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.
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.
Personally I think it’s people like you that dictate how others should act and tell them what they’re allowed to enjoy to be the cancer. There’s a reason the world hates dictators.
I don’t even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you’d use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.
It just seems completely backwards to me.
With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.
But Lemmy’s already fine in a browser and it’s ad-free. So what’s the point?
I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that’s got just the features I like most. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn’t matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.
And it’s just… not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it’s fine.
From the perspective of someone who isn’t currently in the “Bad If Not FOSS” mindset, this image really gets the impression backwards. To the average user who doesn’t appreciate the user-unfriendly klunk and jank that is inherent to FOSS interfaces, it really feels like the image should depict a bunch of FOSS Teletubbies being intruded upon by a competent Power Ranger.
I used to be a FOSS guy. And then I realized I valued my time and sanity way too much to spend more time troubleshooting and nudging my software into just working normally than I did actually using it.
FOSS software as the underpinning of the platform that is then accessed by a closed-source client is, ultimately, the best circumstance we could ask for. Clients are what the user actually interacts with. If that experience is more engaging and approachable, you get many more users on the platform overall, without threatening the sanctity of the freedom of the FOSS platform it all runs on. There is no one authority to make unilateral decisions to derail the platform, while still offering a more welcoming public face. If you can’t understand that, or don’t care to recognize it, that you’re content to let the platform wallow in obscurity.
What about FOSS software is inherently jank? This is a stupid take that’s likely informed by some bad past experiences, of which I’ve had many with proprietary crapware.
It is easier to find crap FOSS software because it is easier to make & maintain a FOSN project when you’re less competent & you don’t have a strategy for long term success. Proprietary software relies on for-profit motives to improve, while FOSS software relies on user feedback & community incentives. This is why, while the average quality of service from FOSS programs is potentially worse, the best QoS is usually from a FOSS program. See Elk for Mastodon for a fantastic example of premium quality.
It comes from a ten year period of distro-hopping a dozen different Linux distros that ultimately all fell short of delivering an experience anywhere near as stable or reliable as Windows or Mac OS. The closest I got to that was Mint, which I ended up using from Mint 9 thru Mint 17. And then the drivers for my nVidia graphics card just…broke. I had my laptop set up as a dual boot, and until that driver mess, rarely ever booted Windows. After the driver busted, I found myself having less and less interest in spending ungodly hours trying to coax some other distro into cooperating (Ubuntu, Pentoo, Kali, Knoppix). Every distro would have some kind of conflict or missing libs or some other issue requiring hours of fixing config files or finding exactly the correct repo to install from so as not to break compatibility with something else. It just got exhausting, like having a second job just to maintain a functioning desktop that wasn’t full of obsolete or deprecated software. Mind you, I gave up back in 2015. I did wonder if I should have given LM 18 a try when it came out about a year later, but by then, I had largely just moved on from PCs as an interest altogether. I just didn’t have the budget to keep up with hardware, and my job as an over the road driver at a time lent itself to portable gaming and consoles. I couldn’t justify spending another 2 grand on another laptop that would be obsolete in two or three years.
So yes, it is my own experience with FOSS software, and lots and lots of it, and all of the headaches that went along with it. I absolutely adored Mint when it worked. It’s just too bad that that only lasted a couple years, at least for me.
I mean great in what way? Great at looking into the empty mind of a conservative grifter? The scene of that researcher trying to explain the intricacies of gender identity and expression, and Matt Walsh zoning out to classical music will be stuck with me forever
IMO those researchers should be able to easily explain what is a woman or any of those asked definitions, but somehow they are just stuck in a loop of a circular definitions… thats pretty much says to me, they are no researchers but charlatans…
And you would be wrong. It’s almost impossible to narrow down a definition to something that includes everything that is, and excludes everything that isn’t. The entire point behind gender identity and expression is that human beings are extremely complex, and the things we attribute to biological sex are almost all sociologically constructed. Trying to rigidly define a woman will inevitably exclude those who even conservatives would consider traditionally consider woman. As such, a deep look into gender theory is needed to understand how we categorize people into different genders.
The entirety of sciences is based on generalizations of stuff by their common denominating parameters, despite the outliers. This includes chemistry, physics,…
Generally in biology, the female are usually characterized as the sex producing immobile ova and the males producing mobile sperm. The outliers, which due to some mutation or other reason doesnt fit that description, doesnt change the definition, they are simply described as outliers.
Its now also indicated by studies, that those intersex outliers in humans are mostly caused by endocrine disruptors during pregnancy but also during later life: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.4137/EHI.S39825
Great as in nicely edited, compelling in a Michael Moore way. I just rewatched it and think I know which scene you mean. They could’ve left more of his contortions in, fair enough, but he gets an awful lot of airtime besides. How is Walsh a grifter? I only know him from this documentary and the interview that led me to it.
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