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Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed? My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive some sort of network effect so busines

by pid-1 4y ago

Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed? My understanding is this sort of strategy wants to archive some sort of network effect so business (which actually pay for services) start adopting a product. It's meant to kickstart recurring revenue, not to last forever.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I mean.. it kinda does. If a small opensource dev group gets pissed at slack, and those people have a say in a chat solution at their workplace (paid plans there of course), pissed people won't recommend slack but other alternatives.
Kye 4y ago
The people who use Slack for their weekend DnD group are the same people who bring it into the companies they work for during the week and ultimately suggest a paid plan. That's the entire idea behind freemium: just because someone doesn't get their own credit card out doesn't mean they don't influence the person who does.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  That's exactly how I ended up having a paid slack subscription. It looks like discord is going to take over several companies exactly for this reason.
TheGeminon 4y ago
Don't know if it is their intention, but this is probably more of a cost-cutting measure than a revenue-increasing one (or maybe even a technical one, with their data strategy/partitioning it may be much easier to do everything time-based). Many people expect free things to stay the same forever, which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the free tier, there are a ton of OSS projects, community groups, etc. that will no longer be using Slack, and the network effects will drop substantially. This has been seen a bit with Discord, so maybe they are going all-in on dropping these types of customers. There can't be _that_ many people who are on the free plan that will now be migrating to paid with this change. If anything, it now incentivizes larger groups (which would generate more revenue) to use the free plan since data is gated by time, not by usage. A slack instance with a few thousand active users on the free plan was basically unusable, 10k messages can be eaten up rather quickly. Now if you only care about the last 90 days (which honestly, isn't a bad idea with Slack to not use it as permanent storage) you can have a much larger group on the free plan.
- klibertp 4y ago
  What's wrong with Discord? Most of the projects I want to follow have Discord server, often connected with an IRC channel. I miss a few features from Slack, but in general I'm happy with Discord. It's still free from what I can see. So, what happened to make "OSS projects" etc. to stop using Discord? (Honestly asking, I don't follow Discord itself at all)
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Discord data mines their users to hell and back and even scans your computer. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_discord_recording_our_open_programs_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_d... It has no business being the default chat of open source projects. Especially when there's something amazing and fully free like Matrix.
tyingq 4y ago
>Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed? I think a fair amount of their actual sales come from non-tech companies reluctantly paying for it because their developers are pushy about wanting it. Those developers want it because they were exposed to it in some context where it was free. Lacking that pressure, those companies will just tell their developers to use something they already have...MS Teams or whatever.

by pid-1 4y ago

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

I mean.. it kinda does. If a small opensource dev group gets pissed at slack, and those people have a say in a chat solution at their workplace (paid plans there of course), pissed people won't recommend slack but other alternatives.

Kye 4y ago

The people who use Slack for their weekend DnD group are the same people who bring it into the companies they work for during the week and ultimately suggest a paid plan. That's the entire idea behind freemium: just because someone doesn't get their own credit card out doesn't mean they don't influence the person who does.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
That's exactly how I ended up having a paid slack subscription. It looks like discord is going to take over several companies exactly for this reason.

TheGeminon 4y ago

Don't know if it is their intention, but this is probably more of a cost-cutting measure than a revenue-increasing one (or maybe even a technical one, with their data strategy/partitioning it may be much easier to do everything time-based). Many people expect free things to stay the same forever, which obviously isn't realistic, but this is still going to have a damaging effect on their brand. As well with the free tier, there are a ton of OSS projects, community groups, etc. that will no longer be using Slack, and the network effects will drop substantially. This has been seen a bit with Discord, so maybe they are going all-in on dropping these types of customers. There can't be _that_ many people who are on the free plan that will now be migrating to paid with this change. If anything, it now incentivizes larger groups (which would generate more revenue) to use the free plan since data is gated by time, not by usage. A slack instance with a few thousand active users on the free plan was basically unusable, 10k messages can be eaten up rather quickly. Now if you only care about the last 90 days (which honestly, isn't a bad idea with Slack to not use it as permanent storage) you can have a much larger group on the free plan.

klibertp 4y ago
What's wrong with Discord? Most of the projects I want to follow have Discord server, often connected with an IRC channel. I miss a few features from Slack, but in general I'm happy with Discord. It's still free from what I can see. So, what happened to make "OSS projects" etc. to stop using Discord? (Honestly asking, I don't follow Discord itself at all)
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Discord data mines their users to hell and back and even scans your computer. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_discord_recording_our_open_programs_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_d... It has no business being the default chat of open source projects. Especially when there's something amazing and fully free like Matrix.

tyingq 4y ago

>Does Slack even care if folks not planning to pay are pissed? I think a fair amount of their actual sales come from non-tech companies reluctantly paying for it because their developers are pushy about wanting it. Those developers want it because they were exposed to it in some context where it was free. Lacking that pressure, those companies will just tell their developers to use something they already have...MS Teams or whatever.