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

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

#631

Post by prepend » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #611

prepend wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with a ton of scientists (and am one myself) and I’m a member of multiple slack channels with hundreds of members that are years old and only have a 1-2k messages. An example is a Python users group where there’s maybe a few threads a week. And it’s really useful to search for old threads. Another is a hackathon with maybe 30 people where there were a few hundred messages over a week and then 1 message a month…

Self host a forum…

That’s what I’ll end up doing. Pretty much migrating all these chats off slack.

Interestingly, these led to lots of pie licenses and we’re migrating all these over too.

Once we’re self hosting a server then we don’t need the paid license either.

Seems kind of much for $100/year/user anyway. Teams is bundled in with o365 for nothing or little extra.

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

#632

Post by oarmstrong » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

h0l0cube wrote: post #263

gernb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.

Are you perhaps conflating Discord and Discourse? Discourse is certainly a forum in my eyes.

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

#633

Post by pwpw » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

dagurp wrote: post #567

raydev wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit is.

moved on to what?

I have to imagine most users are mobile or it's actively trending in that direction

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

#634

Post by cheald » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #366

cheald wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried it, I even made some contributions trying to get it to work. In the end we just migrated to Mattermost, which speaks Slack webhooks natively and is a very competent Slack replacement. We self-host it, too, which is a big win.

Huh, that's pretty enticing. Unfortunately last time I set up Mattermost it exploded on a VPS so that wasn't too good...

My employer's Mattermost instance has been running on a small VPS for a few years with no issues, fwiw. It's braindead simple with docker+compose now, too.

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

#635

Post by nottorp » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

staindk wrote: post #606

mrweasel wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except threads. Threads are useless. That might exactly be my problem with Slack, and Google Chat as well. I understand the desire to wanting to some sort of threading, but it doesn't work in either programs. Instead it just confuses the interface greatly. Slack is super weird, because you can have a thread open, and navigate around, so the thread view is now completely out of context.

IMO Slack threads are quite good. I'm sure it depends on your use case etc., but in my work context I find they function really well. I did try test some concepts around Slack/Discord threads serving as entire "discussions" for a literary community (so you e.g. post a topic and discuss it in the thread under the topic), and in the end there were a bunch of small pain points that all added up and made it unfeasible. A…

> but in my work context I find they function really well.

You have only one channel? We have zillions, per topic.

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

#636

Post by TabTwo » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

Oh cry me a river. You don't pay for it - you are not a customer, you're probably the product. You don't own the server - you dont own the data on this server/service (anymore). You cant afford to pay for such service - declare bankruptcy, obviously your business is not sustainable. You cant afford to pay for the needed SLA and your business won't survive a few days downtime - declare bankruptcy, obviously your business is not sustainable.

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

#637

Post by lmeyerov » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #609

lmeyerov wrote: post #548

We have a paid slack for our team & customers, and a free slack to support our community, and Slack continuing to kneecap our community zone keeps pushing us towards dropping slack in general. Just as Slack emerged to fill a social networking gap not quite solved by irc & hipchat, the steady mishandling of community pricing & usage (web indexing, ...) is keeping the door open for a good competitor to knock them out f…

No one is stopping you from using a different free product.

We are paying users with a growing annual account, this is not about free.

We want 1 product for chat, enjoy that Slack solved much of community side of chat (cross-company, ...), and Slack's UX is slightly better than Discord's + significantly better than Team's. Likewise, there is gravity keeping us there: text history + customer accounts.

My point is Slack's lead is tenuous, and they are steadily eroding their primary moat for us -- community-minded features. Our community account already has limited search and customization, and this update obliterates that further. If/when we move our free community channel, we will move our paid account too.

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

#638

Post by sweetbitter » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #222

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…

This is such a hard problem. The very much not a secret secret of consumer payments is that all actions that people take are reversible. Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers. The problem when things are not reversible is an account can get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions and lose a bunch of money and have no way to…

You didn't fully read the post you responded to. They were not suggesting a non-reversible medium.

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

#639

Post by waynesonfire » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

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 want a password manager to be paid.

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

#640

Post by AtNightWeCode » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

I don’t understand the criticism. I worked with a lot of free Slack accounts. None of these had 90 days of history. Would say 20-30 days or something like that on average. To get 90 days history is an improvement for most larger consumers on free tiers. No?