Slack to destroy >90d history of free communities

How many times will this same post be shared, each time with an incorrect/sensationalized title?

Free teams already couldn't view history beyond 90 days, and that isn't changing.

Slack originally stored the history forever, but will now delete it after 1 year (not 90d as in the title).

This is actually a good development, because the next logical step from a large corporation's perspective would be to use this trove of user data for training LLMs or selling it to a third party (like Reddit, Stack Overflow etc. have done), and they can't do that now.

Seems reasonable? If you’re planning on staying free forever and are already gated to 90 days of history, why would you care if they delete 1+ year old content? From a privacy perspective, I’d even say it’s a positive update.

Maybe I'm not getting it but you're on a free plan, which only gives you 90d of history, but Slack has been keeping all your history, which you can't access but you have an issue with them deleting >1yr old history?

I'm pretty sure they've kept this history as an incentive for people to pay so they can gain access to it. Now they've decided the costs of maintaining history >1yr are larger than the value they get from maintaining it.

If being able to have this history is important enough to you then I guess you'll want to be on a paid plan. Slack doesn't provide a free plan out of the goodness of their heart, they provide it to get people to eventually become paying customers. It's a business.

Slack lets free plans to turn on 90 day retention (i.e. content auto-deletes after 90 days). Free workspace users might want to consider this as a risk reduction measure: free users don't have meaningful access to beyond-90-day content anyway (explained in the article), yet anyone who compromises Slack (via any means, be technical or legal) gets access to extended history that workspace users don't themselves get. https://slack.com/help/articles/203457187-Customize-data-ret...

And anyway, the best UX is that of Zulip, which you can self-host :-)

I'm more interested in the psychology of how people have come to expect free services on a continued basis from strangers when it is behind a keyboard.

This is probably why they deprecated the IRC servers. I used to use them to log everything, it was great. :'(

A lot of OSS communities, study groups, hackathon groups use Slack. Never understood this choice other than familiarity from work.

I hope more people shift to Zulip. But we all know where people are actually going to shift, even though that is a poor solution for long-term community building, too.

I was just reading this... been getting a few emails. Ha. 92 for people who don't want to click on the image.

https://i.imgur.com/N6hdfU0.png

I knew I had a lot of Slack groups, but I didn't realize it was quite this many. (And there are probably about 2x that many if I could include old emails in the list.)

But I don't really have a problem with them deleting old messages.

A lot of agencies set up private Slack groups with each client... easy way to have team chat, without the hassle of getting approved by the client's security team, or getting on the client's SSO tools. =P

I'm grateful for Slack, but the pricing model never quite worked right for agencies. I don't really want to put everyone in the same basket, the permissions would be annoying to maintain -- and the downside to messing up permissions and showing work from one customer to another would be devastating... easier to just spin off new groups. But... paying for each and every group is also not really appealing.

Anyway, 90 days still allows us "working communication" and I'm still very grateful to Slack for the platform they built. (=

Didn’t they always enforce history limits on free groups? Is this something new?

Guess they did the math and figured out most people don't pay to see the history anyway.

If a server stays free beyond 90 days there's probably a low possibility of converting to paid.

Or at least lower likely gain than the cost of storing and maintaining the history.

This post strikes me as incredibly entitled.

Slack started doing this as a loss leader. If it's not working out for them, then they're well within their rights to try and cut their losses by telling people to shit or get off the pot.

This is why you shouldn't use Slack as anything more than a beefed up chat client, and especially not for things like non-ephemeral help/information.

Deleting old stuff seems more like a feature to me. I wish everything would delete old stuff automatically.

Can’t we all just get back on IRC and Usenet? I sorely miss both. Blogs too, but .plan files will do fine.

I don't understand when people complain about things like this. If you aren't paying you should not be surprised that this could happen.

If I were a paying customer of Slack and this change were made then sure, it would be "enshitification", but if you are not paying for anything you aren't really entitled to complain. They are essentially subsidizing your free usage.

If your slack community is that important, then you should be asking the community to help support its history.

For the free communities I'm a part of, this is not a bad thing. Social conversations disappearing after 90d is a good thing, and I'm glad they're purging that data as well.

How is it "enshittify" when people aren't paying for the product? I feel like this was entirely predictable, there's no way that Slack (now Salesforce) would continue to pay for free storage for none paying customers in all eternity.

Go ahead, delete what I cannot see and will not pay for.

It isn't clear to me that this is a good business move...

GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store. Which means that by making available only the last 90 days, you can't keep older stuff...

And, in today's AI powered world, in slacks position that old data seems far more valuable to keep than to throw away, even for your non-paying customers.

For one thing, they might be able to make a smarter 'AI slackbot' which better understands your organisation looking at more history.

And they might one day be able to wrangle permission to sell the AI training rights to all your corporate chats if they can find some convincing way to anonymize the result.

They could have used it to train AI...

“Hopefully one day FOSS can actually compete with these services’ UX.”

Then build it yourself. ChatGPT will help you.

I mean, I get it. @AndrewfromX I don't think it is as simple as a "free TB". If I can afford a few TB on my desktop, Slack can afford many-many-many TB. I feel that these are more to apply pressure to "freeloaders be gone or become paying customers".

There have been many discussions/comments here in HN on this topic (free vs paying) so I bet a penny on the "convert or be gone" scenario.

anyone from slack know how many TB of space this reclaims for them?

it's certainly their privilege to destroy the free hosting people don't want to pay money for.

if they are really genuinely deleting that data and not deleting it just for the account holder, then i would guess slack is not interested in the value of that data for ai.

imagine if reddit tossed their archive cause people wouldn't pay. it's not even the reason they exist anymore. they're data sponges.

Is it just me, or has Slack been going downhill since the Salesforce acquisition? Lots of new features I don't want, the user experience has become too complicated, and they move shit around in the UI for no good reason, screwing up my muscle memory.

Don't build castles inside another's house.

Always good to teach the next generation that most companies aren't altruistic.

No longer a Searchable Log of All Chat and Knowledge. So sad seeing Slack die.

Hello Inshitification My Oldd Frienddd

I suppose at least this makes sense, storage is cheap, but it's not free.

I do find it very odd that every established platform with a free version has adopted the same model of "make the free version suck more" in hopes of boosting sales. I'm not sure that's the most effective model to be honest. I'd think that actually looking at why free tier users aren't converting would be a better long term move, being that, if you alienate free tier users via rugpull, they're less likely to give you later, and much more likely to leave entirely.

Also, if anyone wants something slack-ish, pumble.com is pretty good. Sortof a hybrid of slack and discord, we're using it a little and aside from the windows client hanging after its left open for a few days and occasionally needing to restart the app when an audio device is added in order to use it, no real show stopping issues. I don't doubt that the same thing happening to slack with happen to pumble eventually, at very least it's cheap and their tiers fit smaller teams well.

Oh and because they absolutely burry their pricing page, it's /pricing if you want to skip the marketing wank. It's much better when signed in to find it, but, I think an overall shitty onboarding experience if you do actually want to pay for it.