#Switching to Slack?
white flare
Ooo I think these are good points. I just realized that Discord has a threads feature and thought it might be worth trying it out for this discussion!
My take: I completely agree that Slack's ability to bookmark posts would be so useful for saving helpful tips, but I am concerned about some of the limits on the free version of Slack. For example, free Slack allows only 5 GB of total storage for the entire workspace before it starts archiving files. With hundreds of users uploading DALL-E images that are each 1-2 MB, I think we would run into this limit quickly. Also, free Slack infamously only displays the 10,000 most recent messages, which I also fear we would encounter fast.
Curious to hear other people's thoughts!
sullen jasper
Everything about Danielle’s post, as we discussed 🙂 with threads being the biggest, by far, value add. So many great conversations and great points are certainly lost in the comment fray. Discord favors a real time paradigm, but slack values the storage and retrieval of important conversations. The gold is in the comments.
Mature search and bookmarks are far more important than 10,000 threads. But are your bookmarks in slack more or less culled by the 10,000 limit? Or does that just mean 10,000 that are immediately searchable? I can’t imagine that slack and deletes your bookmarks because of a rolling 10k limit? We’ve used it extensively in a consulting environment and never had this problem.
lyric edge
Discord has threads, but "This thread will archive after 24 hours of inactivity" — so you can never go back in time and add a thought. Agree Discord is great for real-time communication if we're always online, but not great for asynchronous conversations. And realistically, I won't check this every day.
I don't think the paid plan is that big of a deal for OpenAI haha. It's a small price for the value they'd get out of the community using it 🙂 They could always limited it to a few hundred people.
white flare
Discord has threads, but "This thread will archive after 24 hours of inactivity"...
I'm not sure how much this changes things, but turns out the thread creator can change that timeout period to be any duration of up to a week (I just updated this thread's timeout)
lyric edge
Oh cool
Well, this is nice. I rarely see threads on Discord!
I wonder why it's only a week vs. forever.
I think the lack of being able to bookmark things though is tough. I like treating everything like a thread too.
Just heard back from Natalie and they're exploring having a Slack as well! In addition to Discord I think.
white flare
I don't think the paid plan is that big of a deal for OpenAI haha. It's a small ...
Yes, paid Slack is the dream!! Sadly, as far as I can tell it's only billed per user which gets unbelievably expensive: Pro plan is $6.67/user/month when paid annually, or $80/user/yr, so with 200 users it would theoretically add up to $16,000/yr (?!?)
lyric edge
Yes, paid Slack is the dream!! Sadly, as far as I can tell it's only billed per ...
We are worth it!
(That's not much in the scheme of tech company bills, haha.)
low sage
Agreed, paid Slack has many useful functions, but we already it cannot be upscaled. We had Slack back to GPT-3 times, and things became tricky after we've got several thousands of users. Therefore we were looking for solution, Discord was one of that, but then we landed with Discourse. It works good - with 12k users now.
All systems have up- and downsides. For DALL-E a post bookmarking and good data storage (for all the images) is inevitable [in case of GPT-3 it was rather not a problem :))
lyric edge
Oh cool. Are you at OpenAI? Discord could be good for massive rooms / the larger DALL-E community once that becomes a thing—but that would require full time mods since it would get spammy very quickly. Since this account is run by OpenAI, I don't know how much bandwidth they have also run the community aspect.
At this stage, if it's a few hundred people and we're giving specific feedback to the the OpenAI team before it's more broadly launched, that feels like a different kind of group.
One good reason to switch to Slack is because the OpenAI team uses Slack at work (I believe), and it would be nice to loop them into all our feedback. I'm not sure how often they'll check this Discord.
Discourse makes sense for GPT-3, as it's very organized by topic, and very searchable / bookmarkable. I wouldn't mind Discourse for DALL-E as well, but it's a little less image-centric.
low sage
I'm part of Community Ambassador team, we're helping voluntarily devs and users of GPT-3 with open office hours, requests and moderations. And yes, there is at least Community Ambassador Slack channel, but it's basic, since we don't need upscaling there.
And good point, Discourse is probably not really useful for image-centred topics.
honest kiln
What about pinning messages here on discord?
lyric edge
I think pinning is just for the mods to make things publicly pinned (not personal bookmarks), but in any case, Natalie is setting up a Slack so we can have both!
honest kiln
I’ve always just saved the message link in my own systems as a bookmark alt, but ymmv 🙂 I’m sure having both will work too (Personally I haven’t used slack since discord was an option, but I’m old enough to have grown up on IRC and prefer that logic, heh)
lyric edge
Let's switch to IRC!
cerulean valve
Yeah, sounds like @low sage also remembers the community Slack from the GPT-3 days :), there were some pretty significant downsides as we scaled up. Cost is one of them, and reliably automating invites requires being on the enterprise plan which is even more expensive per user (https://api.slack.com/methods/admin.users.invite)
Discord isn't perfect, but we're trying to balance the trade-offs. There is a lot of value to keeping the community centralized in one place.
