stoweboyd:

Satya van Heummen of Fileboard relates a story about a newly hired associate who wondered about how to use Slack, and he answered that you basically have to be online 24/7 with Slack to get the benefits. Which – he believes – may be the real key to Slack’s success:

And then it hit me. This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anymore. And that results in:

#1 Social isolation / pressure
Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time, other people reference or know stuff on Slack that you don’t know and you don’t take part in. Within companies it is very important to inform yourself about what’s going on, not only for your job but also for your position within the company and your future ambitions. You start to feel social pressure to follow Slack and post to Slack 24/7.

#2 Addiction
Now you start to follow Slack all the time. It’s addictive, resulting in unconscious stress, because you have the feeling you might miss something. I see colleagues Slack at night, weekends, days off, when their wife is labouring, etc, which basically put Slack on the same level as email, Facebook and Whatsapp.

#3 Single source of information
Everyone is now going all-in on Slack because of reason #1 and #2. More and more information is going into Slack (exactly the reason why Slack has hundreds of integrations and more popping up each week) and the team is heavily invested in it.

And before you know there’s no way out. Slack has become part of your company and your companies’ culture. And then you find out you need to start paying…

Why Slack’s business model is evilly brilliant

Slack’s business model is essentially based on historical messages. The free searchable (and viewable limit) is 10.000 messages before you start paying. If you want to find a historical post on Slack, it only gets you 10k messages back unless you start paying.

Which means, If you didn’t check Slack enough, which put you in social isolation, now there’s no way for you to see a conversation every again and drag yourself out of social isolation. Unless you pay. And the more people in your company, the faster you reach that 10k messages limit. For example, if each person in your company is posting like 100 messages a day, and your team is 100 people in total, you already need to start paying to avoid social isolation.

Before you know, half the people are missing conversations, find themselves socially isolated, and you start paying licenses because your internal communication and company culture just fails.

It’s brilliantly evil.

Mwah-ha-ha-ha.