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It isn't clear to me that this is a good business move... GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store.

It isn't clear to me that this is a good business move... GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store. Which means that by making available only the last 90 days, you can't keep older stuff... And, in today's AI powered world, in slacks position that old data seems far more valuable to keep than to throw away, even for your non-paying customers. For one thing, they might be able to make a smarter 'AI slackbot' which better understands your organisation looking at more history. And they might one day be able to wrangle permission to sell the AI training rights to all your corporate chats if they can find some convincing way to anonymize the result.

trashtester 2y ago
> GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store. My understanding is that Slack doesn't make >90 days available to non-paying users, so by your statement above, they're required by GDPR to delete that history.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Yep... And that might be why they're doing it. They also have the option to make the data available but in an inconvenient form - like for example 'sure, you can access your data vault, but it'll be CSV files of chats that you have to download one by one'. Google Takeout is basically that, since nearly all the data isn't readily usable by most users.
  - trashtester 2y ago
    That requires extra effort, though. They may even need to set up a team dedicated to serving such requests. It's not obvious that it's worth the effort.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
My wild guess is that they will not delete it, but keep it in reserve for some kind of future value extraction. Instead, this is a short term juicing of subscriber numbers by getting more people to upgrade to paid plans. Also, I am curious just how much this can be saving. Text is tiny.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Text is tiny, but database rows get expensive far faster than the raw storage costs. For one thing, you basically can't run any database for small data like this direct from hard disk. Even for ancient data, where say a 100 byte chat message is read once per year on average, a 12 TB hard drive stores 120000000000 messages needs to provide 3800 IOPS to handle that load. No hard drive does that.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Since the data is all cold and immutable, do you even need the database anymore? Especially if you are locking down access to paid plans only (paying clients with performance expectations would still require live db). Shard the old data by community/age into separate parquet files you can retrieve as needed. You have it just in case, but then you are just paying for storage.

trashtester 2y ago

> GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store. My understanding is that Slack doesn't make >90 days available to non-paying users, so by your statement above, they're required by GDPR to delete that history.

londons_explore 2y ago
Yep... And that might be why they're doing it. They also have the option to make the data available but in an inconvenient form - like for example 'sure, you can access your data vault, but it'll be CSV files of chats that you have to download one by one'. Google Takeout is basically that, since nearly all the data isn't readily usable by most users.
- trashtester 2y ago
  That requires extra effort, though. They may even need to set up a team dedicated to serving such requests. It's not obvious that it's worth the effort.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

My wild guess is that they will not delete it, but keep it in reserve for some kind of future value extraction. Instead, this is a short term juicing of subscriber numbers by getting more people to upgrade to paid plans. Also, I am curious just how much this can be saving. Text is tiny.

londons_explore 2y ago
Text is tiny, but database rows get expensive far faster than the raw storage costs. For one thing, you basically can't run any database for small data like this direct from hard disk. Even for ancient data, where say a 100 byte chat message is read once per year on average, a 12 TB hard drive stores 120000000000 messages needs to provide 3800 IOPS to handle that load. No hard drive does that.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Since the data is all cold and immutable, do you even need the database anymore? Especially if you are locking down access to paid plans only (paying clients with performance expectations would still require live db). Shard the old data by community/age into separate parquet files you can retrieve as needed. You have it just in case, but then you are just paying for storage.