28 ms·
Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily
by Roritharr 7y ago
Well deserved.
Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.
It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.
- mehrdadn 7y agoI don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.
- colechristensen 7y agoFree is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me. Choose your customers.
- mehrdadn 7y agoI never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.
- igbrdjk 7y ago> So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over. I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments). But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
- mehrdadn 7y agoYour exporter goes beyond the 10k limit for DMs on a free plan?
- igbrdjk 7y agoI didn't try on free plan. But maybe just run it incrementally, at least once every 10k messages.
- mehrdadn 7y agoWell then you missed the entire point of my comment, which was specifically about the free plan, and specifically about when you haven't had a chance to run such a script incrementally.
- zwily 7y agoThe exporter doesn’t export DMs at all, does it? (On any plan).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zbentley 7y ago...OK, so you chose to communicate on it in order to communicate with "others", presumably due to an employer wanting you all to use Slack. In that situation, your communications are often legally not your own property (though it is arguable, at least in the US). If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them. A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed. You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many. You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
- mehrdadn 7y agoNo, I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. There are other categories where I've had no choice but to use the same communication channels others were using despite the content of my communications being emphatically mine. Are you just trying to be infuriating?
- pietroglyph 7y agoThis is not entirely true. You can export all data from Slack, including data that’s normally hidden because you’re on the free plan.
- mehrdadn 7y agoReally? How do I export the DMs I have beyond the 10k limit?
- fpvracing 7y agoIs that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
- mehrdadn 7y agoIt was as far as I was able to tell when I checked many months ago. I've seen no indications that anything has changed, but would love to hear otherwise...
- bjoernw 7y ago"Corporate Export On the Plus plan, Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool called Corporate Export. This type of export includes content from public and private channels and direct messages. If Corporate Export is enabled for your workspace, Standard Export will not be available." https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-yo...
- mehrdadn 7y agoYes, which means they hold your data hostage until you pay, exactly like I said.
- blinzy 7y agoI don't use or even like Slack, but what is the problem with that? I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense. If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
- danielscrubs 7y agoHuh. Wasn’t Facebook forced to add a export data button because of a law?
- mehrdadn 7y agoI don't know exactly what made them add that feature or when that happened (it was before 2011, I think), but AFAIK they never outright blocked you from even viewing older messages. And even then it was possible to scrape it I think, if my Googling right now is any indication.
- senorjazz 7y agoWhat does "well deserved" even mean? Does it just mean not evading your privacy to generate income via ads? Does it mean not being too aggressive / abusive of customers? Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation
- mehrdadn 7y ago"Decent behavior" describes the process. "Well deserved" describes the outcome. So you might say the outcome is well deserved only if decent behavior comprised the process.
- jazzyjackson 7y agoJust double checked this and exported the history from my free plan -- in Slack I can only see messages back to November 2018, but the export includes all messages back to our beginning in 2016. As others have said, this 'Standard Export' doesn't include direct messages and private channels, so there's still some amount of 'hostage taking'
- jhallenworld 7y agoI miss this from Lotus Sametime: all of your conversations were stored in local XML files. It was very useful to "grep" through these to find some piece of information that someone told you years ago.
- mehrdadn 7y agoAnd you're probably the workspace admin. I shouldn't need someone else's permission to export my own data either.
- wuliwong 7y agoSlack has a completely different business model than Facebook. Facebook has no paid tier for its users, all the money comes from advertisers.
- vehementi 7y agoNah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly wants to see their history, lol
- mehrdadn 7y agoI'm not claiming they haven't made an otherwise great product, but if their business doesn't rely on this then why are they doing it?
- einpoklum 7y agoSlack is still inferior to IRC overall. Don't know what you're talking about.
- vehementi 7y agoWhat? Slack is objectively better in every way except the open source part
- geodel 7y ago> and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.
- shereadsthenews 7y agoWhy does anyone use the app instead of the site?
- Spivak 7y agoThe site also is a heavy resource hog but you're right that it's overall less. There are plenty of lightweight clients that use the Slack API. I don't see why people complain so hard that the official client is heavy. Weechat with Slack is a dream feels like the good-ole IRC days.
- shereadsthenews 7y agoThe site doesn’t use any resources when I close its tab.
- sciurus 7y agoThe desktop app doesn't use any resources when you close it either. What's your point?
- shereadsthenews 7y agoThat’s only true if you configure it in a particular way. By default it stays running when closed so it can notify you and update its badge.
- orhmeh09 7y agoFor me it’s a usability thing—I tend to lose track of SPA tabs, often by closing the window or not being able to differentiate them from content tabs. I do use web apps but I vastly prefer using my machine’s window manager and window buttons/lists.
- baby 7y agoAgree. About the breaking the law thing though: it's a B2B. Most "breaking the law" companies seem to be B2C.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoAdvertising companies like Facebook make their revenue by selling to advertisers, not individuals- they are emphatically a B2B company.
- baby 7y agoI would argue that this is not totaly true. Everyone can advertise on Facebook (I did it myself without a company).
- Quinner 7y agoThey're both. They're selling a service to consumers, which they buy with their personal data. They then use that data to sell to advertisers in the form of better targeted ads. They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
- naveen99 7y agoAre you saying they are bartering and not paying sales tax for their services and their customers personal data ?
- robohoe 7y agoProbably because there is money to be made from advertising/sharing user data and human customers don't have the money to see you like businesses.
- bborud 7y agoYou are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.
- hellofunk 7y agoMy personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards. This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
- rubyfan 7y agoThe internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development. Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago> Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have ...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
- bborud 7y agoAnd yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large. I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable. Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top. If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
- archiepeach 7y agoI think the whole argument of "unicorns exploiting legal grey areas" falls victim to Hanlon's razor. I don't really believe these companies set out to bend or break any laws, it was more a case of the legal system not catching up fast enough. Uber started as a service to hire limousines, not a platform company. If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd probably have a proper definition for a "gig economy" worker by now. A definition that would allow them to keep the flexibility that they appreciate so much, whilst still having proper worker protections for sick pay, holidays and all the rest.
- asdffdsa 7y agoConsumer ride-sharing (uber/lyft) is obviously exploiting "grey areas"
- i_love_limes 7y agoIt's strange that you explicitly brought up Uber and still hold this opinion. Out of all the companies, they have most aggressively skirted labour laws in every country they are in, and have been selectively banned from some countries and cities due to their continual breaking of the law. Not to mention lobbying efforts to minimise the effects of labour laws. They didn't start as a company for the sole purpose of exploiting legal grey areas, but they certainly have consistently done so since their inception.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoAm I wrong in being skeptical at believing something that is essentially a messaging platform is worth 16 Billion?
- einpoklum 7y agoIt's IRC with auto-linkification. Well deserved? Pro-capitalists are crazy.