We have a paid slack for our team & customers, and a free slack to support our community, and Slack continuing to kneecap our community zone keeps pushing us towards dropping slack in general.
Just as Slack emerged to fill a social networking gap not quite solved by irc & hipchat, the steady mishandling of community pricing & usage (web indexing, ...) is keeping the door open for a good competitor to knock them out from the bottom. Discord is an obvious possibility, but it can be anyone new too. In a world where Teams is already knocking them out of the enterprise market, Slack intentionally losing their main advantages in community, vs pulling up the ladder on competitors, seems pretty dumb.
We are paying users with a growing annual account, this is not about free.
We want 1 product for chat, enjoy that Slack solved much of community side of chat (cross-company, ...), and Slack's UX is slightly better than Discord's + significantly better than Team's. Likewise, there is gravity keeping us there: text history + customer accounts.
My point is Slack's lead is tenuous, and they are steadily eroding their primary moat for us -- community-minded features. Our community account already has limited search and customization, and this update obliterates that further. If/when we move our free community channel, we will move our paid account too.
Just as Slack emerged to fill a social networking gap not quite solved by irc & hipchat, the steady mishandling of community pricing & usage (web indexing, ...) is keeping the door open for a good competitor to knock them out from the bottom. Discord is an obvious possibility, but it can be anyone new too. In a world where Teams is already knocking them out of the enterprise market, Slack intentionally losing their main advantages in community, vs pulling up the ladder on competitors, seems pretty dumb.