Exactly right. The whole “pay so they don’t track you” thing is a trope of maybe more than a decade ago. Now you pay to get the basic feature you need and you’ll get your data sold anyways.
I’d be willing to pay, but not that much for my brother and I to chat every now and then.
Their pricing is geared towards enterprises with big budgets, not family and friends, nor even interest groups. It’s pretty much Discord everywhere now, and it’s just a matter of time until Discord eats the enterprise market too…
Hypothetically, I wonder how Discord would pull off a shift to enterprise. A big differentiator is that Discord is more for casual conversation. By changing the current successful product, it won't stand out versus Slack/Teams.
However, a fork to a separate version of Discord sounds very, very costly in terms of resources. They would need a lot of software development (when their current developers are already occupied with the main app), and a costly marketing strategy too (to reframe Discord's fork as non-casual and suitable for business).
The shift sounds very expensive, and I'm not sure how Discord could make it pay off.
I dunno, enterprise sales sound like a fairly straightforward payoff to me. But I kinda don’t want them to lose focus, and that would inevitably happen.
I think Google shows how non-trivial being good at enterprise sales is. It's a different mindset to become a "We never thought anyone would want to do that, but we realize it's a key feature for you, so we'll get it on the roadmap" company.
I would be excited if it applied to paid plans too so "oh the documentation is this ancient Slack thread" would stop being treated as a viable option. ;)
I have like 7 Slacks. 2 of them are paid, 5 of them are hobby that I may use once a month. What are you suggesting? That I pay an extra $40/month just so that maybe I need an old message in one of those? I'd agree with you if Slack were indie devs but does Slack need my $40?
The unhappiness comes from the fact that people want to rely on a service, even if it's free. It would make sense if this was a change for the sake of resources or paid user experience. This is for neither, just a tiny push for people to pay or leave. Ironically, It may make me want to stop paying because having all the conversations in one place is nice if I take the hobby slacks elsewhere
So I have to ask, why use Slack for hobby things instead of Discord? Is that driven by people used to having it at work? I'm confused by the thought of "hobby Slack channels".
I agree. My experience with Discord vs. Slack is not nearly what people seem to make it out to be. I find Discord significantly more confusing and the concept of "servers" is not one that makes any actual sense; they are using that word as a stand-in for rooms/workspaces/etc, but "servers" sounds better to gamers. I can't blame them, but it's confusing to me. Oh well. I'm old.
I don't really get your source of confusion, The concept of a server makes perfect sense in so far as it's a self-contained "themed" communication space that contains many rooms a.k.a. channels.
I don't understand the point of your comment. How is it annoying that different interest groups are separated from each other? Reddit is split into different subredits, IRC is split into different servers and channels, forums do the same thing, I could go on. Would you rather everything be jumbled together in one place?
Nitro banners, blobs, public servers with bowling balls etc.
If you're just in a discussion it's fine but click the wrong place and it's like a teenage dream exploded.
I feel like it's rather silly to be so concerned over something as trivial as that, like being worried over what other people think if you have a hello kitty bag. Life is entirely too short to be bothered by inconsequential external perception.
What is it about free services that brings out the worst complaints from people? I understand the paid plans aren’t cheap for small projects, but then maybe don’t rely on a free service for archiving important information.
The CUE team was looking at a $8k monthly bill for keeping Slack. The money Slack wants can be pretty outrageous when most users don't even chat. Add on top that a single user is likely in several orgs, the money they make per user is approaching usury, if you'll pardon the pun
CUE is keeping Slack for now and accepting limited history
Zulip is a very good fit for open source communities, and much much better for communication than Slack. I hate how Slack encourages you to say everything in the main channel, threads are close to impossible to use.
They're a tiny section off to the side and you can't easily navigate between them, it's really badly done.
Yeah, the ecosystem and integrations is definitely where Slack has the advantage. Still, I'd rather give up the integrations than the much improved communication.
I think the real problem is that people can only really support having one chat application open continuously at a time. Maybe two for some, if you account for the non-chat things like text & email. Notification / source burnout. I have to use slack professionally, I'm not going to add another tool.
That's why someone was suggesting mattermost (iirc on a friday), as something that bridges all the chat platforms and gives you a single tool
Hmm, what do you mean? I'm talking about using Zulip instead of Slack. If I'm going to use another similar service, I might as well use Slack itself. Zulip is miles ahead.
I'm saying my employer, who pays for slack so this whole thing is a no-op, means I have to have slack open. I'm not adding another chat platform to my repertoire, that is the real problem of incumbent
If you read the CUE discussion I linked, you will see several people making this same point
Well yes, how could you? If the rest of the company is on Slack, you using a different service wouldn't work. The question is where does the employer (or, specifically, the CUE team) go if they don't want to pay for Slack any more.
1: I am not employed by CUE. I am their biggest fan and cheerleader
2: CUE has never paid for Slack
The context is that I have slack open, I am in 12+ groups. I've tried adding other platforms like discord and keeping them open.
The point is that, as a human, I only have so much attention, and having more than one chat program open at a time, in addition to the other messaging streams we are subjected to, it's a non-starter.
For my own sanity, only one chat platform can be regularly open. Thus follows the network effect and incumbent arguments
I've been super impressed with Zulip's thread system in technical chats. But how is Zulip itself in situations where you mostly want channel-wide banter, with the odd thread spawning off of that?
People don't value things that are cheap or free. Anyone who has spent enough time doing work on commission knows this. If you set your price too low, you'll get customers of quality proportional to that price, some of whom will believe it's their right to ask the moon of you (or their money back). By raising your price, you won't have as many customers, but the customers you do keep will likely be high of quality and much easier to work with. Even if they request more work of you, they will likely make it worth your while.
I noticed this as an independent web developer. When I charged very little, all my clients believed they could make unlimited changes to the expectations of the project, no matter how impractical or time consuming. When I charged what at the time I thought was way more than I was actually worth, someone still ended up paying me and they actually respected my expertise while leaving me alone most of the time.
My initial reaction to Slack's change was that it's not a big deal. In the small communities I've worked with through Slack, we generally assumed that Slack messages are temporary, and we'd hit the former 10,000 message limit someday. We used email for more permanent communication, so the expectation of permanency wasn't changed.
However, it was interesting to see the company's data that is supporting the headline's assertion (in terms of migrations to the service after the Slack change). I'm also part of a smaller Slack group of a few people, and in abstract, it's understandable that it will be sad to see the older messages disappear. But then again, even in the tiny group, I always thought we'd hit the old 10,000 message limit someday, and never personally expected the messages to stay permanently.
I hate slack and chat in general being temporary at basically everywhere I have worked. So often a colleague will give you instructions on some process then the next time you need it, it's gone.
Huh, I worked at a place that used it for several years and kept all the history. It was actually amazing to be able to search through conversations within the company for problems that other people had run into and the solutions they came up with. Once or twice I ran into an issue and found the answer in a conversation I had actually had with a colleague and then forgotten.
When the company moved to Teams (because it was free with the other Microsoft stuff), I asked if it would be possible to get an archive saved somewhere and I got the brush-off, "we'll look into it". It's a shame how much was just thrown out.
argh, or worse yet: you search and find someone had the exact same issue! You click on the response to their thread and it says "oh yea this, I'll call/email/whisper the answer personally to avoid helping anyone else in future"
A cheap VPS could run something like Zulip or Mattermost or phpBB or other ways to communicate. Then that open source community would be in control of their own data.
I pay for Slack, but I'm also part of a number of non-organization communities. They're more like the phpBB communities of the 2000s. Even if I were willing to pay to be a member of those (which I probably am, but not to the tune of $8 each), the organizational overhead of collecting dues from everyone towards Slack fees wouldn't be worth the effort.
I tried this and the server crashed a ton and was unstable; I used their official deployment guides to a DigitalOcean VPS. Nuked the VPS and stuck with Slack.
I'll probably give Zulip a try before I go back to Mattermost.
I can say plenty of bad things about Mattermost, but it's been completely stable on my cheapo Digitalocean VPS, running night and day for at least three and a half years.
The main advantage that Slack has, especially for many people in non-technical roles, is the just-professional-enough user interface over the casual look of Discord.
I've been in Discord servers for volunteer work, and while it generally works pretty great, the system feels a lot more casual to users (e.g. with non-human profile pictures). On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft Teams is almost too professional, and has an emotional association of being too corporate/formal for more pleasant use.
Discord is also tougher to create group conversations easily (you need to be Friends first). Though, if message history is really that important, it could be a worthwhile tradeoff.
The problem with Teams is not that it's "too professional". The problem is that there is more spacing in the interface than there is actual text. You know, the conversations - the thing it's meant to do best. Threads are a mess to follow, channels are awkward... If professional == terrible UX, then you may be right.
And let's not even talk about how unstable and unreliable it is.
It depends on the user. You could argue that many users in technical roles would see a professional interface, as one with less white space that allows for more information on the screen at once. However, many users in non-technical roles actually prefer more white space. This is why the default options for newer software redesigns (e.g. Outlook) favor more white space, with a "compact" options in the settings for users who prefer more information.
I think the Teams design team tried to compromise by making the interface approachable enough for the greatest number of users. But for one reason or another (strategy to differentiate from Slack, company DNA, or other reasons), they couldn't make the interface subjectively feel more casual and less professional.
Everything from the name ("Microsoft Teams") to the logo (a bunch of people, versus the Slack logo with eyes and a mouth) is more serious, even if the team tried to soften it a bit by using less formal language in the interface.
> The main advantage that Slack has, especially for many people in non-technical roles, is the just-professional-enough user interface over the casual look of Discord.
1) That's not much of a moat for Slack. If Discord were serious about entering the enterprise market, and there's sufficient user feedback on this point, I'm sure they could adapt with a few month's work.
2) I've heard similar critique about Slack in the past as well. IMHO professional vs casual comes down to expectation and familiarity. As more youths who are accustomed to Discord enter the workforce, the casual connotation would go away.
There was a time when e-mail was considered too casual and unfit for professional communication, too.
Teams target is Corporations so it should be professional?
Microsoft has tries to make Teams "less professional" or more causal and people hate the changes. They recently changed the theme of the emoticons "Microsoft Fluent Emojis were brought to life to embrace expressiveness and play" they seem to be well received by non-professional users, or even professionals in "creative" fields, but for traditional corporate users they look terrible and are not well received at all, the feedback asking for the return of the traditional emojis has 10's of thousands of votes.
for work I want a professional platform, I want teams to be a professional tool for professionals
Microsoft is in a tough place in that respect, because its user base is so broad by design (as a default program in Windows 11 now). It can never be fully optimized for professionals in formal environments, nor professionals who prefer more casual environments.
This Pirates of Silicon Valley scene comes to mind [0]. Teams may not be the most optimized software for formal versus informal users, but that doesn't matter because it's trying to have a broad appeal.
They are in a tough space by their own making because they keep refusing what the market has been telling them for decades. They need to SEPARATE their consumer making business from their Corporate business.
For example
Lync was separate from Skype... Business and Consumer
Then they got rid of Lync in favor of Skype for business... Bad
Then comes Teams, designed from the Ground up for Corporate. Dropping Skype for Business like many many wanted, a separate corporate app
Now with Win11 they are making the same mistake again with "Teams" the default app in windows 11, which is different client than the "business teams app" and at launch could not even connect to organizational teams tenants only "Microsoft" teams accounts which should be called Skype....
Skype should remain the consumer / family platform, if they want to bring "teams like" features to that great. Teams should remain a business app
It's a normal, universal human response to protest when something you're used to is no longer there. Even though I don't share the outrage, there's nothing 'current year'/particularly contemporary about it.
If you were using a free product with limited history and expected not to lose history then I have exactly zero sympathy for you. Even if the free product you were using changed their terms.
I don't use slack outside of work, so nothing from me. Just sayin' how people are so easily outraged w/o really thinking about their needs and technologies. I have no sympathy for those slack users either, cheers.
It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community.
I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article).
As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
(I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)
My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.
If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so.
Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.
In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.
Having their free self hosting plan linked on their pricing page [1] is more than enough, ridiculous to expect companies should the devote the same valuable realestate promoting their free offering as their commercial products which sponsors development.
I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.
I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.
Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical pixels for a Discourse logo.
Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread.
2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range.
3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads.
4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.
It's not as awful as I would have suspected from the description, but I still don't really like it. Bar the fancy "scrollbar" timeline they give you to jump directly somewhere in the page - which does alleviate that problem I mentioned a little - it does feel exactly like infinite scrolling to me, I'm not sure where you're making the distinction between lazy loading and this. The content does physically appear later on the page, making the scrollbar jump around, which I heavily dislike. This renders the native scrollbar pretty much useless as a reference point.
The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.
It's not a competition, though. Nothing stopping a forum from having both features. A forum I'm on has the classic-style forum navigation as well as feeds, and customizable feeds at that. Each user can read through the forum in whatever fashion they like.
Hmm... man I tried to like this stuff and used it with good faith. No idea why I don't like non-static UIs. I just want everything like a static page, almost like a physical analog piece of paper. Nothing moves. The monitor is like a loupe that I scan through on a giant canvas. I can empathize with people that like new fangled UIs, problem is with me.
It has been a problem, that's why there aren't several million more phpbb users. Discourse is filling a niche that hasn't been filled. Slack and Discord aren't right, but unfortunately phpbb isn't it either.
Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse, I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for and against pagination.
You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.
Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.
The issue with discourse is it isn’t infinite scroll. They break up the timeline into the right side and if you have an exceptionally long timeline it will skip time periods thinking you just want the original post and the new stuff.
It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.
This is correct. A problem with a sensible solution. When you scroll through NodeBB your address bar updates with the context of where you are. Copying that address will return you to where you were.
Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.
Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.
While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5 droplet.
I could run phpBB just fine on my $5-10/mo shared hosting.
It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.
IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced
Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced
I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?
It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just get lost in.
I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.
> Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?
Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow.
They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.
I found that my Discourse instance consistently took ~250 milliseconds to display the forum post list (according to the little box at the top left corner). After getting annoyed with Discourse, I went back to Invision Forum and I see about ~95 ms for the same thing, including sending the response to my browser.
Ruby is not necessarily more resource hogging than PHP, but the way typical ruby webapps deployed (all workers processes started immediately and left idling to wait for requests) leads to higher memory usage compared to low traffic PHP webapp (worker processes only started when requests is coming and shutdown afterwards, so you can host a lot of small traffics sites in a small server). If PHP webapps are deployed with similar process lifecycle, I imagine it would consume similar resources.
For medium and high traffic webapps, the difference is moot because you're going to end up with a large amount of worker processes to handle all those traffics anyway regardless of how you initially spawn them.
There's something /off/ about discourse that I can't put my finger on.
In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use, even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection.
Today, some recent communities that I have visited using discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn. Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to render feels so slow, then the subsequent fetches using infinite scroll just sucks.
I've also visited some forums recently that do not use discourse, like the arch forum and some maplestory private server, and I don't feel the awfulness that discourse invokes.
For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I find the website uncomfortable to look at because the screen is mostly white and very little anything is visible.
I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why they built churches with high ceilings.
The website also gives me vibes of being a question and answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.
> Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a much higher content/ui ratio.
They’re also full of bullshit gamification and immediately start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with it.
Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world.
I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games.
There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.
Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.
Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.
There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0].
As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game.
In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat.
What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.
I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past. Detailed information. Even the comments are good.
Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations).
Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.
The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation.
I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
Yes, but not for e.g technical help channels. I don't want a personal relationship with another user of xx OSS tool - I want to search for the error message and find previous answers.
Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...
People used email lists for everything, then forums for everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest to educate users on picking communication tool for their purpose.
Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later.
Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful
In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?
Reddit has active communities of people who just repost other subreddits to laugh at, get outraged at, or bully. In theory the bullying and brigading is supposed to be moderated against but weakly moderated niche subreddits can sometimes find themselves under attack.
That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
Sites for pointing at people and mocking them for being different have been with us much longer than Reddit. SomethingAwful. 4chan. LJDrama. alt.fan.warlord. The current main site in this space is Kiwifarms and I sure won't be sad if Cloudflare finally decides to stop protecting them from the DDOS consequences of their actions.
Bulletin boards with any kind of roadbump to registration could make it a bit harder for a bunch of atrocity tourists to start showing up and mocking someone directly but you sure couldn't stop them from screenshotting you and kicking you around on their board.
(okay alt.fan.warlord is maybe a bit of a stretch given that it was generally confined to only making fun of people's signature blocks, but...)
It happens if a niche reddit has a popular post and makes it near the front page. Or, someone makes a post that gets the attention of one of the brigading subs(even if mods remove post as soon as they see it, it might be too late). Usually the sub will have an influx of low quality posts/shitposts for a while after that.
Also, not subreddit-subreddit, but multiplex times, posts of mine got reported to admins for hate speech because I said "retarder" in a mechanical focused subreddit, and I suppose they don't care to take the time to realize it's a perfectly fine piece of technology and not an ableist slur before sending out threats of banning you forever from the site.
> I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident
I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post?
Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.
Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a server with PHP and a database and install your choice of tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still fundamentally works today.
However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.
rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread.
i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.
Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that some of the treads you're in have new messages.
The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
They were also more than a community. They became massive sources of niche information.
Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)
Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off.
Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread.
Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come.
Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the current generation of forums.
Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)
e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space.
(Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)
There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there.
Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
> Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident)
You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.
> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.
> In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
> The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX.
Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
I honestly prefer to see sites made by people who don't know how to design anything. The people who do know how to design websites seem to be either malicious or designing in the interest of some alien species from another dimension- see how bad Discourse looks, whitespace galore, too low density. Its modern polish is both its strength and its weakness.
Last activity and a (small) icon are valuable information. The icons visually distinguish users and "last seen" lets you know whether you are replying to a person or primarily replying for the benefit of the community. Also, distinct pagination means you have a stable location for each post instead of "scroll around until you see it".
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
I think https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.
I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
If Zulip became an overnight success, five to seven years from now I see them making similar changes. Resources cost money and Slack achieved what it needed to in order to establish itself as the dominant company in the space.
If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
> Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is.
That's why Microsoft won. It's better than Slack for the people that make the purchase decisions. Who cares what the users think if they're not the ones that make that decision.
IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged...
One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
Yeah, even if file uploads are disabled and limited to sharing links (e.g. from Google Drive), screenshots will be very useful for communication, for a long while.
I have no idea why you wouldn't mind that, but thats fine, you do you. I am curious though, if you don't mind sharing why?
To everybody else who are hit by this, they would not consider it a feature but a pretty serious limitation, since if you didn't care about server side logging in first the place why would you mind messages disappearing after 90 days?
Regardless though, IRC also doesn't persist user names which I think is a serious limitation.
Server side history and SaaS frontends is the biggest misfeature of all the modern chat services. (and corresponding lack of client side history logging)
Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.
There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).
With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.
Replacing slack with IRC really doesn’t feel like a sincere proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no configuration or research.
The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.
I did work at one company where the main means of communication was an IRC server on the intranet. Calls were done through VoIP and file sharing was via the usual shares --- usually the coworker's machine, but central servers were also available. Of course this was a company that specialised in networking and communications products, so perhaps they were more inclined to do such a thing (and we "dogfooded" all of our products too), but nonetheless it was a great experience.
I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.
I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.
One of my main concerns about IRC, for the average user, is the lack of good modern clients. IRCCloud is pretty good, but that's also sort of missing one of the point with IRC, to me at least.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.
If teams works great for you I don’t think I want to work there.
Some idiot higher up thought it was a great idea to switch from Slack to Teams, presumably because they have a vendetta against it, and our communication experience and effectiveness (especially cross-border) absolutely crumpled.
My biggest problem with Teams is the same as Jira. It gives you so much rope to hang yourself with.
Everybody and their mother wants to create a whole Team for their pet project, and then invites the whole organisation, because there is no way to discover existing teams.
MS Teams is garbage. When I did some consulting for Microsoft recently I was added to a Slack channel. Even the engineers at Microsoft I work with don't use it.
One developer at my company uses Teams for video meetings instead of our corporate Zoom account. I don't know why. So like 5-10% of the meetings I go to I have to suffer through Teams' inferior audio and interactive experience.
I work for 4 different companies. Each one have Teams. I can't even put the 4 accounts in the desktop app. I can do in the mobile, but not in the desktop.
I had to install containers in firefox, and open 4 tabs to be able to use the 4 accounts at the same time. And of course, because Im using firefox, I can't use the camera in video calls because microsoft allows only chromium browsers to do so.
It is the chat client circle of life. An old chat client has to do something unpopular to obtain some return on investment. Users look for a new solution. They find one that is still in the "basically mature but trying to grow marketshare by using investor money to provide services and features for free." It works well while that investor money holds out/as long as they can get more ("look at our user growth!"). Eventually investors get tired of paying for things, look for an ROI, and they have to do something unpopular...
Hopefully the "gamer" branding will keep Discord in their niche for a little longer. It will be a shame when we all have to transfer our gaming groups to something different.
Teams is a mess, but it's a Microsoft supported mess that integrates with the rest of their mess. Granted I run version 1.5.00.23452 as of today which is even more messy than public.
Please stop using Slack/Discord for forum replacements. Forums can be indexed and found. Slack/Discord is like pissing in the wind. Here today, gone three hours from now.
An interesting partial solution to an older, niche Discord community I've found was the creation and sharing of a "lore document" of important insights and parts of the community's history.
I generally agree that knowledge-sharing helps more people if it's easily searchable via Google, but then again, it's also possible that the interactions would be different without the exclusivity. Many events in the community's history may have never happened if it were more public.
No, discord is not a good alternative. We just have to wait until they pull the rug from under their free users in order to aggressively monetize. And I think that will hurt much more than Slack.
I like, and use, Discord daily, and like it a lot.
But I have to agree: Eventually, management will start to more aggressively monetize it (i.e., "pull the rug from under their free users").
Truly free (e.g., IRC) alternatives seem like the only long-term solution, otherwise people will keep stumbling from one commercial platform to another, because they never last.
not just that, they're also incredibly hostile to users trying to retain privacy.
they're requiring phone number validation just after registration or you run the risk that they suddenly lock your account, demanding a phone number for "abuse prevention". depending on ip reputation and possibly other factors it may be impossible to use it in the first place without providing a phone number.
This felt like a mean spirited and cynical money play to me, especially coming years after launching free instances. For smaller groups (families, houses, etc) this effectively forces them to pay or lose months or years of history.
To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.
I jumped up and down about this to Slack over the course of a few emails, having some paid workspaces and a couple on the free plan that I use(d) for family. Eventually I got one of those "Hi this is such and such, stepping in for the other person" emails, with a link to this app that can export everything (including private messages):
The export is in a proprietary JSON format and only contains links to attachments, plus it has a limit on the number of messages you can export if you don't pay for it. But after jumping through various hoops one afternoon I was able to export all the messages and attachments from a family channel that we've had going for a few years - since our kids were first active on computers. The total number of messages was about 3500, but we would have lost the vast majority of them with Slack's new approach.
No, some certainly were. There's one quoted in the blog post, for example.
In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)
I work with a ton of scientists (and am one myself) and I’m a member of multiple slack channels with hundreds of members that are years old and only have a 1-2k messages.
An example is a Python users group where there’s maybe a few threads a week. And it’s really useful to search for old threads.
Another is a hackathon with maybe 30 people where there were a few hundred messages over a week and then 1 message a month.
I don't mean to say that people were led to believe that free instances had no limits - just that this is a reversal of the nature of those limits. Groups that had planned based on the old limits are now in a tough spot.
I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within the slack client.
You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.
Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:
- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money)
- never going to pay (families, online communities)
Changing this to 90-days plan:
- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack.
- Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day
- Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away
The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.
While this is a slimy tactic from Slack, I doubt that organisations significantly under the 10k message limit over 90 days are actually benefitting from it.
That’s 110 messages a day. Fewer than ~5 users and regular personal IM applications are probably easier to use than Slack. Fewer than 20 messages a day and the messages are probably long enough form that email or documents would be a better option.
Slack is a lot of overhead to read just a few messages, and is definitely best when multiple channels become necessary, and when not using it for email-length messages.
Sure, but are they getting more value out of slack? I’ve been in many slack channels that would be better as email, IM, or other formats. I feel like many jump on the slack bandwagon because it’s popular rather than critically evaluating it next to other options.
What do you feel it brings for these very small and low volume use-cases over alternatives?
This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click.
I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
> "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats).
I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.
Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
-
But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...
The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.
Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.
> Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).
I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive mobile consumers, is that information density is super high with old.reddit and RES.
I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.
> I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit
For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least:
IIRC, Old Reddit addicts are a disproportionate influence among the moderation and high-karma populations. New Reddit is for the read-only proles, Old Reddit is for the people who provide value.
This is one of those things where the distinction between "UI" and "UX" really matters. reddit is fucking up the UI, but the content is still reddit. digg fundamentally changed the content they displayed from community driven to publisher and power-user driven. they could have survived a redesign if they hadn't also pivoted the whole product direction at the same time.
DIGG basically became what new Reddit looks like now, but they were specifically transparent that every post was essentially a paid marketing blob and the corporate commercial took over all of DIGG - pissed everyone off and they all flocked to Reddit.
Reddit is doing the same thing, however, when DIGG messed around with the UX, bots were not a thing in the same form they are now…
To using reddit as reddit intends, either the default interface on the web (so not old.reddit), or even more likely the first-party apps on iOS and Android.
To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project.
Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.
Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation.
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.
> However, Slack’s policies do not allow organizations on the Free or Pro plans to export their private channels and private message history.
I guess, but individual users can still periodically sync everything they have access to via regular API to some database for archival purposes. That includes the private messages. You can workaround these limits that way.
My favorite is still Stackoverflow’s channels for community discussions. It sucks that SO didn’t find time to invest in the channels. I hate Slack and Discord for creating broken siloed communities.
zulip really is an amazing piece of software. Don't let the looks deceive you. They are "brutalist" because they are spending all the effort on UX and UI. If you download their terminal client, there is nothing to learn if you already know vim, and more importantly everything is very intuitive. Their messaging model is a bit different and needs an initial familiarization until it dawns on you that this is how messaging should be done anyway.
Extremely agree. After having used Zulip, Slack feels like going back to snail mail after email.
Catching up on messages after days of being off is a breeze in Zulip. Threads are a joy to use, not an afterthought like in Slack. It's just superior in every way (except popularity, sadly).
Stop using chat for things that you want to keep long term. It's not just about retention. Even with long term retention, it's nearly impossible to find things in a huge dump of unstructured conversation.
EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search engines.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] thread> one would be hard-pressed to find any who are excited about it
Me.
You know all that bitching we collectively do about ad and tracking supported business models obsfuscating the cost of "free" products?
The solution is being willing to pay for something you use and like.
Their pricing is geared towards enterprises with big budgets, not family and friends, nor even interest groups. It’s pretty much Discord everywhere now, and it’s just a matter of time until Discord eats the enterprise market too…
However, a fork to a separate version of Discord sounds very, very costly in terms of resources. They would need a lot of software development (when their current developers are already occupied with the main app), and a costly marketing strategy too (to reframe Discord's fork as non-casual and suitable for business).
The shift sounds very expensive, and I'm not sure how Discord could make it pay off.
I dunno, enterprise sales sound like a fairly straightforward payoff to me. But I kinda don’t want them to lose focus, and that would inevitably happen.
The unhappiness comes from the fact that people want to rely on a service, even if it's free. It would make sense if this was a change for the sake of resources or paid user experience. This is for neither, just a tiny push for people to pay or leave. Ironically, It may make me want to stop paying because having all the conversations in one place is nice if I take the hobby slacks elsewhere
What do you mean? The analogue to rooms would be channels, which falls under a server.
It seems to me that the main organization model of Slack and Discord are the same.
What about any of that is embarrassing or childish? That it's not specifically designed for corporate drudgery hell?
The better solution for that is to use open-source software.
CUE is keeping Slack for now and accepting limited history
https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/discussions/1839 has an overview of the situation and a discussion of alternatives being considered
They're a tiny section off to the side and you can't easily navigate between them, it's really badly done.
The main problem with alternatives is integrations, bots, and similar. The ecosystems are not as available, at least that is the impression
That's why someone was suggesting mattermost (iirc on a friday), as something that bridges all the chat platforms and gives you a single tool
If you read the CUE discussion I linked, you will see several people making this same point
1: I am not employed by CUE. I am their biggest fan and cheerleader
2: CUE has never paid for Slack
The context is that I have slack open, I am in 12+ groups. I've tried adding other platforms like discord and keeping them open.
The point is that, as a human, I only have so much attention, and having more than one chat program open at a time, in addition to the other messaging streams we are subjected to, it's a non-starter.
For my own sanity, only one chat platform can be regularly open. Thus follows the network effect and incumbent arguments
I noticed this as an independent web developer. When I charged very little, all my clients believed they could make unlimited changes to the expectations of the project, no matter how impractical or time consuming. When I charged what at the time I thought was way more than I was actually worth, someone still ended up paying me and they actually respected my expertise while leaving me alone most of the time.
However, it was interesting to see the company's data that is supporting the headline's assertion (in terms of migrations to the service after the Slack change). I'm also part of a smaller Slack group of a few people, and in abstract, it's understandable that it will be sad to see the older messages disappear. But then again, even in the tiny group, I always thought we'd hit the old 10,000 message limit someday, and never personally expected the messages to stay permanently.
When the company moved to Teams (because it was free with the other Microsoft stuff), I asked if it would be possible to get an archive saved somewhere and I got the brush-off, "we'll look into it". It's a shame how much was just thrown out.
Oh well. Time for the industry to move on.
If you're not paying, it's not a sale.
A lot of very good IRC clients are available for free.
IRCCloud is a good starting point for a lot of people: excellent UI/UX, a free tier, and a very inexpensive paid tier (around 4 USD/month).
Create as many channels as you like.
I'll probably give Zulip a try before I go back to Mattermost.
I've been in Discord servers for volunteer work, and while it generally works pretty great, the system feels a lot more casual to users (e.g. with non-human profile pictures). On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft Teams is almost too professional, and has an emotional association of being too corporate/formal for more pleasant use.
Discord is also tougher to create group conversations easily (you need to be Friends first). Though, if message history is really that important, it could be a worthwhile tradeoff.
The problem with Teams is not that it's "too professional". The problem is that there is more spacing in the interface than there is actual text. You know, the conversations - the thing it's meant to do best. Threads are a mess to follow, channels are awkward... If professional == terrible UX, then you may be right.
And let's not even talk about how unstable and unreliable it is.
I think the Teams design team tried to compromise by making the interface approachable enough for the greatest number of users. But for one reason or another (strategy to differentiate from Slack, company DNA, or other reasons), they couldn't make the interface subjectively feel more casual and less professional.
Everything from the name ("Microsoft Teams") to the logo (a bunch of people, versus the Slack logo with eyes and a mouth) is more serious, even if the team tried to soften it a bit by using less formal language in the interface.
1) That's not much of a moat for Slack. If Discord were serious about entering the enterprise market, and there's sufficient user feedback on this point, I'm sure they could adapt with a few month's work.
2) I've heard similar critique about Slack in the past as well. IMHO professional vs casual comes down to expectation and familiarity. As more youths who are accustomed to Discord enter the workforce, the casual connotation would go away.
There was a time when e-mail was considered too casual and unfit for professional communication, too.
Teams target is Corporations so it should be professional?
Microsoft has tries to make Teams "less professional" or more causal and people hate the changes. They recently changed the theme of the emoticons "Microsoft Fluent Emojis were brought to life to embrace expressiveness and play" they seem to be well received by non-professional users, or even professionals in "creative" fields, but for traditional corporate users they look terrible and are not well received at all, the feedback asking for the return of the traditional emojis has 10's of thousands of votes.
for work I want a professional platform, I want teams to be a professional tool for professionals
This Pirates of Silicon Valley scene comes to mind [0]. Teams may not be the most optimized software for formal versus informal users, but that doesn't matter because it's trying to have a broad appeal.
https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ?t=131
For example
Lync was separate from Skype... Business and Consumer
Then they got rid of Lync in favor of Skype for business... Bad
Then comes Teams, designed from the Ground up for Corporate. Dropping Skype for Business like many many wanted, a separate corporate app
Now with Win11 they are making the same mistake again with "Teams" the default app in windows 11, which is different client than the "business teams app" and at launch could not even connect to organizational teams tenants only "Microsoft" teams accounts which should be called Skype....
Skype should remain the consumer / family platform, if they want to bring "teams like" features to that great. Teams should remain a business app
Outrage for outrage sake. #2020s
I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article).
As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
(I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.
Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.
[1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing
PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/
Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.
1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.
[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-html-cs...
Yes, it’s awful.
> Check it out e.g.
Oh lord. 40 comments? That’s a single page of traditional forums.
How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I do mean threads of a million comments.
The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.
Isn't that sort of flexibility the goal of tech?
You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.
Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.
It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.
Pagination also makes copy pasting links easier.
Not necessarily, pagination is often configurable, so either way you need a per-comment permalink for linking to be reliable.
Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.
So far we're hitting that goal.
It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.
Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.
I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/
Vs these, orders of magnitude more users, multiple orders of magnitude more posts
https://www.forumrankings.net/
Also
https://www.neogaf.com/
It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just get lost in.
I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.
Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow.
They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.
Optimizing responses has diminishing returns once you're below 100ms, but 250ms is far too slow.
For medium and high traffic webapps, the difference is moot because you're going to end up with a large amount of worker processes to handle all those traffics anyway regardless of how you initially spawn them.
In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use, even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection.
Today, some recent communities that I have visited using discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn. Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to render feels so slow, then the subsequent fetches using infinite scroll just sucks.
I've also visited some forums recently that do not use discourse, like the arch forum and some maplestory private server, and I don't feel the awfulness that discourse invokes.
For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I find the website uncomfortable to look at because the screen is mostly white and very little anything is visible.
I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why they built churches with high ceilings.
The website also gives me vibes of being a question and answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.
> Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a much higher content/ui ratio.
They’re also full of bullshit gamification and immediately start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with it.
I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
[0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche.
How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...
Gotta make the most profit possible. At any cost.
Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.
As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game.
In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010
[1] https://rabidb.com/
Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
[1] https://miraheze.org/
I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>" "check the pins".
This was still a thing back during the days of forums.
No, reading comprehension in humanity hasn't improved over the last 20~30 years.
People used email lists for everything, then forums for everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest to educate users on picking communication tool for their purpose.
Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
Bulletin boards with any kind of roadbump to registration could make it a bit harder for a bunch of atrocity tourists to start showing up and mocking someone directly but you sure couldn't stop them from screenshotting you and kicking you around on their board.
(okay alt.fan.warlord is maybe a bit of a stretch given that it was generally confined to only making fun of people's signature blocks, but...)
Also, not subreddit-subreddit, but multiplex times, posts of mine got reported to admins for hate speech because I said "retarder" in a mechanical focused subreddit, and I suppose they don't care to take the time to realize it's a perfectly fine piece of technology and not an ableist slur before sending out threats of banning you forever from the site.
I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post?
Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.
However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.
i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)
Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off.
Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread.
Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come.
Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)
e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space.
(Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)
The docker install is super easy.
Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
Discourse is 100% open source.
Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
If anything, this will allow for some meaningful competition
I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?
Especially given how god-awful of a product Teams is. It could never survive in the marketplace on its own merits.
That's why Microsoft won. It's better than Slack for the people that make the purchase decisions. Who cares what the users think if they're not the ones that make that decision.
One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)
The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.
> The biggest problem with IRC [for Slack’s principle use case, which does not apply to me] has always been its lack of server-side history.
You can understand that while still personally preferring another messaging model.
To everybody else who are hit by this, they would not consider it a feature but a pretty serious limitation, since if you didn't care about server side logging in first the place why would you mind messages disappearing after 90 days?
Regardless though, IRC also doesn't persist user names which I think is a serious limitation.
Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.
There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).
With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.
The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.
Read that as "IRC has integrated anti-non-hacker technology."
Consider holding physical meetings with hard copies of reading material (or at least some Lorem ipsum) to occupy the other employees.
With IRC, you can search your history (logs) anyway you want using any tool you want.
I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.
I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.
I guess Discord can be a option.
Some idiot higher up thought it was a great idea to switch from Slack to Teams, presumably because they have a vendetta against it, and our communication experience and effectiveness (especially cross-border) absolutely crumpled.
My biggest problem with Teams is the same as Jira. It gives you so much rope to hang yourself with.
Everybody and their mother wants to create a whole Team for their pet project, and then invites the whole organisation, because there is no way to discover existing teams.
One developer at my company uses Teams for video meetings instead of our corporate Zoom account. I don't know why. So like 5-10% of the meetings I go to I have to suffer through Teams' inferior audio and interactive experience.
I had to install containers in firefox, and open 4 tabs to be able to use the 4 accounts at the same time. And of course, because Im using firefox, I can't use the camera in video calls because microsoft allows only chromium browsers to do so.
And the linux client is bug as hell.
It is the chat client circle of life. An old chat client has to do something unpopular to obtain some return on investment. Users look for a new solution. They find one that is still in the "basically mature but trying to grow marketshare by using investor money to provide services and features for free." It works well while that investor money holds out/as long as they can get more ("look at our user growth!"). Eventually investors get tired of paying for things, look for an ROI, and they have to do something unpopular...
Hopefully the "gamer" branding will keep Discord in their niche for a little longer. It will be a shame when we all have to transfer our gaming groups to something different.
I generally agree that knowledge-sharing helps more people if it's easily searchable via Google, but then again, it's also possible that the interactions would be different without the exclusivity. Many events in the community's history may have never happened if it were more public.
I always thought it was replacing irc and other previous chat platforms (google chat, hipchat, skype, icq, etc)?
same thing with heroku
But I have to agree: Eventually, management will start to more aggressively monetize it (i.e., "pull the rug from under their free users").
Truly free (e.g., IRC) alternatives seem like the only long-term solution, otherwise people will keep stumbling from one commercial platform to another, because they never last.
they're requiring phone number validation just after registration or you run the risk that they suddenly lock your account, demanding a phone number for "abuse prevention". depending on ip reputation and possibly other factors it may be impossible to use it in the first place without providing a phone number.
To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for. They'll be looking for opportunities to reduce costs or increase revenue and they don't much care if that means losing a lot of users who aren't making them much money. For all the users but the biggest users, this is a sign that you should start looking around for other options.
You can download all your workspace data now, includes chat history.
Chat history on free plan was already limited, so I don’t think anyone who was aware of that was using it as an archive.
https://export.fountstudio.com/
The export is in a proprietary JSON format and only contains links to attachments, plus it has a limit on the number of messages you can export if you don't pay for it. But after jumping through various hoops one afternoon I was able to export all the messages and attachments from a family channel that we've had going for a few years - since our kids were first active on computers. The total number of messages was about 3500, but we would have lost the vast majority of them with Slack's new approach.
In a small community, and if you're not using it for lots of chit-chat but rather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages. So in that circumstance, it's pretty reasonable to have chosen Slack under its old policy. Especially if one wasn't aware of Zulip. ;-)
(I'm one of the Zulip developers.)
I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with, but I haven’t met any so short-winded
An example is a Python users group where there’s maybe a few threads a week. And it’s really useful to search for old threads.
Another is a hackathon with maybe 30 people where there were a few hundred messages over a week and then 1 message a month.
Interestingly, these led to lots of pie licenses and we’re migrating all these over too.
Once we’re self hosting a server then we don’t need the paid license either.
Seems kind of much for $100/year/user anyway. Teams is bundled in with o365 for nothing or little extra.
I'm glad to hear that you can do a full export though and I am surprised it includes the messages you can't access within the slack client.
You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.
Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:
- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money) - never going to pay (families, online communities)
Changing this to 90-days plan:
- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack. - Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day - Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away
The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.
Did you expect Salesforce to?
That’s 110 messages a day. Fewer than ~5 users and regular personal IM applications are probably easier to use than Slack. Fewer than 20 messages a day and the messages are probably long enough form that email or documents would be a better option.
Slack is a lot of overhead to read just a few messages, and is definitely best when multiple channels become necessary, and when not using it for email-length messages.
What do you feel it brings for these very small and low volume use-cases over alternatives?
I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."
It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats).
I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202...
https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic
Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.
-
But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...
The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.
Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.
I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).
I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.
For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least:
https://justpaste.it/6624t
You're not missing much
DIGG basically became what new Reddit looks like now, but they were specifically transparent that every post was essentially a paid marketing blob and the corporate commercial took over all of DIGG - pissed everyone off and they all flocked to Reddit.
Reddit is doing the same thing, however, when DIGG messed around with the UX, bots were not a thing in the same form they are now…
“Video killed the radio star” but now it’s
“Bot killed any sense of trust on social media”
You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit is.
Plausible, but if it really does happen it will be a landmark. Modern losing against old and ~crippled UX.
https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...
Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.
Transport of data was at that time trivial.
Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
I guess, but individual users can still periodically sync everything they have access to via regular API to some database for archival purposes. That includes the private messages. You can workaround these limits that way.
They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely revamped/ended their free tier this week.
Catching up on messages after days of being off is a breeze in Zulip. Threads are a joy to use, not an afterthought like in Slack. It's just superior in every way (except popularity, sadly).
EDIT - and stop using things that are invisible to search engines.
We’ve set our Slack to cull content older than 30 days.
Knowing that information posted on Slack is transient nudges our team to use the appropriate platform for information that needs to be persisted.
Also, it’s more comfortable to chat casually knowing that what you say isn’t indefinitely retained and searchable.