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Slack updates retention policy for free workspaces
- beretguy 2y agoI don’t see a problem. Things like slack or discord should only be used for chat, primarily. Trying to find old messages is painful. It’s the wrong it for such job.
- gabrielsroka 2y agoPerhaps then it's ironic that Slack stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge" https://x.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225 https://x.com/stewart/status/780906639301812225 Via Wikipedia, etc.
- apple4ever 2y agoPretty annoying. They are just proven they cannot be relied on. I get deleting them for little used workspaces, but if they are free and used, this should not happen.
- joshstrange 2y agoMy understanding was the Slack only allowed you to access X days back of content on a free plan (this page seems to indicate it was 90 days?). IIRC that’s a change (happened a while back) from when they used to allow access to the last 10K messages (which of course meant your time-based access depended on the number of messages you sent). On the surface this just looks like Slack saying “we used to keep everything in case you upgraded but now we just keep a year back”. Functionally it’s no different if you never planned on paying. If you did plan on paying then now you won’t get all your messages from the past back, just a year. Have I misunderstood this?
- Ekaros 2y agoYou get what you pay for... I hope we soon learn that we should not have any expectations for free services.
- armchairhacker 2y ago> Starting 26th August 2024, we’ll begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis. Also note that you already can’t see messages older than 90 days on a free workspace, but they’re there if you upgrade. This change means if you do upgrade, data older than 1 year will be gone.
- a1o 2y ago> Existing free workspaces that upgrade to a paid subscription before 26th August 2024 won’t be affected. I think the approach will be to upgrade, export the data and then cancel subscription. I don't mean cancel as to leave slack but to be able to revert to the new free usage policy while keeping previous data.
- poszlem 2y ago[flagged]
- anotherhue 2y agoAutomatic infinite retention is a social failing, we should be selective about what we choose to keep because the rate at which we're creating it is so large. It's not that hard to click 'save'. The old needs to make room for the new.
- akkartik 2y agoI think automatic infinite retention and public access to public data should be a basic human right. And we should be making lots of copies of all that rapidly-created data as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
- anotherhue 2y agoI would think public records and such would qualify as worth keeping, random group chats however...
- akkartik 2y agoYeah, totally. If it's private then it's up to whoever owns it. I think my experience is colored by using Slack for a group that's very much intended to be a public record: https://futureofcoding.org/community https://futureofcoding.org/community Perhaps a better way to state my position is: I think publishing should be a ratchet. Everyone can choose what they want to make public. But once it's public that's it, there's no undo and no do-over. This isn't ideal in some situations, but on balance seems like the greater good. Stuff gets added to the commons of human knowledge, and we do our darnedest not to let stuff get removed once it's been added.
- bunderbunder 2y agoSome random anecdotes from my time on the Internet: 20 or so years back, I joined The WELL. I only lasted a couple months. It was impossible to have an interesting conversation without longtime members popping into the thread to "helpfully" point out that this had already been discussed back in 1988, 1993 and twice in 1997, with links to the relevant threads. I figured, if The WELL wants to be an information archive rather than a social space, that's fine, but Wikipedia is less expensive, better-curated, and easier to search. About 15 years back, I gave up on contributing to Stack Exchange, and about 5 years back I largely stopped clicking on SE links in my search results. Similar story. The culture of preservationism meant that the site tended to favor pre-existing information and opinions. Back in the day, it just made the site uncomfortable for newcomers. More recently, it's also undermined the site's merit as an knowledge trove due to a tendency to favor out of date information. Also about 15 years back, I became an admin on a Web forum. I observed firsthand that having a searchable record of posting history was a social negative that largely served to fuel flamewars. More Internet-savvy users were very adept at searching through the post history to dig up dirt on each other, hunt for evidence of people's opinions changing over time in an effort to try to call each other hypocrites, etc. The rise of social media has only made this worse; Twitter mobs' ability to dig through a target's history for ill-considered or easily-misconstrued tweets that they can use for character assassination purposes is truly a sight to behold. And it has created a situation where more level-headed, continent people tend toward circumspection or even avoiding posting altogether. On the professional side of things, at work I find that the usual corporate information troves - Confluence, ticketing systems, and group messaging - are rarely useful as an information trove, precisely because we hoard everything. It makes actually finding the information you're looking for in these systems darn near infeasible. Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") is only true in the short term. In the longer term, 90% of what remains is compost, because it only ever had ephemeral value. Digging the reasoning behind a 5 year old technical decision out of a 10 year old Jira system is like looking for a chocolate chip in a cesspit. Unfortunately, we've collectively painted ourselves into a corner in this department. Once upon a time, we curated information because we simply didn't have the physical space to keep all that paper indefinitely. Cheap digital storage and keyword search has tricked us into thinking that there's no cost to storing everything, though, so over the past quarter century or so we've gotten rid of all the secretaries, librarians and archivists.
- RationPhantoms 2y agoAnother victim to the end of the ZIRP era.
- coreylane 2y agoI'm one of those people who constantly delete all their messages and data held on third-party services, so automating the removal of this actually appeals to me, but I know many will be upset by a change like this. I wonder how much money this is really going to save them, and at what cost in (potential) customer goodwill.
- willsmith72 2y agoWhat are the best slack alternatives these days? Surely in 2024 live chat is really a commodity
- a1o 2y agoRocket Chat is a possible alternative. Also Teams and Discord.
- thinkindie 2y agoTeams is anything but an alternative to Slack
- domoritz 2y agomatrix.org is a neat open protocol/platform but clients have some room to improve.
- ftth_finland 2y agoMatrix sucks rocks. Zulip is where it’s at.
- rwmj 2y agoIf you want to filter your users to that small group of tech experts that is able to install and set up the client.
- arcanemachiner 2y agoZulip?
- candiddevmike 2y ago> Surely in 2024 live chat is really a commodity IMO, it is, as long as you don't need video sharing or mobile. As soon as these are involved, the field of competitors narrows considerably.
- MaKey 2y agohttps://zulip.com https://zulip.com is one of the better alternatives with an option for self-hosting.
- judge2020 2y agoI wonder if Discord will ever do something like this. We're coming up on them storing messages from 10 years ago, and they're all still accessible and searchable(!) including attachments.
- paxys 2y agoDiscord is still private, unprofitable and running on VC funds, so the answer to that question is undoubtedly yes.
- martin-adams 2y agoOr they will change their policy that allows conversations to be used for training AI.
- judge2020 2y agohttps://discord.com/privacy https://discord.com/privacy > To improve our services. We use your information to help us understand how users interact with our services, what features or products users may want, to develop features that make Discord safer and better to use, or to otherwise understand and improve our services. > you can limit certain types of processing of your information: > Limit our ability to use your data to improve our services. We offer certain settings that allow you to limit the information we collect to help us understand how users use our services, what features or products they may want, or to otherwise help us improve our business. If you turn off these settings, we will stop collecting and using certain event and log information as described in these settings.
- simonw 2y agoSee comment here: I don't think there's nearly as much value in this stuff as AI training data as people often assume. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40788323#40789753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40788323#40789753
- jezzamon 2y agoUntil then, you can use it as an unlimited cloud storage! https://github.com/DisboxApp/web?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/DisboxApp/web?tab=readme-ov-file
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paxys 2y agoThey probably realized after all these years that most teams on their free plan have no intention of ever upgrading, especially if they haven't done so after a full year of use. No point in taking on the costs to store all their data forever.
- rekoil 2y agoThe pricing is insane. Maybe it makes sense for some businesses (we have it at work for sure), but I'm in 9 Slack workspaces currently, and only 3 of those are connected to any sort of business use.
- jerlam 2y agoSlack doesn't seem to have any pricing options for a general community, only for clearly defined business groups with clear onboarding/offboarding procedures. They charge by the user, by the month, so any kind of publicly open group seems impossible to fund.
- paxys 2y agoSlack has never been a solution for hobby groups and open source communities and the like, but people love to keep using it as such and then blame the pricing model for not working for them.
- dvngnt_ 2y agowhy not use a self-hosted solution or discord?
- MontagFTB 2y agoAt larger companies, data retention policies that delete old data are pretty standard for platforms like this. A lot of them can harbor conversations that can be taken out of context or were never meant to be public, so it makes sense from a liability standpoint. That said, there can also be a large body of fruitful technical knowledge sharing that happens on these platforms that should be retained for the good of the company. The real rub is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How can the signal be isolated/retained/copied easily so the noise can be purged? This is especially difficult for very old data that is spread across innumerable channels whose value could be lost and the team left unawares.
- blitzar 2y agoAt many larger companies, data retention policies that KEEP old data are pretty standard for platforms like this. Record retention is a reality for many workers no matter how inconvenient reading out of context messages from 7 years ago might be.
- bee_rider 2y agoThis seems like one of the few really compelling reasons, for a particular type of person, to push return to office. Fewer paper trails to get retained, with in-person conversations…
- syntheticnature 2y agoKeep, beyond legal requirements, for something as loose as Slack seems unusual to me. Having worked for some very large companies they tend to be very worried about purging email, Slack, etc., within months, before there's a chance for a subpoena.
- another-dave 2y ago> The real rub is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How can the signal be isolated/retained/copied easily so the noise can be purged? This is especially difficult for very old data that is spread across innumerable channels whose value could be lost and the team left unawares. I think you need a culture of summarising this type of info & saving somewhere that isn't ephemeral (e.g. README, team wiki). Else even with the history maintained, it's still a pain to try to a) play pattern matching with Slack's search engine and b) weed out all the false positives of old info that's no longer relevant. This feels like the type of thing that maybe could be farmed out to a trained LLM in the future — "summarise today's discussion on X in channel Y and post into the wiki".
- xnx 2y agoIs there a good tool to export everything (public channels, private messages, images, etc.) if I sign up for premium for a short period?
- akkartik 2y agoYou don't even need to upgrade. Just go to your workspace settings and look for the export/import tab. I personally put the downloaded zip file through https://github.com/akkartik/slack-archive https://github.com/akkartik/slack-archive. But there are a variety of tools that can read the zip file.
- kelsolaar 2y agoYou cannot export private messages though without an upgrade.
- karaterobot 2y agoIrrationally, this seems preferable to me to simply holding it hostage indefinitely. It always bothered me that they just stored all my old messages, but held them for ransom at a price I could not possibly afford to pay (something like $12k a year for my stupid little chat board that has $0 a year in revenue). It's better in my mind for them to delete my messages to free up space, because at least that's a reason I can wrap my brain around.
- kragen 2y agoslack: ransomware as a service™
- vehemenz 2y agoI agree, but on the other hand, if you're a paying customer for years and take a hiatus for a year or two, then you lose data.
- Maxion 2y agoYou can export your data: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp... For private messages I think you have to send in a GDPR request. You can view it in a slack like viewer here: https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer
- outcoldman 2y agoThere is a big difference in cost to store data and have data to be available for access.
- wanderinghogan 2y agoWhy not include this data in their AI training models? Personally, I was irritated after that quiet 'opt-out' via email to prevent your corporate slack from being used in their ai training models change, recently. I guess they can double dip? Have you pay the pennies for data retention and use your corporate communications to train the next things they will sell you?
- simonw 2y agoBecause most companies genuinely don't value training on user data in that way. It just isn't that valuable, even without the huge amount of negative publicity attached to doing that. The cutting edge AI labs are leaning much more into high quality data (licensed from the Associated Press for example) and synthetic data, which it turns out is a huge part of Claude and Microsoft's Phi series. Andrej Karpathy said: "The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all." - https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933
- altdataseller 2y agoBut conversations in Slack aren’t your average webpage. Minus the channels used for automated messages/memes, a lot of in-depth, quality conversations happen on Slack on a large variety of topics
- simonw 2y agoAnd it's all full of potentially private details. Can you imagine the storm of bad publicity that would emerge the first time some company has details of an internal strategy leaked because some chatbot ended up parroting those details back to a competitor?
- syntheticnature 2y agoI'm actually surprised Slack isn't actively harvesting unused free instances, to be honest. I know of at least one group that would create a free instance per-event that would then sit idle after (presumably to avoid having to deal with security issues/key admins deciding to not participate).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pentagrama 2y agoI always want something like that as a feature. For a hobby project on a free plan I prefer have an auto delete feature and choose the timeframe.