Slack Is Evil  ## Metadata - Author: [[ThePrimeTime]] - Full Title: Slack Is Evil - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #slack - #platform-economics - #community-management Author: Primeagen (speaker); curated by Courtney Robertson Source: YouTube — “Slack is evil” (ThePrimeTime) Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} --- # 🧩 Title: Critique of Slack’s Pricing & Practices — Analysis of “Slack is evil” ## 🔗 Table of Contents - 📝 [Summary](#-summary) - 📚 [References (in-article)](#-references-in-article) - 📖 [Main Content](#-main-content) - 🗒️ [Notes (with timestamp links)](#️-notes-with-timestamp-links) - 🗣️ [Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - 📰 [Newsletter Blurb](#-newsletter-blurb) - ✅ [Action Items (GoDaddy DevRel & OSPO lens)](#-action-items-godaddy-devrel--ospo-lens) - 🧪 [Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - 📊 [Methodology](#-methodology) - ❓ [Questions](#-questions) - 🔮 [Future Research](#-future-research) - 💡 [Implications](#-implications) - 🧠 [Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - ♿ [Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - 🌍 [DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - 🧭 [Logical Validity & Fallacies](#-logical-validity--fallacies) - 🧷 [DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - 🎯 [Conclusion](#-conclusion) --- ### 📚 References (in-article) - 🎬 Primary source: YouTube — “Slack is evil” by ThePrimeTime (Primeagen): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU --- ## 📝 Summary - 🔹 The speaker argues Slack’s behavior toward communities—particularly nonprofits—is ethically questionable and economically punitive, highlighting threats of deactivation and deletion of message history tied to sudden price increases. - 🔹 Claims include: high per-user pricing, Electron app performance frustrations, unreliable websocket reconnects, and coercive-sounding sales motions directed at large communities (example: Hack Club). - 🔹 The talk positions Discord as a preferable alternative for youth-oriented or community-heavy spaces due to lower cost barriers and culture fit. - 🔹 Tone: sarcastic, humorous, and emphatic; persuasive via analogy and moral framing rather than data tables. --- ## 📖 Main Content - 🧵 Framing: The speaker opens with a bold claim (“Slack is evil”) to flag moral stakes and grab attention. He distinguishes UX gripes (Electron, reconnects) from what he calls “cartoonishly villainous” pricing conduct. - 🧱 Core Allegation: A nonprofit (Hack Club) faced an abrupt escalation: pay a large increase (e.g., $50k immediately, $200k yearly) or lose workspace and history. The speaker acknowledges not litigating “extortion” legally but argues it *feels* coercive. - 🧮 Pricing Critique: Per-seat pricing is framed as misaligned with community dynamics (lurkers count as billable), and “history paywalling” is used as an example of lock-in. He compares Slack’s seat price to consumer streaming, for rhetorical effect. - 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Community Fit: He suggests Discord better matches teen coders and grassroots groups, while Slack increasingly prices communities out. - 🏢 Ownership Optics: Salesforce stewardship is invoked to explain enterprise-first incentives, reinforcing distrust among developers and communities. --- ## 🗒️ Notes (with timestamp links) - 🔧 [00:00–00:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=0) — Opening claim & tone: strong moral language; sets a humorous, sardonic style to keep engagement high. - 🖥️ [00:39–01:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=39) — Electron critique: cross-platform perf pain; expectation that a “billion-dollar company” could fund native clients. - 🔌 [01:56–02:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=116) — Websocket reconnect pain: “years” of intermittent disconnects; argues reconnect logic is solvable engineering. - 🏫 [02:14–02:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=134) — Hack Club history: long-term Slack use; earlier $5k/yr agreement; claims of abrupt new demands. - 🗄️ [02:47–03:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=167) — Threat framing: pay or lose workspace + message history; compared to “trust & safety” shutdown experiences at other vendors. - 💸 [03:28–04:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=208) — Price context: $15–$18 per user, billed regardless of activity; rhetorical compare vs Netflix to signal poor value. - 👥 [04:24–04:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=264) — Community angle: Discord fits youth coding groups; Slack’s limits/costs hinder engagement. - 🧾 [05:01–05:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=301) — Cost anecdote: example of ~$120k/yr to preserve message history for an active community. - 🧨 [05:50–06:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=350) — Nonprofit threat redux: moral indictment of “pay or delete” posture. - 🧩 [06:16–06:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=376) — Salesforce optics: presumes enterprise-centric incentives explain community-unfriendly choices. - 📣 [06:34–07:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU&t=394) — CTA/meta: channel milestone ask; tonal shift back to personable, comedic sign-off. --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - 🧩 Original thrust (00:47–01:11): Slack’s recent conduct goes beyond bad UX; it’s “cartoonishly villainous,” like a mobster charging protection. - ✍️ Paraphrase: The issue isn’t just sluggish apps or dropped sockets. The new pricing playbook reads like intimidation—pay a premium or face shutdown—evoking a protection-racket vibe. - 🧾 Pricing value claim (03:28–04:11): Slack’s seat price outstrips everyday services; even inactive members count; history is gated. - ✍️ Paraphrase: The per-user bill climbs fast, including quiet accounts, and essential features like searchable history sit behind a steep paywall—poor economics for volunteer-heavy communities. --- ## 📰 Newsletter Blurb **Slack vs. Communities: Price Hikes, History Lock-in, and Better Options?** A viral take this week skewers Slack’s pricing: nonprofits report sudden five- to six-figure demands with the specter of workspace shutdown and deleted history. Beyond Electron jokes and websocket gripes, the core critique hits governance and economics—per-seat billing punishes lurkers and community scale. For youth-centric groups, Discord keeps surfacing as the cheaper, culture-fit alternative. Links: 🎬 [“Slack is evil”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU) • 📘 Slack pricing (check your plan specifics) • 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Consider open-source chat (Matrix/Element) for long-term control. --- ## ✅ Action Items (GoDaddy DevRel & OSPO lens) - 🧭 Map vendor risk for community programs: identify cost cliffs (per-seat billing, history limits), data retention, export rights, and lock-in triggers; propose mitigations (export cadence, self-hosted mirrors). - 🗂️ Draft a “Community Comms Stack” rubric: price transparency, nonprofit discounts, history portability, API openness, SSO terms, child/teen privacy handling (COPPA/FERPA-aware contexts). - 🧑‍🏫 Build contributor-onboarding modules: “Choosing chat platforms responsibly,” including TCO worksheets, accessibility checks, harassment reporting pathways, and moderation ops. - 🏛️ OSPO policy template: vendor neutrality, exit plans, data residency, and “right to leave with your logs.” Require machine-readable exports + migration guides. - 🌱 Sustainability tie-in: evaluate Matrix/Element or Zulip pilots for education/nonprofit cohorts; document SSO and moderation setups; publish a migration playbook. - 🔍 Executive brief: summarize platform economics for leadership (CFO/CISO/Legal) with a side-by-side comparing Slack, Discord, Zulip, and Matrix (security, compliance, TCO, culture fit). --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses - 🧩 H1: Per-seat billing with history paywalls suppresses message volume and retention in volunteer communities. - 🧩 H2: Abrupt pricing enforcement increases churn to lower-cost or open platforms within 90 days. - 🧩 H3: Communities prioritizing youth engagement report higher satisfaction and participation on Discord than Slack at equivalent scale. - 🧩 H4: Availability of bulk export + transparent APIs correlates with longer vendor tenure and reduced public backlash. --- ## 📊 Methodology - 🧪 Quasi-experimental cohorts: match communities by size/sector; track 6-month retention, - Summary: https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream 5 days a Week Become A Great Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (I make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Order coffee over SSH! ssh terminal.shop Discord: https://discord.gg/ThePrimeagen ### LINKS https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1968556768239263846 Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQsOReCjRU I think Slack is evil. Yes, I'm you I'm throwing out some intense accusations here, but some of you are going to probably be like, "Oh, wow. Water is wet, Prime." Okay, grass is green. We get it. That's a pretty soft take because I know the love of Slack, it's not it's not that much. Okay, it's not quite there. Slack is not the thing I want to open. Okay, if I have to choose to live in Discord or Slack, I just rather be in Discord. I don't know why. It just makes me feel better as a person. Slack just feels like I'm slowly losing part of my soul. Slack feels like Steve BMI with like the skateboard meme trying to fit in. Hey kids. Hey fellow kids. You know just like no stop it Slack. But none of those things make them evil. Even though it should be considered evil foisting Electron upon every single operating system after being a billion-dollar company for years upon years, not managing to be able to write a native app so that I can at least have a reasonable experience on any system. Oh no. Sorry. Sorry. I can't expect that out of a billion dollar company these days. Sorry that you can't hire a few engineers to be able to make something that I actually enjoy using. But still, I'm not going to give you evil for that situation. I like But what Slack is doing now is like cartoonishly villainous, right? It is like I don't even know how to describe the behavior. It's like a mobster, right? Flipping the coin, being like, "Hey, you want to operate here? It's going to cost you a lot, buddy." It's crazy. And look at this. a nonprofit is claiming that Slack is extorting them for $195,000 a year. Now, I don't know what legally constitutes extortion. I assume they're using the term, hey, pay me this amount of money or else I do this. I don't know if that technically is extortion. This feels a little bit, I not don't want to throw legal terms out there. Uh, I found this tweet. Thank you, uh, Gurgley for this. Really appreciate this. But so let me give you the story of what's going on and why I think uh this is pretty crappy behavior on Slack's behalf. By the way, I'm still upset about reconnecting websockets. Okay, it's been years and every now and then I just go to Slack and it's just disconnected and it won't connect and I try and I have to like try to hard refresh it to get it to start getting messages again. Very frustrating. Okay, reconnecting websockets is not that complicated. All right. So, for 11 years, Hack Club has been operating as a nonprofit using Slack for communication. A few years back, they got hit with a $5,000 a year agreement. Like, hey, you pay us this amount of money, we'll let you continue to operate. Now, do I think that's fair? I don't I don't really know. I don't know what's fair and not fair. I'm not going to say what is what. I don't know what Hack Club was getting for that money. I don't know if they had some sort of special agreement. I don't know what kind of features they were using, right? So, I'm not going to comment on the amount of money they're paying. It's just that they agreed to pay some sort of money. Well, earlier this week, Slack reached out and said that if we don't agree to pay an extra $50,000 this week and $200,000 a year, they'll deactivate Slack Workspace and delete all of our message history. I don't know what extortion means, but I would feel kind of extorted. Okay, I would I'm extolling the extortion in this situation. That feels horrible. Like this reminds me of when Cloudflare did something similar like either pay us this or we're shutting down your website like out of nowhere, right? The trust and safety team reaching out. This is the same feeling. It's like this just it's cartoonishly villainous to be able to request this from somebody. There's not even like a hey, we are no longer supporting nonprofits and so we are going to just move you to standard business plan. This is what our business plan costs. It will start going from here. It's going to be $200,000 a year. In 28 days, when your next billing cycle hits, you'll be charged the full amount. Okay? Like, hey, I think they I honestly think Slack is way overpriced. Okay? This is insane amount of price for Slack. Slack, like $15 per person if you pay yearly or $18 per person if you pay monthly, and that is includes people who never send any messages. Like, dude, what are you doing, Slack? Okay, you're actually more expensive per user than Netflix. Okay, at least I get to watch the One Piece. Like what is this? This is insane. Like you are so expensive and you're sending text messages. My gosh. So Slack is doing themselves a doozy. Slack is obviously going to be losing community after community with this kind of behavior. I And honestly, I just don't understand why. Like why if you're building a community, why use Slack anyways? Why use these paid for services? For the most part, most people just want to use Discord anyways. Especially since uh this particular one, Hack Club is teaching teenagers how to code. Like, you know, if you want to be hip with the kids, you you use the old Discord. Huh, man. Now I Now I'm the Steve Busi meme. Damn it. Hey, fellow kids. I also have a Discord. And just to kind of show you just how ridiculous Slack is just in in general, people like here's levels io. And he said that people call me crazy for switching off Slack, but it was kind of obvious to I was paying $120,000 a year for a chat app that was one feature of Nomad List because they charged per user. If I didn't pay, there'd only be a,000 message history. With 600 messages per day, that means every 20 hours the entire chat was empty again. He paid to be able to have message history. $120,000 a year. Slack is insanely priced. And this just seems like this has to be a place where somebody can take advantage of this. Somebody just has to be able to disrupt this organization. Yes, disrupt. Hey, favorite Silicon Valley term. Okay, Slack already uses AI, so you don't even have to do that. Okay, you just got you just got to do something. Just make me message. Oh, don't do that. So, at the end of the day, $120,000 for one feature is just it's insane. It is actually insane. and Discord is clearly a better choice at this point. Uh and it's even more crazy that Slack is threatening a nonprofit with shutdown unless if they do the $50,000 uh ask and along with the $200,000 a year price. This is just bad behavior and more so even if you just take this situation out, Slack approaching problems with this type of mentality is going to just be the rune of Slack. And it's not surprising Salesforce owns Slack. Salesforce, at least in my opinion, I have this like kind of really negative viewpoint of Salesforce. Maybe, hey, it could be unfounded, but in my head, when you say, hey, this is brought to you by Salesforce. I'm like, I don't want that. And this is just proving more and more about it to me. Hey, the name is press why did you press the like button? Hey, appreciate that again. Also, sub. I don't know if you know this, but I'm about like with the current projections, I am like 80 days away from crossing a million. Okay, if you're watching this and it's the end and you're not subscribed, just press it so I could get just Dude, I will I swear I I will be the happiest camper ever. I will you know what? I will program React for you if you make this happen, okay? I will do an entire live stream programming React and being happy about it for you. A gen., Slack Is Evil, ThePrimeTime, 01k5kq75ebj8mpy7nf89h5jds4.