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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

#581

Post by tomrod »

rattray wrote: post #437
joshspankit wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GitHub is a good example of an enduringly useful (to the company) free tier. Because devs use it for OSS/hobbies, they want to use it at work. Simple.

That, and their paid-for subscriptions are natural extensions of the already super useful platform. Either more quantity (actions) or more useful features on top of an already fully useful feature set.

Users pay for convenience and for more, not just slightly better.

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

#582

Post by tomrod »

nmcela wrote: post #412

I'm grateful to Slack for their changes in the free plan, it forced our hands. We realized it's obvious we can't trust any of these external SaaS services, in the long run they will ALWAYS change the terms and somehow fuck the customers, paying or not. And then you will lose all the invaluable information and data that belongs to you. This has happened with other services we've used in the past too. So we decided to…

Have you put up a blogpost to compare the alternatives? We'd love to self-host in the mid-term.

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

#583

Post by tomrod »

parkingrift wrote: post #498
muppetman wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has 4 business slacks she's a part of. Because she's got the slack client open all day, she setup a little slack for just her and me to use. We use it during the day to plan things, talk etc etc. It's been great to be able to go back and looks at various conversations/details/bits that were often up to two years old. I don't think we were "freeloading" as such, the 4 business ones she uses are all paid. I'm a…

Its been great for you to use Slack and to be able to go back and view conversations from years ago. It’s so useful to you that you’ve used it for years, and you love it. …but you won’t pay $12/month for it? Yes, you are a freeloader. And you’ll inevitably keep bouncing from free app to free app as services mature and shift focus to making money. You, as a freeloader, are of no economic value to Slack, Discord, or wh…

$12/month is a lot for a messaging protocol, some scripts, and storage under a few GB a year in a market that is Betrand pricing with a first-mover leader.

SaaS adds up.

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

#584

Post by 734129837261 »

I'm just wondering why these services need centralised hosting to begin with. Peer-to-peer networking isn't new, Blockchain as a tech could take care of decentralised but shared information.

And I don't mean that a company of 10 people depends on each other, their messages are also hashed, seeded, encrypted, etc. on the entire network. Each company and each individual can have their own unique key that's used to make their own messages and content readable again.

Of course, a company should be able to choose to only share messages across their own employees and not to anyone outside, if they are wary of security issues. Messages could have set expirations, too, etc.

We shouldn't need an expensive middle-man. It should be a free open-source project.

But I'm not a networking expert. Is this simply not feasible for other reasons? I'd love to work on such a project as a software engineer, for sure.

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

#585

Post by sebzim4500 »

xtracto wrote: post #189
samstave wrote: post #146

Earlier 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

You're not missing much

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

#586

Post by Jill_the_Pill »

nottorp wrote: post #495
quickthrower2 wrote: post #186

Earlier 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…

Slack is $9/user/month :)

You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month, and as a professor, if you include all the workspaces I was maintaining for my past classes, I have . . . or had . . . about 25 of them with hundreds of users. Maybe I wasn't using it the most efficient way, but I had no reason to think I needed to be strategic. And to think: I used to tell classes we were using Slack so their access would persist after they got kicked out of Canvas when they graduated!

It should have been possible for Slack to start the new limitations on new workspaces only. This term, because I started the change too late, I will continue to use Slack without enthusiasm while keeping a shadow archive (possibly in piazza but they have also begun to charge for larger classes). For next semester we will find and use a different service.

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

#587

Post by EamonnMR »

piperswe wrote: post #139
nerdponx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.

There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.

Someone will copy your wiki's content into Fandom and Fandom will starve you voa SEO.

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

#588

Post by nottorp »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #586
nottorp wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is $9/user/month :)

You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month, and as a professor, if you include all the workspaces I was maintaining for my past classes, I have . . . or had . . . about 25 of them with hundreds of users. Maybe I wasn't using it the most efficient way, but I had no reason to think I needed to be strategic. And to think: I used to tell classes we were using Slack so their a…

> You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month

It's per user sadly. Apparently $8/mo now if paying monthly. Of course if you go to their pricing page they lie and give you the price for paying yearly.

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

#589

Post by 3np »

3np wrote: post #409
Vardiak wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies are literally an optimization mechanism for turning profits. Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.

GP is implying that companies that don't are by definition performing poorly by missing out on the margin.

In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.

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

#590

Post by EamonnMR »

KhalPanda wrote: post #460
JadoJodo wrote: post #21

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/c…

I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development. The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites…

The joy is probably the lack of friction.
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