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#community-development
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2018-02-22
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Chris Bidler00:02:52

The thing is, I believe we are something of a degenerate case. I don’t imagine there are a large number of Slack communities in our portion of the Venn diagram among the areas has a 5-digit user count, finds a searchable archive of all history to be a _valuable resource_, and doesn't have a centralized structure of leadership from which to pony up $84k/month

Chris Bidler00:02:59

and as @lee.justin.m points out, there is the worry that moving to an individual-subscriber model would cut their potential revenue by a factor of quick glance at my Slack app sidebar maybe nine or ten? Much worse than leaving weird, huge, decentralized-but-committed-to-our-topic “workspaces” like us out in the cold, possibly

seancorfield00:02:50

@chris_johnson I just looked in the Kotlin Slack and their 10,000 message history limit stretches back about ten days. Ours is less than a week, on average (as an admin I get the weekly stats reports and I believe we hover around 15,000 messages a week and we're up to 1.9M in total since we got started). So, despite having 2,500 more members than us, the Kotlin crowd are a lot less chatty than we are.

seancorfield00:02:51

The question about searchable archives comes up in every community Slack that I'm a member of, by the way.

seancorfield00:02:42

For some reason we just seem to have a segment of the community that is extremely vocal about it, usually couched in the context of "open source good! closed source bad!" 🙂

fellshard00:02:13

They were really noisy early on, but have probably cooled down since then.

seancorfield00:02:15

Some of them went away...

fellshard01:02:51

Oop, context. Speaking to Kotlin specifically.

seancorfield01:02:08

Ah, I wasn't there at the beginning. The Kotlin community seems to have a very different "tone" to our. I get the impression the IntelliJ team shut down a certain amount of "noise" -- based on how they react to certain threads that get started?

seancorfield01:02:39

(whereas Clojurians isn't "run" by Cognitect, so it's had a much lighter touch in general)

Alex Miller (Clojure team)05:02:50

yeah, we take such a heavy-handed approach to moderation ;)

seancorfield05:02:46

Yeah, us poor mods have to do all the heavy lifting 😆

mbjarland20:02:11

I wonder if we did a poll what fraction of our users would be prepared to pay the $7 a month to get access to channel history

seancorfield20:02:16

@mbjarland The last time there was a poll about Slack and it's limited history, I think only about 1,000 people even went and looked at it, and only a few hundred cared enough to actually participate 🙂

seancorfield20:02:11

(my opinion: the number of community members who would actually pay for access to Slack archives across all of Slack's communities would not be enough to make it worthwhile for Slack to completely change their billing and access model)