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Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

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

#531

Post by bayindirh »

digitalengineer wrote: post #494
hnarn wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody understands this. Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off. You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the st…

Same with Evernote. Massive ‘growth’ on the free plan. No good way to capitalize, so they just started deleting features and locking people’s content in. There is no regular export to get everything out and you need to jump through a lot of hoops. I wish I never updated that app…

Just curious (I'm using professional for a very long time, and plans page doesn't clarify), can't you just get the ENEX files per notebook and import it to something else?

It contains everything, incl. the files as far as I can see.

The file format is open, and there are many conversion tools out there.

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

#532

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

hnarn wrote: post #481
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…

Everybody understands this. Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off. You’re trying to put the blame on the consumer here which never makes any sense from a business perspective. If your loss-leading pricing strategy was unsustainable from the st…

> Here’s what companies don’t understand: if you promote your product through a loss leader — which is arguably how Slack became popular in the first place — changing your pricing at a later date will piss people off.

This is part of the game: 1) work hard to make something popular by offering a part of it for free, 2) once enough people get hooked, start tightening the terms, 3) most people will be pissed off but your profit is from those who stay (because they invested too much to just migrate away).

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

#533

Post by Macha »

dagss wrote: post #402
ryantgtg wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that in Discord you can choose to spin off the conversation into a separate thread, or you can reply within the main chat and it quotes the comment you’re replying to (and the quote is clickable) in order to see context. You can’t do the latter in slack, and it’s easy to not realize that others have started a thread when it’s above the fold.

Isn't this like replying to a thread and clicking "Also post to channel" in Slack?

No, discord threads are siloed off into their own world. They're effectively more so temporary channels (and discord itself enforces the temporary nature - they get locked after disuse). Parent poster seems to like it, but for my use case I'd rather slack threads.

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

#534

Post by jelling »

bayindirh wrote: post #531
digitalengineer wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Evernote. Massive ‘growth’ on the free plan. No good way to capitalize, so they just started deleting features and locking people’s content in. There is no regular export to get everything out and you need to jump through a lot of hoops. I wish I never updated that app…

Just curious (I'm using professional for a very long time, and plans page doesn't clarify), can't you just get the ENEX files per notebook and import it to something else? It contains everything, incl. the files as far as I can see. The file format is open, and there are many conversion tools out there.

Yes. But as someone that's been meaning to switch off of Evernote - never has a project bloated their own software with so many unasked for features / desperate attempts to grow valuation - it's a non-trivial project. One needs to have a high degree of trust in the import tool and new repository.

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

#535

Post by karamanolev »

soheil wrote: post #526
digitalengineer wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Evernote. Massive ‘growth’ on the free plan. No good way to capitalize, so they just started deleting features and locking people’s content in. There is no regular export to get everything out and you need to jump through a lot of hoops. I wish I never updated that app…

Not to mention 1Password

I wouldn't mention 1Password. It's a cornerstone for your digital security, if you're using it. As such, I don't want it free, I want to pay for it. My current family plan suits us very well and I'm very happy. Security is hard and I want it done right. Not to say that free tools are bad and paid tools are always good, but it certainly helps.

I also do want "easy" things to be free, like a note-taking app.

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

#536

Post by ggsp »

joshspankit wrote: post #519
ggsp wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

They scraped all the code submitted to GitHub and used it to train the AI behind the now-paid Copilot product

In their FAQ [1], GitHub state: GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pretrained AI model created by OpenAI. It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.

Genuine question, has there been any evidence to substantiate your claim?

[1] https://github.com/features/copilot#what-data-has-github-cop...

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

#537

Post by RunSet »

vlunkr wrote: post #151
userbinator wrote: post #29

IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged... One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.

Replacing slack with IRC really doesn’t feel like a sincere proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no configuration or research. The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.

>The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.

Read that as "IRC has integrated anti-non-hacker technology."

Consider holding physical meetings with hard copies of reading material (or at least some Lorem ipsum) to occupy the other employees.

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

#538

Post by Macha »

t-sauer wrote: post #467
input_sh wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as "tagging" users. Instead of a user fitting a single pre-defined category, you can add tags to a user. To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people working on a project, 7 of which are software developers. To mention the developers, your Slack option is either @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually. On Discord you can create @d…

You can do that in Slack as well. They call it user groups: https://slack.com/help/articles/212906697-Create-a-user-grou...

Slack user groups are much less powerful than Discord roles. Slack user groups are _only_ a way of bulk notifying users. Discord roles control effectively both views of your server, and permissions (though why "Pin Messages" and "Delete Other User's Messages" are still combined into a single "Manage Messages" checkbox is a glaring flaw in that granularity).

And some other features like colours which are nice when you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams for some sort of competitive event server.

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