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I 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 th

I 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 ago
Free 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 ago
  I 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 ago
      Your exporter goes beyond the 10k limit for DMs on a free plan?
      - igbrdjk 7y ago
        I didn't try on free plan. But maybe just run it incrementally, at least once every 10k messages.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        Well 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 ago
        The 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 ago
      No, 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?
      - 0xffff2 7y ago
        > I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. What are you talking about then? All of my communications are either personal or employment related, almost by definition.
        wuliwong 7y ago
pietroglyph 7y ago
This 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 ago
  Really? How do I export the DMs I have beyond the 10k limit?
fpvracing 7y ago
Is 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 ago
  It 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 ago
      Yes, which means they hold your data hostage until you pay, exactly like I said.
      - blinzy 7y ago
        I 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 ago
Huh. Wasn’t Facebook forced to add a export data button because of a law?
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I 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 ago
What 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 ago
Just 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  And you're probably the workspace admin. I shouldn't need someone else's permission to export my own data either.
wuliwong 7y ago
Slack has a completely different business model than Facebook. Facebook has no paid tier for its users, all the money comes from advertisers.
vehementi 7y ago
Nah, 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 ago
  I'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 ago
  Slack is still inferior to IRC overall. Don't know what you're talking about.
  - vehementi 7y ago
    What? Slack is objectively better in every way except the open source part

colechristensen 7y ago

Free 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 ago
I 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 ago
    Your exporter goes beyond the 10k limit for DMs on a free plan?
    - igbrdjk 7y ago
      I didn't try on free plan. But maybe just run it incrementally, at least once every 10k messages.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        Well 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 ago
      The 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 ago
    No, 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?
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      > I'm not referring to employment communications or personal communications. What are you talking about then? All of my communications are either personal or employment related, almost by definition.
      - wuliwong 7y ago

pietroglyph 7y ago

This 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 ago
Really? How do I export the DMs I have beyond the 10k limit?

fpvracing 7y ago

Is 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 ago
It 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 ago
    Yes, which means they hold your data hostage until you pay, exactly like I said.
    - blinzy 7y ago
      I 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 ago

Huh. Wasn’t Facebook forced to add a export data button because of a law?

mehrdadn 7y ago
I 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 ago

What 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 ago

Just 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 ago
I 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 ago
And you're probably the workspace admin. I shouldn't need someone else's permission to export my own data either.

wuliwong 7y ago

Slack has a completely different business model than Facebook. Facebook has no paid tier for its users, all the money comes from advertisers.

vehementi 7y ago

Nah, 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 ago
I'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 ago
Slack is still inferior to IRC overall. Don't know what you're talking about.
- vehementi 7y ago
  What? Slack is objectively better in every way except the open source part