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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.).
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 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.
> 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
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..!
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.
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.
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.
reply