The thing I personally found difficulty about Workplace is that it uses the same dark patterns as Facebook to increase engagement. For a business tool this is a bad thing.
A tool that requires none of my time to get benefit out of is a better tool than one that requires some of my time. Workplace drained time with patterns like unnecessary notifications, email notifications without the actual content in and prompts to engage in activity on the platform in ways that weren’t productive.
Business tools should save time, not drain time. I think Workplace either has this wrong, or is designed for workplaces where people don’t have enough to do and spend their days on Facebook anyway.
Of course, but much harder to quantify in terms of productivity and money lost unless you time-track all your life to know how much money your off time is worth.
My company too has bought into this Facebook Workplace hype. The feedback from users is mixed. Some people like it. Most find it clumsy and cluttered. The notification system is totally useless and spammy. Almost every little update by anyone in your org is a notification. I see 100+ notifications everytime I log in. I don't know what value it brings or what problem it solves that is not already solved by email / distribution lists / IM.
We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications. It seems you can't control it either, you can turn off individual workspaces or whatever they call them, but new ones are added by default it seems so it's a cat and mouse game.
Given it's so noisy, and full of the same dark patterns as regular Facebook, it's all but useless in sending out comms across the wider organization, let alone for communicating with other team members.
There was a big push last year to get everyone on Workplace, which was kind of ironic since the internal firewall blocked facebook so you had to use an external network (e.g. phone.) They fixed that, but despite the big push, most truly important notices are still sent via email distribution lists and published on internal web properties. It really feels like something forced on the org, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm a year they backtrack and say it's too expensive and doesn't provide any value beyond what email and internal sites already did.
What we really need is a good chat solution with solid search functionality. Slack would do, but I'd prefer something more like IRC with all chats archived and fully searchable. Slack is too meme friendly...
> We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications.
I have a solution for you: https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw Even better, if you go to https://my.workplace.com/groups/ you will see a list with all groups you are part of with options, for each group, to control the notifications, follow settings and leave the group. On the same page there is a button to bulk manage groups.
Both my personal fb feed and the workplace feeds and notifications (both when I used to work for fb and now at the current startup), are fairly clean, with only things I care about. Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy.
At fb, our team had a public group for support requests, a main internal group for team wide comms (release notes for each service we provided, on-call reports, welcome messages for new peeps, social stuff) and a number of groups for each individual team, or service, or even inter team projects. The noise on my feed was minimal.
The fact that some (supposedly) technical users on HN are annoyed by this noisiness should be enough to tell you that the system's badly designed and that you can't expect most users to configure their feeds the way they'd ideally want it, even if the tool allows for it.
I never "let" it be noisy, it's noisy by default since I have to opt-out to groups rather than opt-in. I've intentionally subscribed to exactly zero groups in workplace, but auto-subscribed to all. This makes notifications entirely useless to me, since it's all just noise and I don't have the time or energy to go through and change settings every time someone adds a group.
Oh, I didn't know that. Still, since everyone seems to add everyone to all of the things in our workplace then, the effect is the same – just a bunch of noise and an endless turning off of notifications. I just logged in and again had 100+ notifications from groups I've never heard of before, nor subscribed to. My feed is full of stuff that's of no meaning to me, and so the whole thing becomes useless. Maybe it's useful elsewhere in other organizations, but I wouldn't know.
I honestly can't tell if you're being facetious; comparing Workplace to e-mail seems disingenuous, but I'll bite. E-mail, being a decentralized protocol, gives me – the consumer – control of how I shape the incoming feed of data. I can, and do, ignore any e-mails not directly addressed to me, either via the To: or Cc: headers. Anything else goes into a different folder, which sometimes I check for relevant details. Sometimes I'll notice what is essentially corporate spam, and so I make a rule to just delete those messages. I have a very clean inbox, and I've never missed an important piece of communication using these simple rules. Ultimately the only algorithm that controls my feed, is the one I design.
By contrast, the feed on Workplace has never been useful to me, since it's just noise. The only way for me to have it not be noisy, seems to be constantly tweaking subscriptions, or just ignore it entirely – the latter option has proven the most effective. Maybe it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me, nor my immediate colleagues who also gave up on using it for anything of consequence.
No the OP, but my employer has also adopted Workplace. Before that we used our own internal website for section-level and company-wide updates, with commenting and a small discussion board where dicussions not directly related to updates were had.
I'm sick and tired of Facebook, and now I'm forced to endure it at work, unless I want to miss out on important updates.
If I read it right and they had around 1k users after 3 years of trialling Workplace, I think it’s less a case of “ending the trial” as it is “pulling the cord on life support”.
The article distinctly makes it sound as if they only trialled because they were offered a generous free usage period, without a clear desire to actually integrate it into their daily routine.
The timeline suggests that they were onboarded in the early days of Workplace, and I would blame FB’s nascent enterprise sales team for being too immature to recognise what was a losing battle from the get go.
They fail to mention how many potential users there were and whether this was high or low take up.
"The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2016 had 2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,000 users."
Is it 1000 out of 2500 or 1000 out of 14500 or am I using an invalid source and the actual staff count is completely different?
FB’s target was almost certainly the whole enchilada, so it’s penetration of 1000 out of 14500.
Even if you call it 1000 out of 2500, that’s 40% adoption over three years, for a tool that wants to be the centrepiece of your collaboration architecture.
This is the biggest risk to companies as they evolve their use of products and manage costs.
We found to our dismay that Dropbox do something similar if you decide to migrate off their platform (accounts get downgraded to the free plan and the company loses all control over the data in the account).
Companies are not doing enough to highlight these gaps / gotchas when the decision to utilise the platform are made.
(only a little bitter having had to deal with the fallout of these decisions)
Universally true: Reactions are never always positive for anything. A non-statement which will also be true of whatever replaces Workplace.
> Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy.
Many other people used the tool for 3 years during the free trial; how is this advisable if there are genuine data privacy issues? Seems negligent on CERN's part.
The decision point came at the transition from free to paid, not due to a change in trustworthiness of Facebook.
I'm unsure why any company would prefer Workplace over Slack/Teams etc. They have far more features and basically not scathed in privacy troubles as FB is in right now.
“More” doesn’t mean better. As an ex-fb employee, I genuinely liked workplace as a replacement for slack. It forces a fundamentally different workflow, but has some very clear advantages — e.g. groups suck for near real time chat like slack offers, but is a much better format for long term search.
Workplace is more like an intranet, whereas Slack is more like email (in terms of how it’s used). That said, my experience was that the Facebook layout makes people treat it like Facebook - sharing and liking good news stories, but all the serious stuff is done elsewhere.
This has tradition at CERN. I wonder why they even considered Facebook's offering, but I guess they do not dismiss proprietary solutions as well. Whatever works?
Often enough they end up writing their own tools, if nothing fitting is available, and this might end up in the public domain (since AFAIK everything at CERN is basically paid for by the public, i.e. various member states, EU etc.).
CERN IT administration is sometimes pretty idiotic. When I was still in physics, they replaced the well-loved homegrown Hypernews system with Microsoft something, a move welcomed by no one.
I thought lack of control in the free offering of mattermost is one of the things people complain about the most.
It seems riot/matrix and rocket.chat seem quite popular. I liked the e2e in riot but it seemed a bit cumbersome. Rocket.chat was quite popular at CCC so I guess it's probably decent as well.
They only had 150 active users (despite 1000 signups), so choosing not to pay for the offering makes sense.
I have the utmost respect for CERN as an institution — I want to make that clear. What I don’t love, however, is this trend that seems to be using a PR offensive of “price shaming” whenever contract or license terms change. I understand CERN is publicly funded and that it doesn’t have an unlimited budget. But I’m not sure how necessary the passive-aggressive jab at the three-year free trial now becoming paid is to the fact that CERN is dropping a tool only 150 people actively used.
The critiques of the product (and I’ve never used Workplace and hope I never have to) seen to be totally inconsequential, because CERN seemed to be happy doing the IT work to keep it running/integrated as long as it was free.
It’s fine to drop support for a communication tool — especially one that doesn’t have a lot of adoption. But there seems to be an insinuation that Facebook should continue to give CERN access for free, and that I just don’t like.
I read this as an announcement of the 'why' they dropped it for their own 150 active users. There's nothing wrong with saying you stop something because it has become too expensive.
It's not price shaming, it's saying that you're not willing to pay the price that has increased.
It would've been price shaming if it said that it was so much money for so little services.
There's nothing wrong with dropping an internal tool because you don't want to pay for it. Posting about it publicly is a different story.
I'm not seeing why they would post about it publicly unless they wanted to put public pressure on Facebook to let them keep using it for free. To me, that's price shaming.
Which is very normal state of affairs for research organizations. They try to reach as much of their employees / stakeholders as possible. You'd be surprised how often the work issued email address is not read.
Isn't this the open government many people ask for?
(CERN is an intergovernmental organisation, so it's similar to a government research department, except the funding and control is shared between several governments.)
So it was ok to publicly say that they're trying it out, and FB to benefit from the PR exposure but not ok to say it didn't work out at the price FB is asking.
IMHO you're either silent about everything, or open about everything and I support that CERN is open about everything.
Geez. I guess I'll leave your safe space and we'll both the better off.
Semantically, any discussion point that is arbitrarily elevated to outrage is now disallowed? Obviously off topic here, and ignoring certain perhaps universally accepted things that are disallowed, this stance seems stifling. The whole concept of "micro aggressions" or whatever that means.....just seems like virtue signaling. But YRMV.
> But I’m not sure how necessary the passive-aggressive jab at the three-year free trial now becoming paid is to the fact that CERN is dropping a tool only 150 people actively used.
I don't see any passive-aggressive jab in that post. It states the facts - namely that Facebook changes the conditions of their offering and the offering is no longer something worthwhile for CERN - and depending on your position this facts may look bad for Facebook. That's Facebooks problem, not CERNs.
I'm guessing you found the passive-agressive one here:
> Losing control of our data was unacceptable, as was paying for a tool that was not part of our core offering for the CERN community; therefore, we will end the trial of this platform.
I don't see it. The statement seems matter of fact and not relaying any opinion on the matter of Facebook choosing to end the free trial.
> What I don’t love, however, is this trend that seems to be using a PR offensive of “price shaming” whenever contract or license terms change.
I didn't read it this way at all. I read it as "CERN was offered, and adopted, a free product with features A, B, and C. Later we were told that terms were changing and we could not longer get all of A, B, and C for free and in addition the free tier would include factors that were the cause of concern to some parties, as already described above." In other words, "no longer meets our needs so we will change." As it happened one of those "needs" wasn't really that well satisfied (only 150 people used it) but they didn't say that here so weren't shaming the product at all.
In general I consider it uncool when license changes don't grandparent in existing users as much as possible.
Centralization of the web is a huge problem, More and more we see companies paying 3rd party services (like Facebook, MS, and Google) to run communications infrastructure instead of running your own infrastructure based on Open Source software. I find that to be a TERRIBLE trend.
If price shamming is a way to open peoples eyes to go back to running their own serivces then I am all for it
CERN is very public about its procurements and does cross marketing agreements with many vendors. That’s well known and Facebook probably sought out CERN as a customer for this reason. When those sorts of things are done, the end of the agreement is often publicized as well, as there’s an implied endorsement.
Corporate social media is like having your parents try and hang our an be cool with you. It just won't ever work they way they think!
I used an earlier version of this stuff at a bank, an it was very monitored. The way we were instructed to write, like and shares things made me feel even more oppressed by an already pretty stuffy job.
That's basically stating that influencers should get free stuff; CERN is a company that handles hundreds of millions, and I don't believe they're too poor to pay for services.
Without wanting to sound dismissive to the massive contribution Tim Berners-Lee, and CERN as a whole, has made to IT; we’d probably have ended up with the same user experience we have today but with Gopher as the base tech. Or maybe something else entirely different from markup perspective, such as something RTF or s-expressions...?
Great technological advancements are rarely the work of one genius in isolation. Usually it requires the imagination of a great many people to be captured. By which point the world is already ready for such an invention so it becomes more of an evolutionary breakthrough rather than a one idea that couldn’t be recreated.
In theory, yes. But there are a few caveats to that:
1. CERN wouldn’t have been able to patent anything too generalised because there was prior art (Gopher)
2. Thus if the patent was too expensive developers would have just used a similar technology (bare in mind it took quite a few years before the web to evolve from a toy, then something that companies “needed” but it wasn’t contributing massively to their bottom line, to what it is today where a great many businesses sole market is web based).
3. Even if it had somehow became part of industry standard or CERN had achieved a vague patent that prevented similar implementations from coexisting, Europe has this thing called (if I remember the acronym correctly) FRAND patents where patents which are required as part of a standard have to be fairly licensed.
None of this means CERN couldn’t have potentially made a lot from HTML & HTTP. But I also think part of the reason it was the success it was, was because it was a royalty free open specification.
Yep, I agree that any or all of those would apply (note that regarding F/RAND, a holder can refuse, and then the standard must exclude their IP) but at the same time we have seen over and over that corporations (and the nation-states that back them up) can get in really aggressive patent wars if they see fit, even over the concept of black, glossy rectangular cuboids...
> Losing control of our data was unacceptable, as was paying for a tool that was not part of our core offering for the CERN community; therefore, we will end the trial of this platform.
It seems that they were pretty open about the reasons they dropped Workplace and suggested Mattermost and Discourse as replacements.
I wouldn’t look negatively at price shaming. Facebook isn’t a person their a corporation. I’m sure they’re delighted about this article, for one it’s free publicity and two they’re getting valuable feedback on their product.
There’s a real value in blunt feedback, even if it occasionally hurts.
price shaming is just communicating information about a product you have used to other market participants. Even if you very aggressively price-shame that's just a signal that you were an unsatisfied customer, which is valuable input for everyone else. Feedback of whatever kind is how markets function so I don't think it makes sense to criticize it as long as it is their genuine opinion.
That being said, it does seem publicly funded institutions do seem to have a lot more money to devote to plant and equipment (or anything you can put someone's name on) than software, services, or other small equipment that you cannot put someone's name on.
Maybe they should consider following Mozilla and just self-host their own instance of Riot.
A $5-$50/mo Linode + a tiny bit of ops overhead has to be less expensive than anything anyone else is charging (whether Facebook, Slack, Teams, etc.). Plus, then they at least have complete ownership / control of their data, which for an organization like CERN seems a little important...
It says they already run their own internal Mattermost intance which does the same thing. Having run both MM and Riot for real users I can say that MM is the far more professional and well-designed of the two.
How long ago did you try Riot? It's changed a lot in the past year, and with their encryption changes coming in the next few weeks it should be even nicer.
Fun fact. This tool was being developed internally at FB about ten years ago. They really couldn’t figure it out back then and it sounds like they can’t figure it out today. Internally before it was Workplace it was a decent tool that integrated with the public facing site. Unsure of how Workplace works today.
It works really well inside of FB -- good way to collaborate, teams have their own groups and then there are cross team groups etc. There can be a little too much information, but there are not many complaints in general about the productivity it brings. Not sure how well it works in other companies.
I guess it must work well for some people inside FB. For me, it was just another high noise, low signal thing to try to remember to check: email, workplace, workplace messenger, irc, wierd automated smses with links I couldn't load and I couldn't quite figure out but at least stopped after I quit, whatsapp messages (where i worked), sometimes phone calls and people coming to my desk. Plus diff reviews and task tickets, which theoretically sent notifications through whatever, but since it's so full of garbage, you just have to check.
Of course, you can't actually rely on workspace notifications either, if you really want to know if another team did something, you need to skim through all their posts. Of course, if you asked someone directly, they would send you to their group feed, like an outsider would be able to skim it with ease.
Corporate internal social networks are a concept that just doesn’t work because of the hierarchy involved. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the HR department.
> CERN was then given a choice of either paying to continue with the initially free set-up or downgrading to a free version that would remove administrative rights and CERN single sign-on access and send all data to Facebook
Well no surprise there. FB is consistently on the dark side of the moral spectrum, at least kudos for being consistent. Scientists have privacy concerns and seemingly higher moral expectations, so paying for a tool like that with public money would not look good from any possible angle.
Do I understand correctly that they changed their pricing model to paid during trial, or have all control over data revoked? In a place like CERN that would probably be even security breach, even though its international project, US 3-letter agencies (and for-profit corporations) shouldn't have internal access like that.
My company chose Workplace as a formal and only official channel for internal communication, including announcements from executives to all employees. It makes you have to actively on workplace to get information, knowing what's happening around. I think it's a wrong way to use, but it's already set by top c level.
I'm surprised CERN has tried it in the first place. I mean, if CERN can produce things like ProtonMail, it can definitely conjure up massively superior alternatives to facecrook.
I don't know Workplace but how is this newsworthy and of interest to anyone outside of CERN? The article sounds quite spiteful, and why, if 'Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy' would you use it in the first place? Also, how can you blame a commercial company for charging for a tool?
Maybe we can address their concerns with our platform Open Social (getopensocial.com) as they use Drupal for most of their platforms already. I think we can get some data our of Workkplace trough https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/gra... - would be an interesting case for a migration tool..!
Besides the fact that it makes no sense to import Facebook-style data into a chat, doing so would only be useful if more than a tiny amount of the data in Workplace was actually worth keeping.
I don't see this as price shaming. I see a HUGE "we don't trust these folks to begin with...". Facebook is cancer for humanity. It gives 1 and takes 50. And then dilligently finds ways to use that 50 to hurt you, for their profit. I wouldn't trust any sensitive information with them. And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Some random admin with god-mode that will get bribed by Saudis/<insert other criminals/dictatorships> wouldn't hesitate providing them with any data.
For some organizations, the value of their data/information is worth much more than the £€$5k/10k/50k that their collaboration tools cost. CERN is one of them. I prefer to pay £€$10 per year more taxes so they don't use scum like Facebook.
(angry words yes, but hey.. they tried hard to earn them feelings - perhaps if they evern become less scum-my, maybe people will trust them more)
This is straightforward third century gnosticism. Granted, the Matrix was inspired by that religion, but it's funny to see these old beliefs come back and be taken so literally.
The funny thing is, even if the universe was a "simulation" of some sort, there's no reason to assume that simulation is literally code running as software inside a computer as we understand those terms - yet people who believe in simulation theory seem to assume exactly that. It's understandable that the God of the gaps would be replaced by belief in ghosts in the shell in the modern day, but it's also sadly mundane and reductive as philosophies go.
Agreed! Such a succinct way of putting it. That has been my problem with the simulation hypothesis too. It seems like such a failure of imagination. What if the beings who "run" us live in a universe that intersects with 143 spatial dimensions and 23 time dimensions, and their "computer" is actually a by-product of some other process, and they aren't even really aware of it or us, and are not even really sentient in a way that we would understand. Can it really be said to be a "simulation" at that point? How strange would it have to get for the word "simulation" to be meaningless? I have a feeling that whatever is going on is far more bizarre than anything we can possibly imagine.
> Can it really be said to be a "simulation" at that point?
Nope. And even if our reality really is a "simulation" in the sense that we're just the result of a program running on a computer, that simulation is so comprehensive that I don't think it could be called a simulation at all. It's just a different layer of reality.
If you perfectly simulate something, after all, you haven't simulated it at all -- you've created the real thing.
I am just thinking why can't CERN make their own worplace equivalent platform for their people considering the fact that they help create the internet itself.
CERN did not create the internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web.
Also keep in mind that there actually existed many predecessors of hypertext systems (EDIT: see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_hyper... ); just for some reason (let's say because the world wide web was in the right spot at the right time), the world wide web became hugely popular.
The Internet and the Web are not the same thing. The Web is a service that runs on the Internet, just like DNS, E-Mail, and the like. Your cellphone is not a text messaging program.
Have you seen the entrances to the accelerator caverns? You really need to watch your step there, if you fall you'll die for sure! The CERN is harnessing these ancient, fundamental powers for this, we barely understand how they work... gravity.
I'm pretty sure you can kill people with their particle accelerator too if the particles hit you. You'd probably be int he vacuum of the accelerator though so unsure if you'd notice.
I worked on Workplace at Facebook. It's super-cheap at $1-3 per MAU. If they like it, why not pay for it. OTOH if I were FB I'd give it to CERN for free.
I'm forced to use Workplace in my company and i absolutely hate it. After 15 years of employers trying to keep employees off social media they're now trying to shove it back in again.
While joined to around 100 groups in my global organisation the wall/feed thing becomes a very poor way to deliver technical information. Its intermingled with personal messages or a reminder about Jason from accounts upcoming birthday drinks.
Everyday i'm reminded why i left Facebook in 2012 and never looked back.
This sounds like a terribly mismanaged Workplace instance to me. Why should anyone be joined to 100 groups? That's a red flag right there. And if you can't move personal stuff off of Workplace, create separate groups for that that can be muted or left etc. This noisy personal stuff can easily exist in public groups that can be looked into by anyone if something comes up.
A tool that requires none of my time to get benefit out of is a better tool than one that requires some of my time. Workplace drained time with patterns like unnecessary notifications, email notifications without the actual content in and prompts to engage in activity on the platform in ways that weren’t productive.
Business tools should save time, not drain time. I think Workplace either has this wrong, or is designed for workplaces where people don’t have enough to do and spend their days on Facebook anyway.