Comment by seamanrob

The great @dang has spoken.

we are still using slack

Not new. Ever heard of Oracle? :)

Slack has been a rip off from the absolute beginning really. It's good to see more examples like the OP on why to stop using them, there has never been a single one besides FOMO.

One look at his LinkedIn and all becomes clear lol.

Are you describing PG&E?

This is a joke right?

> Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future.

You are dreaming... look at all of the other posts on topics like this. It's going to continue to be business as usual until you have the social capital for a post that gets to the front page of HN or similar status elsewhere.

Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Like obviously you see that this wasn’t just a billing error, this was extortion under threat of losing eleven years worth of data.

If you see this massive screwup as just a price issue that can be fixed by lowering their bill, you’ve missed what’s happened here. Your company has entirely obliterated any trust here, and the way to fix this is to acknowledge that and do everything necessary to help them migrate their data to a place where you aren’t holding a gun to their heads.

> an oversight in our billing process

So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice? Because that's one of the "mistakes" that your "billing process" made.

There was no "mistake", this is how you operate, this is what you've already done in the past, and, the only reason you backtracked now is because this one blew up in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.

What I miss from these sort of apologies is an actual postmortem like the one we'd have for a software bug.

What was this oversight? What caused it? What are you exactly doing to prevent it from happening in the future?

> I cannot guarantee

You mean you won't guarantee. You could guarantee this if you invested in customer service. Choosing not to do so is a choice.

Is that a good advert for Salesforce?

The reason you’re not providing details about the oversight like you should (this should be treated like a data breach, transparency = trust) is because you’d have to admit that this “oversight” was you meant to only exploit smaller companies that can’t cause a media ruckus like this. Prove me wrong.

No guarantees needed (and good on ya for this fix)!

Def do encourage the post mortem with root-cause analysis & robust corrective action plan. Thanks for being here.

There was a phone call, there was a human, this was not resolved until there was a public backlash.

So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?

I can think of at least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one. Taking their word exactly at face value is not “something in the middle”.

No, it's not 'hostile'.

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.

> What an unnecessarily hostile take.

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?

"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.

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.

I can see how the bill itself was a mistake, but the real scary thing to me is the timeline. Seven days from action required to deletion of all your data isn’t reasonable under any circumstances.

So what exactly was the oversight here? Is it normal practice to change contracts and billing plans and threaten deactivation within 7 days?

Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.

And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.

(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )

A postmortem — software bug fix please. 1. Why did this happen? 2. What was the root cause in billing that caused this? 3. What are you doing to fix the issue that will ensure that if this error was to happen it escalated to the right medium expediently? What is the SLA on disputes?

One would like to know why were https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac... changes not applied to billing this time around?

With great power comes great responsibility.

@solarkraft: This response you got from Rob is why its important not to treat this sort of outreach as if it's being made in good faith when it clearly is not. It is precisely what Rob and the crisis communication team he's working with hopes for.

Let's walk through what's going on a little more clinically in this response from Rob that was shaped like an answer:

Rob's comment looks like a good response, but only in form. Structurally it mimics apology in syntax but the batteries are missing. He starts with something a little self-effacing, a little "ownership", to bring down dehumanizing walls. All fine, if you're sincere. But Rob didn't choose to respond to a direct question and there were plenty. If he had, the mismatch between his words and the reality where his use of "oversight" did itself elide over a phone call demanding $50k in five days... that would sound absurd. By replying where he did, he gets the appearance of substance without risking contradiction when he's a no-show on any followups after this.

For crisis communication, getting a question for Rob to respond to like this works better actually than getting incoherent rage. That would be easy to dismiss as "unwilling to engage in discourse". But a comment like this can be answered harmlessly precisely because the commenter is looking to have a discourse, and socially acceptable discursive pragmatics don't require an immediate and comprehensive answer. The established pragmatics allow for a response like Rob's without seeming immediately absurd. As a result, he can be the more grounded human personality, less distant than even a sincere CEO of a multi-billion corporation would look, and soak up blame without conceding anything or answering any questions.

That's Rob's role here, to be the face to blame. This is hugely important in a crisis like this where the situation was highly avoidable and the damage is reputational. Blame. Not to be accountable: that is different than blame, though they overlap and get confused. Blame is hard to do in either direction without a specific face, and so we have Rob. Rob is the blame face. Not the architect of the policy, not the one who made the phone call, but the human buffer that makes Slack look responsive without putting someone in the firing line.

It's worth watching for this dynamic in other crises. Even if a CEO does hang out for more than the single copy-paste in the comments that Slack's did, it isn't proof of sincerity, but its absence sure does say the reverse.

The problem is that PR has learned how to simulate sincerity since the literal SCCT Theory playbook of the '90s. Unfortunately the the lesson learned wasn’t "do better" it was "signal better". But hope springs eternal, here's a paper & data set that could be part of the foundation, a a small bit of RLHF, of a state of the art corporate BS detector. It's interesting reading either way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03638...

Someone suggested the possibility that the org status change which moved them out of the "not for profit".

After this the billing department might just get a list of companies that are behind and start a process.

Although transparently self-serving, this seems like a perfect time to say, "Hey, this couldn't happen to you at Mattermost because we A) have a free tier, and B) allow you to export your data."

This is hacker news, hackers are ceos, too, and have a very relevant product or service to sell. If anything he didn’t do it enough in this thread.

I was wondering about what options exist for Slack, and Mattermost along with a few others do seem to have a completely free layer.

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Agreed, someone had to meet their 3rd quarter goal and threw a Hail Mary at Hack Club. Shameless.

The time to complete the paperwork on a $200k/yr deal is longer than 2 weeks. Especially if the customer is expected to fork over 4000% more than what they were paying.

Fair, it’s 6 weeks until the end of the quarter.

There’s still a human account manager involved, it wasn’t an automated billing error.