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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

#771

Post by sporritt »

macintux wrote: post #70
jimvdv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay or lose months or years of history. You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat history. Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don’t think anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.

You can’t download private messages, however.

I jumped up and down about this to Slack over the course of a few emails, having some paid workspaces and a couple on the free plan that I use(d) for family. Eventually I got one of those "Hi this is such and such, stepping in for the other person" emails, with a link to this app that can export everything (including private messages):

https://export.fountstudio.com/

The export is in a proprietary JSON format and only contains links to attachments, plus it has a limit on the number of messages you can export if you don't pay for it. But after jumping through various hoops one afternoon I was able to export all the messages and attachments from a family channel that we've had going for a few years - since our kids were first active on computers. The total number of messages was about 3500, but we would have lost the vast majority of them with Slack's new approach.

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

#772

Post by minusSeven »

akamaozu wrote: post #744
minusSeven wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It probably pleases the people who were paying you, because now they don't have to subsidise the people who aren't. Bullshit. It's unclear communication and indecisiveness that pisses people off. If you can't afford it, there is no reason for you to give something for free and then later take it away. People who are paying will feel that samething will happen to them in other ways. You want consistency.

You would prefer to never get a thing for free rather than have it at no cost for a brief period in time?

Having something for free but for a brief period of time is actually really inconvenient if you think about it. You are basically forced to move or find some alternative. You want consistency.

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

#773

Post by anticensor »

Macha wrote: post #533
dagss wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Auto-archiving != auto-locking

Auto-archived threads automatically unarchive themselves when you send a new message. Locked-threads, on the other hand, require explicit unlock.

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

#774

Post by fennecfoxy »

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…

It's not trust they migrate for lmao, it's things that are "free". People are irrationally outraged when they have to pay for a product or service that was previously free.

Especially considering all of Google's products/services, people still cry about Youtube ads/having to get Youtube premium.

People are so freaking self-entitled.

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

#775

Post by coffeeling »

dalmo3 wrote: post #145
systemvoltage wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want t…

> not a giant scrolling doomswheel Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.

tl.net, display all.

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

#776

Post by coffeeling »

pleb_nz wrote: post #243
_8j50 wrote: post #219

No problem against it but please don't migrate to discord, migrate to Matrix. My plea has nothing to do with product quality but that with Matrix I can access other bridged people. But discord and pals not so much. Wasting 8gb ram on slack, already on gitter, teams, google meet and I am not even a people's person others have more platforms active in parallel. This is why I don't support any platform that does not als…

I'm interested in matrix, how can I learn more and can you choose providers or clients, any recommendations?

If you end up using Element, beware one thing. Although it looks like Discord, it's not. Spaces may look like servers, but they do not contain channels.

A Space is a list, phone book, a map that lists a bunch of rooms so you can join many of them conveniently.

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

#777

Post by jwr »

datavirtue wrote: post #295
jwr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU at least, this is impossible because of invoicing and bookkeeping/accounting requirements.

Hmmm...Starbucks does this by charging me a lump sum in one transaction and then allowing me to spend it down over time in smaller chunks. I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited support issues around reversibility.

Oh, that is even worse! Only big corporations can afford to do this, as this borders on banking services and you need good legal grounding for this type of business.

I should probably clarify that by "impossible" I really meant "does not make business/economic sense". You can do microtransactions with individuals, but if you're spending €2 (rough estimate) per transaction for invoicing, accounting, VAT processing, etc, it no longer makes any sense. Thus "impossible".

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

#778

Post by MichaelZuo »

dijit wrote: post #764
MichaelZuo wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Well by definition… how else would you differentiate between serious customers and tire kickers?

It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features.

And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.

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

#779

Post by dijit »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #778
dijit wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 go…

Well by definition… how else would you differentiate between serious customers and tire kickers? It’s pretty obvious that a magnetic fridge pad has less features. And it was not a solved problem in the year 2000.

Honestly this is just a really poor take.

There will always be egregiously priced “enterprise” software but that doesn’t mean the value is there, it’s usually because nobody knows better; the “tire-kickers” are people suckered into the platform using the exact same tactics as people who peddle drugs, that’s not defensible.

Centralised notetaking/communication has been a solved problem since the BBS era, it gets reinvented constantly.

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

#780

Post by anticensor »

dhsysusbsjsi wrote: post #241
armchairhacker wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for Zulip, but Discord seems to be better than Slack in almost every way. It's not open-source pr self-hostable, but they are a lot more generous (e.g. unlimited message history, https://upsilon-it.medium.com/slack-vs-discord-comparison-wh... ). They're also a lot faster and have less downtime. And they do have channels and threads and bots, though there may be less integrations than Slack, there are a lo…

There’s some kind of problem with Discord’s privacy history (either country of ownership, or founder) that makes it unsuitable for a lot of firms.

Discord explicitly declares itself unsuitable for business use and their terms of service also reflects this.
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