynchronous conversations, and you can easily switch back and forth between the two within one thread.

I'm a big fan.

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

#476

Post by [deleted] »

cauthon wrote: post #206
price wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#477

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

cauthon wrote: post #206
price wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

sounds like now you know of plenty!

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

#478

Post by deadbeef57 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #64

This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click. I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely…

Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.

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

#479

Post by deadbeef57 »

stevebmark wrote: post #374

Please understand that Zulip is nightmare software and it's absolutely not a replacement for useful productivity team software. Zulip is a joke (and an unfunny joke at that) for so many reasons. I've worked at three companies that tried and abandoned Zulip, all for good reason.

I'm a huge fan of Zulip. I use it heavily on leanprover.zulipchat.com (~4000 messages/week). I've never used it in the setting of a company.

What kind of issues did you hit? Doesn't sound fair to me to call Zulip an unfunny joke without providing any serious reason.

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

#480

Post by ABS »

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.

I find Zulip unbeareable and feel like I was sent back to the 1990s but IRC in the 90s was much better than Zulip in the 2020s.

I literally cannot follow anything and be productive in Zulip for communities with a reasonable number of people (e.g. Quarkus).

Some of it is obviously personal taste and habits

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