>> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)
> This was a mistake.
Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
Behavior "give me now 50K and then monthly 200K" is called Racketeering.
wikipedia > In the United States of America, racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit.
Did they offer new service and asked for more? No.
Did they came with new calculation based on costs? No.
They just insist on "more money or your operations are toast".
Once executives and vice- clout get into the court on racketeering, just like al Capone was, things will go much better.
Absolutely hostile. OP was talking to a human, not a company, on an issue they have no personal stake in in a forum that values decorum and engaging with the best interpretation of an argument.
I see accusations and statements, not questions and discovery. Folks seem too busy grabbing their pitchfork to engage in an honest conversation on shitty enterprise sales tactics.
People keep throwing out words like extortion and racketeering but clearly have zero idea what those words mean.
> Did they came with new calculation based on costs? No.
A regular review process flagged an account that it shouldn't have, and it was included in some low-level employees day-to-day. To try and act like this was some malicious planned attempt at extortion is an exhaustively stupid position to argue for, it has no legs other than to satisfy some dark urge.
It's a challenge to get a team of developers to adhere internal processes just affecting one team, imagine how hard it is to manage processes spanning managers, directors, and senior executives when those processes are a decade old.
It's absolutely naive to think the C-level executives of a company with 3,000 people are going to hear about an issue like this within 48 hours of it happening. But sure let's keep coming up with conspiracies to satisfy everyone's desire to virtue signal and show off how much they hate the cruel evil business.
I like to defend as much as the next person, but the defence from Slack ignores the approach.
"It was a mistake" isn't enough to gloss over the trouble, as a service provider, they caused. What a rug pull, and to then perhaps blame it on a sales person isn't right. They saw a lot of users and tried to extort, no negotiation.
Honestly though, what can slack do that can't be accomplished by a good old-fashioned mail list or IRC?
So in other words you've never worked at a large org, or been in a leadership position over hundreds of people. So rather than acknowledge that things like this can happen, you'd rather jump to the least charitable conclusion. Clearly the Slack senior leadership sat in a dark room smoking cigars while laughing evil about all the cash they were going to get raising the bills on non-profits. Got it. That explains 0 other non-profits that have had this issue and gone public.
Large organisations have less excuse, not more. I've worked across the industry, at various levels. The bigger the org, the more layers of compliance that have to be adhered to. A competent and compliant sales team would not be pulling figures at random to extort with. The sales team is normally bonus motivated, normally that type of reward system ensures they're not just chair warming.
There's no such thing as "compliant" in this context, you totally made that up which reinforces this is beyond your scope of experience. There's no covenant or other legal obligation they have to be compliant with other than internal systems and controls - you know, processes involving humans which are prone to errors.
This was a process error that you and others have decided to make into something it isn't. If it was systemic we'd be hearing about more instances, but here we are.
All statements following this disclaimer are unedited reproductions authored by yourself in this thread.
> There's no such thing as "compliant" in this context, you totally made that up which reinforces this is beyond your scope of experience.
What an unnecessarily hostile take.
I see accusations and statements, not questions and discovery. Folks seem too busy grabbing their pitchfork to engage in an honest conversation on shitty enterprise sales tactics.
> There's no covenant or other legal obligation they have to be compliant with other than internal systems and controls ...
So in other words you've never worked at a large org, or been in a leadership position over hundreds of people.
> This was a process error that you and others have decided to make into something it isn't.
There's probably been no less than ~6 executives that have been responsible for sales operations in that time frame, and that the sales process has been revamped and changes to how revenue is generated just as many times.
So you've got nothing to contribute besides your prior virtual signaling? This is the best you can do? We get it - you're a knight in shining armor that's doing his best posting angry comments on HN, and besides posting angry comments you're going to somehow magically fix the processes of large orgs forever with your incredible knowledge of how things like this work since you clearly have all the answers.
> So you've got nothing to contribute besides your prior virtual signaling? This is the best you can do?
All I did was quote your own statements and make it clear this was the case. I cannot claim any "virtual [sic] signaling", as it is yourself who authored everything I posted excluding the disclaimer.
Wise is the person,
Who through discourse can see.
The anger one laments,
Originates within thee.
As to the rest of your response, I do humbly suggest avoiding ad hominems as they add nothing to a conversation.
> No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.
Really? People of any age will use whatever the group is using to talk with, because that's where the talk is happening. Most teenagers don't use Slack either, but will if the group notes say use this. There might be some "no one uses" argument because usage has dropped off almost everything since web searching got a lot better. There are fewer lingering people because most answers are readily available. Remember TLDP days? Search is so much better now.
We're not on about general IRC though, just for semi-private use where Slack would have been an IM tool.
> And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.
How is email not a real time chat platform? I see plenty of chat happening on mail lists, and I certainly can't out-type email delivery. Sure, mail sometimes needs a DNS lookup, sometimes has anti-virus/spam filtering too. Maybe that's better for public chat systems anyway.
Thinking more about it, I'd rather have maillists than a web/electron client.
I'm not on about using email for all IM (but it could be), I'm on about more useful messages that you'd want searched later. "Hey, I'm doing X on Y day, here's what you need to know", most of the time this sort of thing gets missed in a IM flood channel.
I don't see much difference between Slack/Teams etc and IRC or maillists, just the tools that existed before are much lighter and have so many more clients you can use the one you know already most of the time.
Maybe. Not deliberately playing the contrarian, but consider perhaps one of the largest, and longest running software projects, the Linux Kernel, which has existed for a long time now using mail lists and IRC. Most mail clients can filter mail quite well, and everything is in one place, easily searched etc and has open protocols.
Using something browser bases puts you into a position where you have to choose between one or two browser engines and suffer however they manage the CPU and RAM.
Teams hogged the RAM and CPU when I used it in the browser, for what wasn't much more than IRC, and a terrible message archive. Mattermost isn't much better at searching either, and it's mostly glorified IRC channels. The only niche is perhaps mobile users, who, could arguably also use an IRC client or browser based one at that.
"Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. "
Not 14 years. Unlikely to be generations of execs.
"Slack" didn't do anything. A uninformed sales process included a customer it should not have, which was eventually resolved. Terms did end up changing, but for the better.
I'm willing to bet money that no one from the team or even area of the org chart that made that deal are still in that part of the org, or that any of them would have been involved in any situation that would have brought awareness of what was going on. Sales team have relatively high turnover, over like 25% anually. In my experience it's usually the least stable org chart in the company.
> Unlikely to be generations of execs.
There's probably been no less than ~6 executives that have been responsible for sales operations in that time frame, and that the sales process has been revamped and changes to how revenue is generated just as many times.
Perhaps this increasingly common attitude of "ethics don't scale" is a good reason to consider legislation that enable the breaking up of large commercial entities when they commit more than a certain number of scale related violations.
> This was a mistake.
Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
0 - https://accountinginsights.org/what-is-appreciation-in-accou...