1. “Alright guys, it’s time to leave Slack for a better alternative!”
    2. Proceeds to migrate to yet another proprietary and centralized piece of software.
    3. It happens again.
    4. “Alright guys, it’s time to leave [insert software name here] for a better alternative!”
    5. Proceeds to migrate to yet another proprietary and centralized piece of software, again.
    6. It happens again, again.
    7. Clown moment.

    It’s what’s going to happen. It’s what always happens. And on a side note, by the way, I guaran-fucking-tee you that it’s what’s going to eventually happen with Discord as well. I have zero doubt about it.

    • SineSwiper ( SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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      2 years ago

      Do you know how to break the cycle? Use open-source software. Use standard protocols that aren’t locked behind some greedy corporation.

      Why not take the features from Discord/Slack and integrate it into a new IRC or Jabber protocol?

    • tal ( tal@lemmy.today ) 
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      2 years ago

      I mean, if the Threadiverse has enough volume to be useful, someone – probably many people – are going to be logging and training things off it too.

    • At this point, I think the genie is out of the bottle. I feel like unless you’re on some p2p encrypted chat, anything typed into the internet is getting scraped. I’m sure everyone at this point has had at least one comment scraped and used for language model stuff.

      I don’t like it. But it seems like corporations will always find ways to make money off of other people no matter what

      • B0rax ( B0rax@feddit.de ) 
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        2 years ago

        To be honest, if someone thought that public things on the internet are not getting scraped, I am not sure what to tell them… Search engines have been doing it since the beginning of search engines, it is no wonder that the same would be done to train AI.

      • Bilb! ( bilb@lem.monster ) 
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        2 years ago

        I honestly don’t get the outage over that. I feel like I’m in the minority on that, though. I don’t care if linguistic statics are gathered from my public comments. Knock yourself out.

        This story is about “private” messages on a free hosted service, and I think their users are just being naive if they think this is beyond the pale. But I get the feeling of violation at least a little.

      • It’s not no matter what. It’s under the system we have they are not only not punished for doing so, they are heavily incentivized to do so. There are ways to punish bad actors that de-incentivize other potential bad actors, our politicians actively choose to prioritize these bad actors ability to do harm over the well being of the population.

  • blabber6285 ( blabber6285@sopuli.xyz ) 
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    2 years ago

    This was definitely a fuckup from Slack but as I’ve understood it, the “AI training” means that they’re able to suggest emoji reactions to messages.

    Not sure how to think about this, but here’s some additional info from slack: https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure-and-private/

    Edit: Just to pick main point from the article:

    Slack AI principles to guide us.

    • Customer data never leaves Slack.
    • We do not train large language models (LLMs) on customer data.
    • Slack AI only operates on the data that the user can already see.
    • Slack AI upholds all of Slack’s enterprise-grade security and compliance requirements.
  • Kekzkrieger ( Kekzkrieger@feddit.de ) 
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    2 years ago

    I know of a few security companies that use slack to work together that includes a shitton of privat data, source codes and confidentional information

    Guess whoever introduced the company to slack service fucked up by not reading their policies.

  • AlternateRoute ( AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca ) 
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    2 years ago

    Interesting how MS is the reasonable one here where all their copilot stuff clearly separates paying business from free consumer stuff for training / not training.

    However slack has gone and said they will train on everything, and ONLY the paying companies can request to opt out.

    Too bad so sad for all those small dev teams that have been using the “free” version of slack… No option to opt out.

  • Stay away from proprietary crap like Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. There are enough FOSS alternatives out there:

    • You just want to message a friend/family member?
    • You need strong privacy/security/anonymity?
      • SimpleX
      • Session
      • Briar
      • I can’t really tell you which one is the best, since I never used any of these (except for Session) for an extended period of time. Briar seems to be the best for anonymity, because it routes everything through the Tor network. SimpleX allows you to host your own node, which is pretty cool.
    • You want to host an online chatroom/community?
    • You need to message your team at work?
    • You want a Zoom alternative?