Comment by abtinf
8 months ago
FWIW, in case you are not familiar with this forum: a 2700 point story is kind of a big deal, on par with the announcement of GPT-5 (only ~2k points).
The damage to your brand is immense.
It may be prudent to consider a wider, more serious, more comprehensive public response.
To quantify what I mean by "immense", as a former developer advocacy leader at a large public company, I once modeled HN impact and would estimate this story to be equivalent to a low-to-mid 8 figure marketing spend.
Did your model look at "positive impact from publicity of being mentioned on HN", or did it look at "revenue loss from negative story on HN"?
Now I’d love to know more about that model!
I agree, this is the stuff that kills a brand. This incident alone and the "CEO"'s weasel apology turns me off from Slack entirely and indefinitely. I had almost forgotten that Slack was acquired by Salesforce. Now that I'm reminded, I will remember to avoid both.
Mainly I'm turned off by the possibility that deleting all historical chat data for an organization in arrears is even an option. It costs nothing for Slack to store that data. That even this is a control knob in their organization is a huge red flag. A more reasonable approach would be "chats are read-only until your dues are cleared", maybe later escalating to "your users may not log in". Threatening to destroy IP to collect dues is crazy.
Yup, I would’ve considered slack in the past but now I know I never will, considering the CEO’s apology provides no guarantees they’ll help any other client with this issue currently or in the future unless they also cause a media fallout, and no details or transparency on how this occurred.
This should be treated like a massive data breach. No transparency = no trust.