Looking mindlessly at my phone and scrolling through pointless posts puts me to sleep significantly faster than laying still listening to whatever thoughts and concerns my brain conjures up.
This hits hard for me. There have been too many nights where I am just lying in bed with my mind racing. I’ve tried breathing techniques, meditation, the whole book. Doesn’t work for me, and I am left with taking delayed release melatonin pills.
I can’t believe that people are supporting an app that literally adds ads into a platform that doesn’t have ads, then makes you pay to remove them. Insane.
Really looks like the reddit api change was the best thing that could have happened for these reddit app devs, as now they’ve got people lining up to pay them money and/or view ads on a platform that doesn’t have ads in the first place.
I’m sure they did, but that free ride to the millions of dollars they were pocketing came to and end because they didn’t want to pay. Now they’re here to milk this sites users dry.
But that price has to be reasonable, and should come with more than 30 days notice.
Should it? Says who? Why?
A $5/month subscription to use the app is more than enough to pay reddit what they want. Remember, many of these app developers have made literally millions of dollars from reddit without giving reddit a cent.
Says any business. You don’t go out and tell the people who rely on your existence to change their shit in “30 days or GTFO” other than if you give zero fucks and have no decency. Especially if you gave no indication that it was a problem for more than a decade.
The boost dev in his whinge post about the new costs said that his revenue was in the millions of dollars a year. His costs are……his time. There’s no way the other devs for apps like sync and RiF also didn’t make millions.
Also Reddit the company doesn’t care about third party app devs leeching off their product. They cost them money. They don’t give them anything in return. That’s why they started charging for the api. 30 days is more than enough to simply increase your existing subscription costs and remove free access. I say this as a developer myself. That’s a half a day job at most, including taking a nap.
30 days is more than enough to simply increase your existing subscription costs and remove free access
You may be a developer, but you clearly don’t know how the businesses side actually functions, especially if you’re self employed. You remove free access and you lose hundreds of thousands of users and millions of ad impressions, as well as plummeting user acquisition since people don’t buy apps. The subscription they had at the time couldnt (or barely could) cover API access. If you start charging more, you lose more users, and you also have to refund anyone that doesn’t like the increased price. You’d be lucky to keep any whole percentage of your userbase.
If it’s your sole source of income, your expenses are very likely to be largely inflexible. You’re telling me you could handle a 30 days notice to cut spending by nearly 100% while also scrambling to figure out how to completely change your monetization in a sustainable way? What if you have a mortgage? Car payments? Other loans?
It’s not as simple as flicking a switch. Even sole proprietors plan out their business 6-10 months or a year+ in advance. Giving them 30 days notice is telling them you don’t want them to exist in the first place under the guise of generosity.
You’re overlooking the fact that these apps don’t cost these people more than their time to maintain. They don’t have hosting costs. The costs are literally the devs time, that’s it.
Would they make less money going subscription only? Absolutely. Would they lose money? Absolutely not. Completely removing the app means they make even less money - $0 in fact.
Most of these apps already had subscriptions. It would be a config value or database change to update the price for new subscriptions, and one line of code to only allow users that have a subscription to use the app.
Also if your entire livelihood relies on making your entire business off the back of a free api to someone else’s business, you can’t complain. When this happens. Your business model is bad, and then cutting off your access is a known risk.
More than their time to maintain? Do you have any idea how expensive a developer’s time is? He could easily be making 120 or 200k a year with his talents
you can’t complain
You absolutely can. When this business has made zero fuss about it for more than a decade and has even welcomed them with open arms, even having meetings with them directly on many occasions, then YES you CAN complain when they suddenly do a 180 without any warning.
Do you have any idea how expensive a developer’s time is?
I do, I am one. A change to go subscription only in an app that already has subscriptions is a one line code change essentially. Changing the price of subscriptions isn’t even than, it’s a config or db change.
The Boost guy made literal millions from reddit. The sync guy is probably the same based on how many people shill it.
I’ve been paying plenty of attention. If sync had raised priced to keep operating on Reddit, the users who don’t give a shit or know about the API price increase (which is realistically a large number of them) would blame Sync, not Reddit. People are idiots.
Most would rightfully stop using it, which would cause ad revenue to plummet, and would very likely make ongoing development of it infeasible since its his full-time job to maintain it.
And whatever. The specific word I used is irrelevant to my point so I don’t see why it’s necessary to be pedantic about it.
Again though - some money > no money. By literally shutting the app down it makes no money.
Ongoing development of sync is only a full time job because it paid so well with zero costs since Reddit handed the content and api to the dev for free. It’s definitely not an actual full time jobs worth of work.
Nah. It’s the ads and the steep cost to remove them that make it a bad choice.
Edit: here’s another way to put it: Lemmy is an open-source platform run on independent instances. Your instance could use that $20 way more than Sync needs it.
It’s steep compared to the other options that just don’t have them and offer largely the same experience. I keep hearing that Sync is miles ahead of other apps. It just isn’t.
A good app? Yes. $20 ahead of other apps that just don’t have ads? No.
I edited my above comment to reflect another point, that if all these people are happy to pay $20 to remove ads from Sync, hopefully they’re paying their instances to actually keep Lemmy running.
It is though, it’s miles better than any free alternative I’ve tried. I couldn’t even stand to use lemmy until sync was released because of just how bad the free alternatives were. Sync for Lemmy just works and the UX is the best available that is also highly customizable. The Sync dev is one guy who has bills to pay, he always interacts and listens to feedback and is constantly updating the app. It was the same when it was a Reddit app and it was worth paying for then as well. Why is it so hard to fathom that some people deserve to be paid for their hard work?
It’s not hard to fathom – but that’s not the issue. The dev decided to make an ad-supported app in an ocean of free, no-ad apps. In the views of some folks, the ads and the cost to remove them are too much. Some say it’s worth it; some say it isn’t. That’s the beauty of free choice.
The dev could have opted to take donations if they wanted to try to recoup development costs. Frankly, they could have read the room and noted that there’s a limited market. Given that there are numerous other options available (many of which are free and open source by choice), it’s a hard sell to say one dev should independently be paid simply because they chose to be regardless of the market condition. This isn’t a moral or ethical issue – it’s someone arbitrarily throwing a number out for payment for an app that runs on a free and open source platform.
The Sync dev is one guy who has bills to pay, he always interacts and listens to feedback and is constantly updating the app.
This describes the situation with most of the other devs working on the alternative apps. They’ve been extremely quick with fixes and improvements. Again, no ads in those. Sync is not the standout you seem to think it is.
Why is it so hard to fathom that some people deserve to be paid for their hard work?
If anyone should be paying for anything on Lemmy, it’s for the hosting of Lemmy itself. Sync can’t load anything but its ads without that. I certainly hope people follow this logic when asked to pay for their bandwidth, which is the only place it seems to actually apply.
But hey, to each their own – if people want to pay $20 to cut the ads on one specific app, they should absolutely do that. Don’t frame it as anything other than that though; it’s simply disingenuous.
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