7 ms·

$120k a year for Slack with 1k users

86 points by skilled 4y ago

davidguetta 4y ago
other people here using discord in a professional setting ?
- chomp 4y ago
  Indeed, we use it professionally. If you can server boost to level 2, it's quite nice for screen sharing. In my opinion, it's also set up way better than slack for voice channels. Krisp is the icing on the cake.
  - metadat 4y ago
    I'd actually not seriously considered it before, but in many ways Discord is a lot better and friendlier UX than Slack. Paying $120k/yr for 1k users is just madness, I was thinking I'd rather force everyone to use a self-hosted IRC server rather than pay $10/user/month for a basic text chat application. I like the Discord solution much better :) What would Discord cost for a comparable organization size? Edit: Womp, womp. Discord "Nitro" is almost the exact same price per user as Slack: $9.99/mo or $99.99/year. Maybe you don't need premium Discord, but these are the accounts subsidizing the freemium users and thus making the business viable. What should the annual cost be to provide chat to 1,000 users? The amount of data can probably add up kinda fast, and retaining and indexing it all to make it searchable at scale is not trivial. Hmm. Conclusion: I guess the outrage I felt when I upvoted this story was just sticker shock :)
    - oceanplexian 4y ago
      I guess I'm in the other boat. It sounds pricy but not crazy unreasonable, if $10/mo for a core productivity tool (per employee) is too much, I wonder what that 1k employee business is actually doing. In the USA the median wage is $41,000/yr per employee, with tech companies paying far more, so like 0.02% per employee? Does Slack make an employee more than 0.02% productive vs trying to use IRC or Discord? I'd argue it's pretty obvious that it does.
      - metadat 4y ago
        Yeah, we're in agreement @oceanplexian. Thanks for the sanity check! As I've stated in the edit in the grandparent post, my initial reaction appears to have been only early-morning groggy sticker shock. I'm now going to open my computer and proceed about my day, a significant portion of which will be spent on Slack. :D Cheers bud.
      - fps 4y ago
        In this case, it's a community with 1K members, not a company with 1K employees.
      - fragmede 4y ago
        I mean in the high-flying world of well-funded VC businesses with billion dollar valuations, $120k is a rounding error. But what about any number of hobby communities that previously had to pass the hat to pay for the $40/month Meetup.com fee? Knitting communities and metal detectorists. Salesforce bought it and so is free to price their chat app however they want, and yeah there is a free tier, but don't walk away thinking $$7.25/month is at all affordable for many communities.
      - davidguetta 4y ago
        Sure, but once again its a bloody text messaging app. Mattermost is almost free compared to that.. people paying 120k a year for that have lost their mind regardless of the value they extract from it.
- echelon 4y ago
  My startup does. We have a public facing one and a private instance. It doesn't have the ACLs and controls Slack does, but it certainly feels better and friendlier.
Test0129 4y ago
IMO discord is not great. I might be in the minority but everything these days offers a discord because it's simple. I'm not a fan of it and would prefer IRC. Part of that reason is discord is just spying equipment dressed up with a nice UI. I couldn't imagine using discord for a company. Slack actually provides some value outside of just chat that makes it legitimately nicer than the mid 00's solution of AOL messenger (or MSN) that companies used to use. I don't think self hosting a chat of similar value would be much cheaper if you did it properly. 1,000 users will require plenty of servers and failover, plenty of storage for messages (even if you cut it off at 90 days), etc. A lot of people use slack as an ad-hoc note storing service with search so go ahead and add even more hardware. On AWS this would get prohibitively expensive quickly. Honestly I could do without 90% of the features and would be very happy if I could just run IRC in my terminal for work. Unfortunately IRC is non-trivial to get a normal person started on.
- d23 4y ago
  > Part of that reason is discord is just spying equipment dressed up with a nice UI. In what way? I didn't know about this.
  - ivraatiems 4y ago
    Can't speak for the parent, but I suspect they're referring to two things: 1) A good chunk of Discord is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese conglomerate 2) Discord decrypts and then re-encrypts content on its servers, allegedly for efficiency reasons I think for a small startup that is making games/software which are non-controversial, Discord might still be a fine choice. For anything requiring assurances of enterprise-grade security, I'd avoid it.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      > 1) A good chunk of Discord is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese conglomerate The most credible source from this is this article[0], but since it's VC we have no idea what the ownership looks like. For all we know Tencent owns 5% or less of Discord, especially given two companies are listed before them in the article: > The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners. In general Tencent has more pull in other big gaming companies[1], which is more concerning imo. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/gaming-chat-startup-discord-raises-150m-surpassing-2b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/gaming-chat-startup-discor... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190677
padseeker 4y ago
The best engine for generating a startup idea? Find a successful company that charges per user, then build a competing product, and don't charge per user. That's it. It would be nearly impossible to this for Salesforce. But for a lot of other applications like Slack and Dropbox, you could carve out a profitable niche.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  agreed, and the moat around slack is much smaller than they think it is
  - EGreg 4y ago
    didn't Microsoft Teams eat their lunch already? https://medium.com/swlh/why-microsoft-teams-has-been-overtaking-slack-in-2020-734f7bf6f824 https://medium.com/swlh/why-microsoft-teams-has-been-overtak...
    - PedroBatista 4y ago
      Not quite but they are trying. Microsoft Teams now has the most users but they have been pumping money into it like it's free. It's a typical SV move, let's see how long it's sustainable, ie. enough time to kill everyone else.
    - akmarinov 4y ago
      Teams is so awful. It constantly logs me out, while I’m in the middle of a meeting, talking. From the perspective of other users, I just quit the call all of a sudden. How can that be acceptable UX?
- EGreg 4y ago
  We did that at https://qbix.com https://qbix.com As part of it we released open source platform covering all use cases from chat to events, videoconferencing, etc. And it interoperates with Discourse and other open source projects, in case you want to use them instead. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE
d23 4y ago
Interesting. That pricing doesn't seem that bad if you're running a company of that size, but for open communities it's obviously a bit ridiculous.
- treesknees 4y ago
  The free tier of Slack has no member limit, so an open community could sign up 10k members in their workspace if it wanted to. However you can't search or see messages older than 90 days. That might be fine for most, if you look at alternatives like IRC you typically need an external logging tool anyway to keep history, so that's still doable with a Slack bot.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
Or you could just use Mattermost.
- silisili 4y ago
  Came to say this. Their pro version, even in cloud, would come in under what OP is asking for.
zargon 4y ago
I'm not a Slack user, but relying on Discord for business purposes seems like a bad idea. They can decide they don't like an account at the drop of a hat, and out of 1000 users it probably isn't an unlikely scenario.
- cyral 4y ago
  You are right that they can close them down whenever they want but 1000 users isn't even a drop in the bucket for their infrastructure. There's tons of discords with 100k+ members. I have one with 15k members and it's considered small by them (and I don't pay a cent).
  - judge2020 4y ago
    There are tons with over 500k[0]. At this point MidJourney might be paying Discord since it seems they're the first to be allowed over 1M members, and a lot of their infra is running with Discord hosting the images and real-time interactive elements. 0: https://i.judge.sh/qwOAB/2_jNVPVBwC.png https://i.judge.sh/qwOAB/2_jNVPVBwC.png
- stemlord 4y ago
  OP says in a few different tweets that they are synced between both Discord and Slack free-tier, which seems like somewhat of a solution in lieu of your point
ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
Why not self-hosted Mattermost instead of nothing-is-encrypted Discord?
- anderspitman 4y ago
  IMO the barriers to entry for selfhosting need to get much lower before this is feasible in most cases.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    A company that is using 1000 seats of Slack can figure out how to self-host Mattermost. Failing that, many hosted Mattermost options are available.
seneca 4y ago
The movement in this space has been an overall negative in my opinion. These closed gardens aren't searchable, they're expensive, they don't work on open protocols, and in Discord's case they are extremely invasive about imposing their values on communities in the name of "safety". What we really need is IRC 2.0 that supports the quality of life features these companies offer without all of the negatives.
- sbdncuvh 4y ago
- SleepilyLimping 4y ago
  Trying to search Discord for anything is so bad, and it's hurting communities because they're centralizing their knowledge there. Things that used to be on forums for things like fighting games are now buried on Discord, indexed terribly, and are a pain to find.
- anderspitman 4y ago
  What are your thoughts on Matrix?
janlukacs 4y ago
why not set up an IRC server?
trasz 4y ago
Slack is a technically-inferior IRC clone with crappy web UI. How anyone would pay even $120 for it is beyond me.
- frou_dh 4y ago
  Less space than Nomad (List), too. Very lame.
EGreg 4y ago
More generally, there is this problem: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Instead of Slack, you can use Discord, Gitter, Telegram, or you can install an open source software like Discourse or our platform Qbix (which integrates with it to add events, meetings etc.) Why pay third parties for some black box solution that bundles everything, to host your company's data, when there is open source software and free market of hosts that compete on price?
oldandboring 4y ago
I do see that the person posting on Twitter may have a different use case than me. But what keeps my small business on Slack, even though we have a perfectly good replacement (Chat) baked right into our Google Workspaces account, is inter-company communication. Slack isn't ubiquitous, but it's common enough that we have multiple clients who use it. If we terminated our Slack Pro account, we wouldn't have a way of continuing to chat and DM with those clients without requiring them to establish new accounts on an unfamiliar service, just so they can work with this one vendor (us).
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Chat is horrible, it’s really barebones and doesn’t have any features. Also it’s been like that for about 4 years now, with very little development or investment by Google, so that should tell you that it’ll just get cut one day.
- briffle 4y ago
  If you setup Matrix, couldn't you then just use the slack bridge? https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/matrix-appservice-slack https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/matrix-appservice-sl...
  - oldandboring 4y ago
    I could be wrong but I think the issue is that I'd be bridging Matrix to my Slack organization, which I would be downgrading to 'Free', and so any communication that happens with external people via the Slack/Matrix bridge will be doing so via the crippled 'Free' account. As it pertains to inter-company communication, 'Pro' allows for channels and group chats, whereas 'Free' only allows one-on-one communication. So, again I could be misunderstanding, but I don't think much is really gained here, relative to (say) implementing Matrix for internal use and also asking employees to keep Slack running for certain external chats.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    A slack bridge might be too invasive for a company looking to prevent any data loss, ie. a Rockstar Games situation. If they can, they'll require linked companies to use the official client, even if it costs something.
paxys 4y ago
Slack is not a community forum. If you ask Slack support they will explicitly tell you that and ask you to use Discord or something else. I'm not sure why people are surprised or outraged here.
- runjake 4y ago
  I suspect people are surprised because Slack just changed their policy[1] on free tiers, and not everyone has picked up the news in the past few weeks. Up until then Slack was used by a number of communities. I ran one of them and Slack never told me to use Discord. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/slack-is-increasing-prices-and-changing-the-way-its-free-plan-works/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/slack-is-increasing-prices...
yodon 4y ago
I find it an fascinating insight into the HN mind that with about 50 comments posted, Discord is mentioned in about half the comments but Teams currently appears nowhere in the discussion.
- reidjs 4y ago
  Nobody picks teams given the choice, teams is thrust upon them from above.
- e40 4y ago
  There was a post here today about how bad Teams is. Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32932137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32932137
- whymauri 4y ago
  Teams is the worst software I have ever used, including betas, proof of concepts, and works developed by students. It is both consistently broken and has horrible UX. At this point, its only use is a as a litmus test for how penny pinching and incompetent leadership can be (with exceptions being Microsoft, I guess).
- itsdrewmiller 4y ago
  The tweet mentions discord and not MS teams - I don't think this is an insight into the HN mind.
all_usernames 4y ago
On the one hand, this is a bargain for Enterprise SaaS software. On the other, I can run you an IRC server for roughly the cost of electricity.
- samatman 4y ago
  There's about as much resemblance between IRC and Slack as there is between Slack and PHPBB forums. Matrix, on the other hand, is better than Slack, and anyone can run it.
LastTrain 4y ago
Glorified IRC
alberth 4y ago
I never understood why companies use chat to build community. Isn’t this what forums are for (Eg your home private “HN” of sorts)
- anderspitman 4y ago
  If you can only have one I would vote for forums, since they're flexible enough to handle a lot of chat and even wiki use cases. But I think realtime comms are different enough that it's worth having a dedicated chat app.
- thecosmicfrog 4y ago
  It seems to be a recent (last 5-7 years?) trend from what I can tell. I agree that forums are much better and more organised for community discussions, but generations seem to drive these things. I'm in some Discord communities, but just get lost amongst all the channels and regularly miss "big" announcements and news. Discord seems to require a lot more of your active attention, versus forums permitting passive "check ins" every few hours or days.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  A large part of forums was basically refreshing the page to see if anybody responded to the threads you commented in. It was basically slow and more annoying chat thus easily replaced by rich chat platforms like Discord. Frankly, real time chat is a big way to get to know people. It’s basically conversation. Meanwhile 10 years on HN and I don’t know a single person. Forums are good for lots of things, but don’t discount chat.
  - alberth 4y ago
    > Frankly, real time chat is a big way to get to know people. It’s basically conversation. Meanwhile 10 years on HN and I don’t know a single person. How many chat channels/DM/etc do you still message with 10 years later? I’d guess very few if any. If that’s the case, what problem is the company trying to solve with a community section? Do they want long term engagement by its users (like you on HN for 10 years) or do they just want tourists stopping by for the short “chat”?
neodymiumphish 4y ago
If you like the structure of Slack and are considering a switch, I'd love to see people switch to Zulip[0]. I've always wanted to see how well a team/org likes it after a serious trial. They have self-hosting options, too. 0: https://zulip.com https://zulip.com
anderspitman 4y ago
The model I hope we eventually get to is using an open protocol like Matrix. You start with a free hosted service a la Slack/Discord. As you grow you start paying them a (reasonable) fee. If you grow huge you can switch to VPS or in-house hosting to manage costs. Never at any point would your users need to know what's happening behind the scenes.
moistly 4y ago
Gods, I hate Slack. And Discord. Sure, you can ask and get answers on those channels, but finding answers to questions already asked? Terrible. The software does nothing to build a repository of knowledge.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
IRC
gits1225 4y ago
Just use Cliq: https://www.zoho.com/cliq/ https://www.zoho.com/cliq/ Zoho has a history of being good: https://www.zoho.com/25/ https://www.zoho.com/25/ (Disclaimer: I work at Zoho).
pacetherace 4y ago
It might be counter intuitive, but many subscription services actually make more sense at larger scale. At scale, the financial implications of downtime and security are way more severe.
Scottn1 4y ago
Don't remember where I found this but here is a good comparison of many Slack/Teams alternatives. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHalWVztqZo7uxlCeKPQ-8uoFOU/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHal... I'd like to see something like Matrix, Wire become more mainstream but will be impossible task with Slack/MS already entrenched into so many orgs.

86 points by skilled 4y ago

davidguetta 4y ago

other people here using discord in a professional setting ?

chomp 4y ago
Indeed, we use it professionally. If you can server boost to level 2, it's quite nice for screen sharing. In my opinion, it's also set up way better than slack for voice channels. Krisp is the icing on the cake.
- metadat 4y ago
  I'd actually not seriously considered it before, but in many ways Discord is a lot better and friendlier UX than Slack. Paying $120k/yr for 1k users is just madness, I was thinking I'd rather force everyone to use a self-hosted IRC server rather than pay $10/user/month for a basic text chat application. I like the Discord solution much better :) What would Discord cost for a comparable organization size? Edit: Womp, womp. Discord "Nitro" is almost the exact same price per user as Slack: $9.99/mo or $99.99/year. Maybe you don't need premium Discord, but these are the accounts subsidizing the freemium users and thus making the business viable. What should the annual cost be to provide chat to 1,000 users? The amount of data can probably add up kinda fast, and retaining and indexing it all to make it searchable at scale is not trivial. Hmm. Conclusion: I guess the outrage I felt when I upvoted this story was just sticker shock :)
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    I guess I'm in the other boat. It sounds pricy but not crazy unreasonable, if $10/mo for a core productivity tool (per employee) is too much, I wonder what that 1k employee business is actually doing. In the USA the median wage is $41,000/yr per employee, with tech companies paying far more, so like 0.02% per employee? Does Slack make an employee more than 0.02% productive vs trying to use IRC or Discord? I'd argue it's pretty obvious that it does.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Yeah, we're in agreement @oceanplexian. Thanks for the sanity check! As I've stated in the edit in the grandparent post, my initial reaction appears to have been only early-morning groggy sticker shock. I'm now going to open my computer and proceed about my day, a significant portion of which will be spent on Slack. :D Cheers bud.
    - fps 4y ago
      In this case, it's a community with 1K members, not a company with 1K employees.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      I mean in the high-flying world of well-funded VC businesses with billion dollar valuations, $120k is a rounding error. But what about any number of hobby communities that previously had to pass the hat to pay for the $40/month Meetup.com fee? Knitting communities and metal detectorists. Salesforce bought it and so is free to price their chat app however they want, and yeah there is a free tier, but don't walk away thinking $$7.25/month is at all affordable for many communities.
    - davidguetta 4y ago
      Sure, but once again its a bloody text messaging app. Mattermost is almost free compared to that.. people paying 120k a year for that have lost their mind regardless of the value they extract from it.
echelon 4y ago
My startup does. We have a public facing one and a private instance. It doesn't have the ACLs and controls Slack does, but it certainly feels better and friendlier.

Test0129 4y ago

IMO discord is not great. I might be in the minority but everything these days offers a discord because it's simple. I'm not a fan of it and would prefer IRC. Part of that reason is discord is just spying equipment dressed up with a nice UI. I couldn't imagine using discord for a company. Slack actually provides some value outside of just chat that makes it legitimately nicer than the mid 00's solution of AOL messenger (or MSN) that companies used to use. I don't think self hosting a chat of similar value would be much cheaper if you did it properly. 1,000 users will require plenty of servers and failover, plenty of storage for messages (even if you cut it off at 90 days), etc. A lot of people use slack as an ad-hoc note storing service with search so go ahead and add even more hardware. On AWS this would get prohibitively expensive quickly. Honestly I could do without 90% of the features and would be very happy if I could just run IRC in my terminal for work. Unfortunately IRC is non-trivial to get a normal person started on.

d23 4y ago
> Part of that reason is discord is just spying equipment dressed up with a nice UI. In what way? I didn't know about this.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  Can't speak for the parent, but I suspect they're referring to two things: 1) A good chunk of Discord is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese conglomerate 2) Discord decrypts and then re-encrypts content on its servers, allegedly for efficiency reasons I think for a small startup that is making games/software which are non-controversial, Discord might still be a fine choice. For anything requiring assurances of enterprise-grade security, I'd avoid it.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > 1) A good chunk of Discord is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese conglomerate The most credible source from this is this article[0], but since it's VC we have no idea what the ownership looks like. For all we know Tencent owns 5% or less of Discord, especially given two companies are listed before them in the article: > The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners. In general Tencent has more pull in other big gaming companies[1], which is more concerning imo. 0: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/gaming-chat-startup-discord-raises-150m-surpassing-2b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/gaming-chat-startup-discor... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190677

padseeker 4y ago

The best engine for generating a startup idea? Find a successful company that charges per user, then build a competing product, and don't charge per user. That's it. It would be nearly impossible to this for Salesforce. But for a lot of other applications like Slack and Dropbox, you could carve out a profitable niche.

steveBK123 4y ago
agreed, and the moat around slack is much smaller than they think it is
- EGreg 4y ago
  didn't Microsoft Teams eat their lunch already? https://medium.com/swlh/why-microsoft-teams-has-been-overtaking-slack-in-2020-734f7bf6f824 https://medium.com/swlh/why-microsoft-teams-has-been-overtak...
  - PedroBatista 4y ago
    Not quite but they are trying. Microsoft Teams now has the most users but they have been pumping money into it like it's free. It's a typical SV move, let's see how long it's sustainable, ie. enough time to kill everyone else.
  - akmarinov 4y ago
    Teams is so awful. It constantly logs me out, while I’m in the middle of a meeting, talking. From the perspective of other users, I just quit the call all of a sudden. How can that be acceptable UX?
EGreg 4y ago
We did that at https://qbix.com https://qbix.com As part of it we released open source platform covering all use cases from chat to events, videoconferencing, etc. And it interoperates with Discourse and other open source projects, in case you want to use them instead. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE

d23 4y ago

Interesting. That pricing doesn't seem that bad if you're running a company of that size, but for open communities it's obviously a bit ridiculous.

treesknees 4y ago
The free tier of Slack has no member limit, so an open community could sign up 10k members in their workspace if it wanted to. However you can't search or see messages older than 90 days. That might be fine for most, if you look at alternatives like IRC you typically need an external logging tool anyway to keep history, so that's still doable with a Slack bot.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

Or you could just use Mattermost.

silisili 4y ago
Came to say this. Their pro version, even in cloud, would come in under what OP is asking for.

zargon 4y ago

I'm not a Slack user, but relying on Discord for business purposes seems like a bad idea. They can decide they don't like an account at the drop of a hat, and out of 1000 users it probably isn't an unlikely scenario.

cyral 4y ago
You are right that they can close them down whenever they want but 1000 users isn't even a drop in the bucket for their infrastructure. There's tons of discords with 100k+ members. I have one with 15k members and it's considered small by them (and I don't pay a cent).
- judge2020 4y ago
  There are tons with over 500k[0]. At this point MidJourney might be paying Discord since it seems they're the first to be allowed over 1M members, and a lot of their infra is running with Discord hosting the images and real-time interactive elements. 0: https://i.judge.sh/qwOAB/2_jNVPVBwC.png https://i.judge.sh/qwOAB/2_jNVPVBwC.png
stemlord 4y ago
OP says in a few different tweets that they are synced between both Discord and Slack free-tier, which seems like somewhat of a solution in lieu of your point

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

Why not self-hosted Mattermost instead of nothing-is-encrypted Discord?

anderspitman 4y ago
IMO the barriers to entry for selfhosting need to get much lower before this is feasible in most cases.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  A company that is using 1000 seats of Slack can figure out how to self-host Mattermost. Failing that, many hosted Mattermost options are available.

seneca 4y ago

The movement in this space has been an overall negative in my opinion. These closed gardens aren't searchable, they're expensive, they don't work on open protocols, and in Discord's case they are extremely invasive about imposing their values on communities in the name of "safety". What we really need is IRC 2.0 that supports the quality of life features these companies offer without all of the negatives.

sbdncuvh 4y ago
SleepilyLimping 4y ago
Trying to search Discord for anything is so bad, and it's hurting communities because they're centralizing their knowledge there. Things that used to be on forums for things like fighting games are now buried on Discord, indexed terribly, and are a pain to find.
anderspitman 4y ago
What are your thoughts on Matrix?

janlukacs 4y ago

why not set up an IRC server?

trasz 4y ago

Slack is a technically-inferior IRC clone with crappy web UI. How anyone would pay even $120 for it is beyond me.

frou_dh 4y ago
Less space than Nomad (List), too. Very lame.

EGreg 4y ago

More generally, there is this problem: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Instead of Slack, you can use Discord, Gitter, Telegram, or you can install an open source software like Discourse or our platform Qbix (which integrates with it to add events, meetings etc.) Why pay third parties for some black box solution that bundles everything, to host your company's data, when there is open source software and free market of hosts that compete on price?

oldandboring 4y ago

I do see that the person posting on Twitter may have a different use case than me. But what keeps my small business on Slack, even though we have a perfectly good replacement (Chat) baked right into our Google Workspaces account, is inter-company communication. Slack isn't ubiquitous, but it's common enough that we have multiple clients who use it. If we terminated our Slack Pro account, we wouldn't have a way of continuing to chat and DM with those clients without requiring them to establish new accounts on an unfamiliar service, just so they can work with this one vendor (us).

akmarinov 4y ago
Chat is horrible, it’s really barebones and doesn’t have any features. Also it’s been like that for about 4 years now, with very little development or investment by Google, so that should tell you that it’ll just get cut one day.
briffle 4y ago
If you setup Matrix, couldn't you then just use the slack bridge? https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/matrix-appservice-slack https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/matrix-appservice-sl...
- oldandboring 4y ago
  I could be wrong but I think the issue is that I'd be bridging Matrix to my Slack organization, which I would be downgrading to 'Free', and so any communication that happens with external people via the Slack/Matrix bridge will be doing so via the crippled 'Free' account. As it pertains to inter-company communication, 'Pro' allows for channels and group chats, whereas 'Free' only allows one-on-one communication. So, again I could be misunderstanding, but I don't think much is really gained here, relative to (say) implementing Matrix for internal use and also asking employees to keep Slack running for certain external chats.
- judge2020 4y ago
  A slack bridge might be too invasive for a company looking to prevent any data loss, ie. a Rockstar Games situation. If they can, they'll require linked companies to use the official client, even if it costs something.

paxys 4y ago

Slack is not a community forum. If you ask Slack support they will explicitly tell you that and ask you to use Discord or something else. I'm not sure why people are surprised or outraged here.

runjake 4y ago
I suspect people are surprised because Slack just changed their policy[1] on free tiers, and not everyone has picked up the news in the past few weeks. Up until then Slack was used by a number of communities. I ran one of them and Slack never told me to use Discord. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/slack-is-increasing-prices-and-changing-the-way-its-free-plan-works/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/slack-is-increasing-prices...

yodon 4y ago

I find it an fascinating insight into the HN mind that with about 50 comments posted, Discord is mentioned in about half the comments but Teams currently appears nowhere in the discussion.

reidjs 4y ago
Nobody picks teams given the choice, teams is thrust upon them from above.
e40 4y ago
There was a post here today about how bad Teams is. Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32932137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32932137
whymauri 4y ago
Teams is the worst software I have ever used, including betas, proof of concepts, and works developed by students. It is both consistently broken and has horrible UX. At this point, its only use is a as a litmus test for how penny pinching and incompetent leadership can be (with exceptions being Microsoft, I guess).
itsdrewmiller 4y ago
The tweet mentions discord and not MS teams - I don't think this is an insight into the HN mind.

all_usernames 4y ago

On the one hand, this is a bargain for Enterprise SaaS software. On the other, I can run you an IRC server for roughly the cost of electricity.

samatman 4y ago
There's about as much resemblance between IRC and Slack as there is between Slack and PHPBB forums. Matrix, on the other hand, is better than Slack, and anyone can run it.

LastTrain 4y ago

Glorified IRC

alberth 4y ago

I never understood why companies use chat to build community. Isn’t this what forums are for (Eg your home private “HN” of sorts)

anderspitman 4y ago
If you can only have one I would vote for forums, since they're flexible enough to handle a lot of chat and even wiki use cases. But I think realtime comms are different enough that it's worth having a dedicated chat app.
thecosmicfrog 4y ago
It seems to be a recent (last 5-7 years?) trend from what I can tell. I agree that forums are much better and more organised for community discussions, but generations seem to drive these things. I'm in some Discord communities, but just get lost amongst all the channels and regularly miss "big" announcements and news. Discord seems to require a lot more of your active attention, versus forums permitting passive "check ins" every few hours or days.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
A large part of forums was basically refreshing the page to see if anybody responded to the threads you commented in. It was basically slow and more annoying chat thus easily replaced by rich chat platforms like Discord. Frankly, real time chat is a big way to get to know people. It’s basically conversation. Meanwhile 10 years on HN and I don’t know a single person. Forums are good for lots of things, but don’t discount chat.
- alberth 4y ago
  > Frankly, real time chat is a big way to get to know people. It’s basically conversation. Meanwhile 10 years on HN and I don’t know a single person. How many chat channels/DM/etc do you still message with 10 years later? I’d guess very few if any. If that’s the case, what problem is the company trying to solve with a community section? Do they want long term engagement by its users (like you on HN for 10 years) or do they just want tourists stopping by for the short “chat”?

neodymiumphish 4y ago

If you like the structure of Slack and are considering a switch, I'd love to see people switch to Zulip[0]. I've always wanted to see how well a team/org likes it after a serious trial. They have self-hosting options, too. 0: https://zulip.com https://zulip.com

anderspitman 4y ago

The model I hope we eventually get to is using an open protocol like Matrix. You start with a free hosted service a la Slack/Discord. As you grow you start paying them a (reasonable) fee. If you grow huge you can switch to VPS or in-house hosting to manage costs. Never at any point would your users need to know what's happening behind the scenes.

moistly 4y ago

Gods, I hate Slack. And Discord. Sure, you can ask and get answers on those channels, but finding answers to questions already asked? Terrible. The software does nothing to build a repository of knowledge.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

IRC

gits1225 4y ago

Just use Cliq: https://www.zoho.com/cliq/ https://www.zoho.com/cliq/ Zoho has a history of being good: https://www.zoho.com/25/ https://www.zoho.com/25/ (Disclaimer: I work at Zoho).

pacetherace 4y ago

It might be counter intuitive, but many subscription services actually make more sense at larger scale. At scale, the financial implications of downtime and security are way more severe.

Scottn1 4y ago

Don't remember where I found this but here is a good comparison of many Slack/Teams alternatives. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHalWVztqZo7uxlCeKPQ-8uoFOU/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHal... I'd like to see something like Matrix, Wire become more mainstream but will be impossible task with Slack/MS already entrenched into so many orgs.