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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

mahadk.com

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Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#791

Post by blueplanet200 »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

Thanks for showing up and owning the mistake.

While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#793

Post by Draiken »

dijit wrote: post #770
Charmunk wrote: post #769

Slack just publicly apologized for this and said it was a mistake and they will be returning hack club to the previously agreed upon plan. Hack club staff are currently discussing whether or not to go ahead with the migration to mattermost anyways. (- a hack club member)

Only because it gained so much attention.

Regardless, if they didn't understand the risks before, surely they do now. The cat's out of the bag.

Even if it was a mistake (it never is) this shows how they control YOUR data. I really hope they don't stay.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#794

Post by iwasnotme »

If we donate to Hack Club, can we put a stipulation that it's not used to pay the Salesforce ransom? :) But I see that they're reversing course, which is good at least.

Seriously though, I'm not sure how I've never heard of Hack Club before. I love the cause and wish I had such a thing when I was younger. Hopefully they see an uptick in donations with all the fellow techies reading your post!

My daughter is graduating in the spring with a Computer Science degree and wants to become a teacher. She'll love this.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#796

Post by MisterTea »

jb1991 wrote: post #776
jamie wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman): "This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980

When something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.

Here's the thing: the post says it was written in haste so I imagine they wrote it before they spoke to anyone at Slack. There is no way to verify malice.

It would have been better to first reach out to Slack and get a confirmation and document that. This way we would have evidence and Slack could not pull the oops card.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#797

Post by fasbiner »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit.

Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#799

Post by amatecha »

whstl wrote: post #729
btown wrote: post #670

One of Slack's greatest missed opportunities IMO was to become the hub for every company's customer/advocate community. Once you've established yourself as a customer service channel and internal coordination hub, you're deep in the operations of the company. They already had the brand cachet, they had everything going for them. And if they were worried about abuse, or about cutting into their B2B bottom line, they c…

Totally. I remember a few years ago where every open source or tech group community was on Slack. Today it's almost all Discord. I once even went to a doctor and the staff was using Slack because it integrated with some calendar thing they had. This is 100% gone. Fancy startups are still using Slack but in two I worked at, they migrated to Teams or Google after a while, as soon as they were acquired.

Yeah, I started somewhere around 6-7 Slack communities. I use exactly zero of them anymore. I still feel guilty for roping multiple communities into the service and helping multiple group of people have somewhere to hang out, only for the rug to get pulled out from under all of us.

Re: Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

#800

Post by sitzkrieg »

seamanrob wrote: post #756
casq wrote: post #176

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate.…

Hey, I'm Rob, the CPO at Slack (for real tho, this is my 3rd time posting this so please don't flag :pray:). This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:.

this era of trying to fly under the radar until you get called out on HN is a really great look

/s

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