Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus

blog.zulip.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 790 posts

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

#761

Post by frupert52 »

samstave wrote: post #643
t-writescode wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, ads and paid posts caused Digg to lose over Reddit. I didn’t use either at the time, but people I know did.

Yes. This is exactly what happened. DIGG basically became what new Reddit looks like now, but they were specifically transparent that every post was essentially a paid marketing blob and the corporate commercial took over all of DIGG - pissed everyone off and they all flocked to Reddit. Reddit is doing the same thing, however, when DIGG messed around with the UX, bots were not a thing in the same form they are now… “…

As someone who only occasionally visits reddit, can I ask what the bots are doing? I’ve only ever seen bots that do things like correct spelling

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

#762

Post by MichaelZuo »

morelisp wrote: post #505
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And paying $12 p/m for a tool you and your wife enjoy and have been getting value for years is not an option, because…?

Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.

A magnetic fridge notepad accessible anywhere in the world.. with lots of advanced features... etc... would probably have been worth $1400/yr (in 2022 dollars) to serious customers back in 2000.

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

#763

Post by koffiezet »

While it might suck for some people, the 10k message limit was always there, so if you wanted to keep history - why the hell would you be on slack?

And the people here shouting matrix and "don't go to discord" have never tried to push more non-technical people onto it. It starts with differently named apps on desktop and mobile (sure there are a few multi-platform clients). But then the naming? Back in the old days, IRC for a lot of people was not IRC, but mIRC. Why? Because the icon they had to click had that name. Thank goodness it at least resembled the name of the actual thing they were connecting to, where they could go "IRC? you mean mIRC?".

If I now tell someone to go on matrix - they don't have a matrix app on their phone, Mac or pc, and I have no idea which-one it'll be. Branding and name recognition is important here.

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

#764

Post by dijit »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #762
morelisp wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.

A magnetic fridge notepad accessible anywhere in the world.. with lots of advanced features... etc... would probably have been worth $1400/yr (in 2022 dollars) to serious customers back in 2000.

"serious" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because it's a no-true scotsman: anyone not paying is not serious enough.

"advanced features" is also vague enough to be true no matter what you mean.

Practically speaking "magnetic notepad on a fridge accessible from anywhere" has been solved over and over and over again, and often in better ways.

Slack is a shiny UX on a middling bit of software with a good marketing department.

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

#765

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #623
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not that simple either: tools used for reasons outside of work may be perceived as good tools for work; and tools used professionally are sometimes considered to be good for use for personal reasons. tl;dr it doesn't need to be true always, only sometimes, which it is

Well, if I wasn't clear enough: the fact that someone have used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases. You need this to be a healthy conversion funnel and valuable brand awareness channel, otherwise you are wasting money. To make a call you need data from marketing research and I would assume that Slack marketing team kno…

I respect your opinion of,

someone hav[ing] used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work is not enough to justify spending on those personal use cases

I am sharing that I have an equal and opposite opinion, which is that the someone having used a tool for personal reasons and may recommend it as a good tool for work sometimes IS enough to justify spending on those personal use cases

You are right that data can inform the decision, of course, keeping in mind that the benefits include intangibles like goodwill, which goes further in the techie community than in a layman community imo

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

#766

Post by poutrathor »

nxss wrote: post #690
gdilla wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, and they think pissing people off is worth it (for their expected benefit). And... they're probably right. People have short term memories and other things to worry about.

They are right for now, but will start loosing clients soon. Zulip & Discord provide better plans without major feature set downgrade. We tested Zulip not too long ago, in short - UI is not so good, but in general still useful: https://nixsanctuary.com/zulip-review-through-slack-glasses/

Zulip and Discord will charge more once their growth plateau, as every one else.

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

#767

Post by morelisp »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #762
morelisp wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine explaining to someone ca. 2000 that the replacement for a magnetic fridge notepad should cost $140/yr.

A magnetic fridge notepad accessible anywhere in the world.. with lots of advanced features... etc... would probably have been worth $1400/yr (in 2022 dollars) to serious customers back in 2000.

The question isn’t whether it’s worth that much to someone, it’s whether it’s worth that much to a couple using it to casually exchange messages (and/or what it costs Slack, which is definitely nowhere near that much).

Feels like regressive AWS style pricing. The casual users are overpaying to provide the basis for advanced features only a fraction of users, who have sufficient resources to optimize their efficiency, need.

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

#768

Post by tabbott »

cheald wrote: post #308
icelancer wrote: post #162

Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack? Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking about it. Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah for…

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.

Those contributions were much appreciated and were merged as:

https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/slack_incoming

It probably deserves another pass on the documentation; it's been improved a few times since then and may no longer deserve the "beta" designation.

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

#769

Post by tabbott »

icelancer wrote: post #162

Does anyone use Zulip that used to use Slack? Our developers have a ton of webhooks on Slack bots and integration. I see no good guides for porting them over and there's a four year old Github ticket with zero responses asking about it. Anyone have experience with this? I'd love to self-host Zulip and save $10k/year on Slack, but if it's gonna cost me $20k+ in dev salaries to migrate the webhook notifications, ah for…

We merged https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/slack_incoming (thanks to the contribution from cheald down thread), which lets one migration many incoming webhook integrations by just changing the URL.

See also https://zulip.com/integrations/ for native integrations that often provide a better experience, taking advantage of topics to thread notifications together nicely.

Can you provide a link to the 4-year-old GitHub issue you found? I'd like to clean it up to reference what has changed since then.

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

#770

Post by zenith035 »

mdaniel wrote: post #691
zenith035 wrote: post #603

If people have small communities on slack they can use Niche Community https://niche.community

I find that landing page insulting to anyone who might want to learn what that product is and why I should use it. So your webpage allows me to play basketball or go hiking together, is that what it does? Only by going to "the changelog" link, because I'm a curious fellow, does one find the discovery page and see an actual implementation: https://niche.community/niche/pzd3x67l0gmqn/hackernews/ > What is the current s…

Have added a new "Discover" section on the landing page based on your feedback :)
Post reply on HN