6 ms·

Slack wants to become the 'long-term memory' for organizations

46 points by sharpshadow 2y ago

apple4ever 2y ago
And yet: https://slack.com/help/articles/29414264463635-Updates-to-message-and-file-history-on-free-workspaces?nojsmode=1 https://slack.com/help/articles/29414264463635-Updates-to-me...
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Yes, organisations that use this free service get exactly what they’re paying for. I don’t think they they’re looking to be long-term memory for free plan users. We’re all adults here that know how freemium models work.
  - sam1r 2y ago
    Additionally, it’s nowhere perfect as a product to expect such a reliance on a daily basis. For instance, query times for search is not optimal, file upload times, especially on mobile, are slower than my internet connection speed.
    - dewey 2y ago
      Turns out a product doesn't have to be "perfect" to work well for many people, I'm using Slack every day for at least 8 years and while these are maybe things that can be improved they are really not things that negatively impact my day.
- nuz 2y ago
  They probably still keep the data to sell to LLM training organizations
Liquix 2y ago
slack was a great product already, no one asked for their org's data to be slurped up by the sleazy opt-in-by-default data harvesting program. gross https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383978
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  Which parts of their policy allow data harvesting? I can’t seem to find them, could you help?
  - immibis 2y ago
    The part where the software runs on their server and you send all your messages to them. It's not a policy thing.
- dewey 2y ago
  You miss-understood a critical part: https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure-and-private/ https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure... Short summary on Twitter: > Slack AI – which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack – is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data. Because Slack AI hosts the models on its own infrastructure, your data remains in your control and exclusively for your organization’s use. It never leaves Slack’s trust boundary and no third parties, including the model vendor, will have access to it. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1791276788212998503 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1791276788212998503
CuriouslyC 2y ago
Slack is great but there's no chance I'd make my business dependent on it in that way. I keep chat content ephemeral and store knowledge in git.
sam1r 2y ago
But their query times for search is suboptimal — so that needs to be fixed first..
- callamdelaney 2y ago
  Their search UX is also terrrible.
konixam 2y ago
Less than 34% of projects are completed on time and one budget, Dresser claimed, saying that users having to switch between tasks in applications was a significant drain on time and productivity. “We have millions of people working in Slack; why leave Slack?” Yes, context switching is expensive. I don't see how never leaving Slack changes that, there is enough going on there to make it hard to stay on task. Plenty of windows, DMs, channels, integrations pinging you, meetings about to happen. I can only imagine they are starting to dream of SlackOS where everything is AI powered and you never leave Slack but you are still wasting the same amount of time, just in their product.
- sharpshadow 2y ago
  SlackOS in a VM is Slack.
- molteanu 2y ago
  I would take it as just marketing. One has something to sell so one now finds some good angle of why that product is better or desirable.
gherkinnn 2y ago
I think they got it the wrong way round. Slack is for ephemeral communication only. Add an option that deletes messages after 7 days instead. Not much money in that though.
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  Perfect for planning illegal anti-competitive actions, Google would love it
  - hhhhhhhmmmmmmm 2y ago
    Good job DLP tools and legal holds exist then
- falconertc 2y ago
  People don't use Slack in this way though. I've worked at several organizations where the freshest documentation we had was in Slack. The truest FAQ is when someone actually asks a dev a question in a Slack channel, and not the questions they anticipated being asked when writing documentation. Capturing this in a meaningful way would be highly valuable, and maybe all that takes is feeding it to a RAG based LLM
pmontra 2y ago
Three customers of mine use Slack all the time, only one is paying. The other two accept that old messages go away. About features: Calls and screen sharing work well. Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them. Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff. A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.
- Bjartr 2y ago
  > A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software Zulip is closer to that I think https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/
- rileymat2 2y ago
  > A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software How much of that was like google wave?
- CrimsonRain 2y ago
  That's called Discord.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
    Maybe I'm just old but I find the UX of Discord pretty bad. Not just aesthetics, but the entire information hierarchy doesn't really work for me. Perhaps it's because it started as a gaming thing (IIRC?) before branching out to more general use cases.
    - CrimsonRain 2y ago
      On the other hand, millions of people are using it everyday as their primary comm app. Discord does a lot more than a typical chat app like messenger/whataspp and thus UI is more complex. But it is not bad; let alone pretty bad. Their UX is amazing. Complex but great.
kazinator 2y ago
Slack wants to become the long-term memory for organizations that pay, and the anterograde amnesia of those that don't.
XorNot 2y ago
I can't see how they win here. Most orgs buy Office 365, and get Teams as a result. Teams is...fine.
molteanu 2y ago
An AI-infused search for hard to find discussions between team members that happened somewhere in the past is nice, I guess. What I find slack enables though, is technical documentation being stored in such chats instead of something more formal, like an API or an up to date README. Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way". Hah - yes. Or the I'm-a-human gambit: "Why can't we just have a conversation?"
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  This is part of the reason I actually like the free slack tier. People know that shit is going away. If slack wants to integrate AI, it should focus on auto-updating other services that people actually want to use to store information like google drive, notion, git, etc based on chats. That would be useful. Trying to lock people into slack harder is not.
- Rastonbury 2y ago
  The ideal AI flow here would be people jumping on a video call, someone hitting record because they know it would be pertinent, AI transcribing and summarising the steps and finding then suggesting edits to wherever documentation should be stored then updating a changelog, which are the main hurdles to someone who just learned something sharing it with the organisation
Havoc 2y ago
That’s smells like one hell of a lock-in
tushar-r 2y ago
The company I work for very specifically turned on message auto deletion after 90 days after a discussion with Compliance. Want to store something for a long time? Use the official wiki.
- redditor98654 2y ago
  Amazon?
  - braza 2y ago
    A competitor of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok for short videos does that also
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Great place to document your crimes :)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
TheAdamist 2y ago
My enterprise employer instituted retention policies on slack, so it couldn't be long term storage. I imagine any other large companies would be the same. Of course then we switched to teams which isnt as useful for finding anything, so that problem is solved /s.
thom 2y ago
Been thinking about knowledge management a bit lately, and maybe doing it well is just impossible and you should let the AIs embrace the chaos for you. But I still have this lingering question: what number employee should your CIO be (if any)?
braza 2y ago
10+ years of usage of Slack and I noticed that the written communication style today is better than before but I wonder about how folks in MSTeams are doing. When I was working with Slack I felt that most of the communication had more depth and broadnesses and after transition to MSTeams I personally feel that the whole chatter decreased significantly and folks are more prone to start a call than to “Create a Post” with title and write down.
kkfx 2y ago
Well... Having an diggable history is a nice to have thing, but "long term" and "commercial service" are an oxymoron... The only long term is owning anything on their own iron and possibly with a little-to-no-deps sw stack and data in easy to master formats, regularly changes as the tech change (converting formats as needed, to preserve old data in new, currently usable, form). Aside for the Slack users I see in action... Get something useful for the long term is well... Less valuable then the cost 99% of the time... It's not version control for a software project, the signal/noise ration of information is so terrible to the point of being just garbage.
hacknews20 2y ago
Ironic headline when the free version stops you seeing messages after a short time.
- temp_praneshp 2y ago
  "for organizations"
iroddis 2y ago
I wish Slack would focus on end-user experience rather than extra org-level features. It’s like being offered a meal when you complain of being tired. Sure, it’s great, but I’d rather have what I ask for. How about code highlighting in markdown-style triple-backtick blocks instead of requiring snippets? Or the ability to have a separate window per workspace in the native app? Or maybe marking thread responses that echo to the channel marked as read when I see them in the channel, rather than requiring an explicit click into the Threads section? Or a huddle video feed that isn’t blurry at 4K so I can actually read the text getting shared? I do like Slack, but some of these missing features just feel like missed table-stakes, and their focus seems elsewhere.
threesevenths 2y ago
I received an email from Slack this morning that they will be deleting any history over 90 days in their free tier plan. It doesn't seem like this is conducive to long term memory if you’re capping history to 90 days.
underlogic 2y ago
Didn't they just announce they'll delete messages older than a year for unpaid users? This is a huge red flag. You don't want a company with a business model that requires them to pull the rug on critical data if you unsubscribe. A business model of continuous threat. I'll find an alternative free self hosted platform with e2e and no AI snooping through our private issues to build profiles on the group.

46 points by sharpshadow 2y ago

And yet: https://slack.com/help/articles/29414264463635-Updates-to-message-and-file-history-on-free-workspaces?nojsmode=1 https://slack.com/help/articles/29414264463635-Updates-to-me...

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
Yes, organisations that use this free service get exactly what they’re paying for. I don’t think they they’re looking to be long-term memory for free plan users. We’re all adults here that know how freemium models work.
- sam1r 2y ago
  Additionally, it’s nowhere perfect as a product to expect such a reliance on a daily basis. For instance, query times for search is not optimal, file upload times, especially on mobile, are slower than my internet connection speed.
  - dewey 2y ago
    Turns out a product doesn't have to be "perfect" to work well for many people, I'm using Slack every day for at least 8 years and while these are maybe things that can be improved they are really not things that negatively impact my day.
nuz 2y ago
They probably still keep the data to sell to LLM training organizations

Liquix 2y ago

slack was a great product already, no one asked for their org's data to be slurped up by the sleazy opt-in-by-default data harvesting program. gross https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383978

throwthrowuknow 2y ago
Which parts of their policy allow data harvesting? I can’t seem to find them, could you help?
- immibis 2y ago
  The part where the software runs on their server and you send all your messages to them. It's not a policy thing.
dewey 2y ago
You miss-understood a critical part: https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure-and-private/ https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure... Short summary on Twitter: > Slack AI – which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack – is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data. Because Slack AI hosts the models on its own infrastructure, your data remains in your control and exclusively for your organization’s use. It never leaves Slack’s trust boundary and no third parties, including the model vendor, will have access to it. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1791276788212998503 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1791276788212998503

CuriouslyC 2y ago

Slack is great but there's no chance I'd make my business dependent on it in that way. I keep chat content ephemeral and store knowledge in git.

sam1r 2y ago

But their query times for search is suboptimal — so that needs to be fixed first..

callamdelaney 2y ago
Their search UX is also terrrible.

konixam 2y ago

Less than 34% of projects are completed on time and one budget, Dresser claimed, saying that users having to switch between tasks in applications was a significant drain on time and productivity. “We have millions of people working in Slack; why leave Slack?” Yes, context switching is expensive. I don't see how never leaving Slack changes that, there is enough going on there to make it hard to stay on task. Plenty of windows, DMs, channels, integrations pinging you, meetings about to happen. I can only imagine they are starting to dream of SlackOS where everything is AI powered and you never leave Slack but you are still wasting the same amount of time, just in their product.

sharpshadow 2y ago
SlackOS in a VM is Slack.
molteanu 2y ago
I would take it as just marketing. One has something to sell so one now finds some good angle of why that product is better or desirable.

gherkinnn 2y ago

I think they got it the wrong way round. Slack is for ephemeral communication only. Add an option that deletes messages after 7 days instead. Not much money in that though.

mcmcmc 2y ago
Perfect for planning illegal anti-competitive actions, Google would love it
- hhhhhhhmmmmmmm 2y ago
  Good job DLP tools and legal holds exist then
falconertc 2y ago
People don't use Slack in this way though. I've worked at several organizations where the freshest documentation we had was in Slack. The truest FAQ is when someone actually asks a dev a question in a Slack channel, and not the questions they anticipated being asked when writing documentation. Capturing this in a meaningful way would be highly valuable, and maybe all that takes is feeding it to a RAG based LLM

pmontra 2y ago

Three customers of mine use Slack all the time, only one is paying. The other two accept that old messages go away. About features: Calls and screen sharing work well. Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them. Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff. A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.

Bjartr 2y ago
> A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software Zulip is closer to that I think https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/
rileymat2 2y ago
> A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software How much of that was like google wave?
CrimsonRain 2y ago
That's called Discord.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dkdbejwi383 2y ago
  Maybe I'm just old but I find the UX of Discord pretty bad. Not just aesthetics, but the entire information hierarchy doesn't really work for me. Perhaps it's because it started as a gaming thing (IIRC?) before branching out to more general use cases.
  - CrimsonRain 2y ago
    On the other hand, millions of people are using it everyday as their primary comm app. Discord does a lot more than a typical chat app like messenger/whataspp and thus UI is more complex. But it is not bad; let alone pretty bad. Their UX is amazing. Complex but great.

kazinator 2y ago

Slack wants to become the long-term memory for organizations that pay, and the anterograde amnesia of those that don't.

XorNot 2y ago

I can't see how they win here. Most orgs buy Office 365, and get Teams as a result. Teams is...fine.

molteanu 2y ago

An AI-infused search for hard to find discussions between team members that happened somewhere in the past is nice, I guess. What I find slack enables though, is technical documentation being stored in such chats instead of something more formal, like an API or an up to date README. Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".

robertlagrant 2y ago
> Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way". Hah - yes. Or the I'm-a-human gambit: "Why can't we just have a conversation?"
CuriouslyC 2y ago
This is part of the reason I actually like the free slack tier. People know that shit is going away. If slack wants to integrate AI, it should focus on auto-updating other services that people actually want to use to store information like google drive, notion, git, etc based on chats. That would be useful. Trying to lock people into slack harder is not.
Rastonbury 2y ago
The ideal AI flow here would be people jumping on a video call, someone hitting record because they know it would be pertinent, AI transcribing and summarising the steps and finding then suggesting edits to wherever documentation should be stored then updating a changelog, which are the main hurdles to someone who just learned something sharing it with the organisation

Havoc 2y ago

That’s smells like one hell of a lock-in

tushar-r 2y ago

The company I work for very specifically turned on message auto deletion after 90 days after a discussion with Compliance. Want to store something for a long time? Use the official wiki.

redditor98654 2y ago
Amazon?
- braza 2y ago
  A competitor of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok for short videos does that also
saagarjha 2y ago
Great place to document your crimes :)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

TheAdamist 2y ago

My enterprise employer instituted retention policies on slack, so it couldn't be long term storage. I imagine any other large companies would be the same. Of course then we switched to teams which isnt as useful for finding anything, so that problem is solved /s.

thom 2y ago

Been thinking about knowledge management a bit lately, and maybe doing it well is just impossible and you should let the AIs embrace the chaos for you. But I still have this lingering question: what number employee should your CIO be (if any)?

braza 2y ago

10+ years of usage of Slack and I noticed that the written communication style today is better than before but I wonder about how folks in MSTeams are doing. When I was working with Slack I felt that most of the communication had more depth and broadnesses and after transition to MSTeams I personally feel that the whole chatter decreased significantly and folks are more prone to start a call than to “Create a Post” with title and write down.

kkfx 2y ago

Well... Having an diggable history is a nice to have thing, but "long term" and "commercial service" are an oxymoron... The only long term is owning anything on their own iron and possibly with a little-to-no-deps sw stack and data in easy to master formats, regularly changes as the tech change (converting formats as needed, to preserve old data in new, currently usable, form). Aside for the Slack users I see in action... Get something useful for the long term is well... Less valuable then the cost 99% of the time... It's not version control for a software project, the signal/noise ration of information is so terrible to the point of being just garbage.

hacknews20 2y ago

Ironic headline when the free version stops you seeing messages after a short time.

temp_praneshp 2y ago
"for organizations"

iroddis 2y ago

I wish Slack would focus on end-user experience rather than extra org-level features. It’s like being offered a meal when you complain of being tired. Sure, it’s great, but I’d rather have what I ask for. How about code highlighting in markdown-style triple-backtick blocks instead of requiring snippets? Or the ability to have a separate window per workspace in the native app? Or maybe marking thread responses that echo to the channel marked as read when I see them in the channel, rather than requiring an explicit click into the Threads section? Or a huddle video feed that isn’t blurry at 4K so I can actually read the text getting shared? I do like Slack, but some of these missing features just feel like missed table-stakes, and their focus seems elsewhere.

threesevenths 2y ago

I received an email from Slack this morning that they will be deleting any history over 90 days in their free tier plan. It doesn't seem like this is conducive to long term memory if you’re capping history to 90 days.

underlogic 2y ago

Didn't they just announce they'll delete messages older than a year for unpaid users? This is a huge red flag. You don't want a company with a business model that requires them to pull the rug on critical data if you unsubscribe. A business model of continuous threat. I'll find an alternative free self hosted platform with e2e and no AI snooping through our private issues to build profiles on the group.