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Sync will shut down on June 30
- june_twenty 3y agoSync had an awesome redesign of their app recently but ruined it by embedding ads into it. Some of the ads are even animated when reading the comments. As a result, I don't feel bad for the developer of Sync - they had it coming really.
- max_ 3y agoThe official Reddit client is worse. I am sad I won't be continuing to use Sync
- Rebelgecko 3y agoWould it be better if they ONLY had the paid version of the app instead of offering both paid and ad-supported versions? To me, it seems ideal to give users that choice. To me the $3 or whatever was worth it to support a good app (even if the dev sometimes goes AWOL)
- Rhedox 3y agoYou could've just bought the pro version for a handful of bucks to get rid of the ads...
- politelemon 3y agoThat's a poor assessment as you're expecting pro features for nothing. Their decision to include adverts does not make them deserving of this.
- not_a_shill 3y agoAnd they shouldn't expect any public API even at a fair rate. No other platform does it at this point.
- aaomidi 3y agoAnd they’re not and they’re shutting down?
- not_a_shill 3y agoI agree & I'm glad we've come to a resolution
- flangola7 3y agousername does not match
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- not_a_shill 3y agoIt's irrelevant to the topic, but I actively dislike Reddit and would be happy for it to die. I use old school forums more than anything else online. Reddit killed those.
- june_twenty 3y agoNot only adverts - animated adverts. They are serving data from a free API and looking to piggy back off it. Not only is my assessment not "poor", it is too kind to the developers.
- mbreese 3y agoWere the ads a necessary evil in response to the API pricing changes?
- kenhwang 3y agoThey were present long before API pricing was announced.
- bsuvc 3y agoIt's definitely a gamble building your business on top of another, much larger company's product. It's called platform risk, and while every company has it to some degree, if your business is solely dependent on a third party especially one that doesn't have (much) skin in the game (your game, not theirs), that risk becomes existential for your business. I've seen it before where a company builds something cool, only to be shut down by the larger company who for whatever reason doesn't like what the smaller company is doing.
- aaomidi 3y agoI can’t wait for Reddit to crash and burn because of this. And no, I don’t feel bad for the workers because they can (and still have time to) unionize and stop the madness.
- parineum 3y agoUnions don't make business decisions.
- wpietri 3y agoUnions can definitely influence them. E.g., that's a big part of the point of the German Betriebsrat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany
- parineum 3y agoUnions can influence them only while they're in CBA negotiations unless they negotiate a seat at the table, as in your example, which is not something that is at all common in the US.
- wpietri 3y agoFormally, that's true. But as we see in the writer's strike, unions definitely try to influence business decisions, and sometimes they succeed.
- politelemon 3y agoThere are many clients for Reddit but this one is my favourite as it's fast and snappy. It introduced experimental gestures which were highly intuitive which I've not seen anywhere else. Excellent focus on content, I'm going to miss it. It's sad to see so many apps shutting down regardless of what Reddit decides to do post blackout. I suspect there's also an element of relief among these developers not having to spend so much of their time on this anymore.
- _proofs 3y agoi paid for sync moons ago and have used it exclusively to browse reddit, even going so far as to resign myself to android to use it (and also to use Materialistic) because of how much i favor the experience, configurability, and UX -- it is infinitely better than any app i have tried. admittedly i might be an outlier as i have no interest in browsing on desktop and very much prefer to reddit on mobile. this is a sad day for me as it likely means my reddit usage will drop to almost zero. R. I. fucking P.
- sureglymop 3y agoMy reddit usage dropped to zero a few years ago and I can't say I miss it. I occasionally slap a "reddit" at the end of a very specific google search term but even for that it's lately been subpar. Hacker News on the other hand I read every day.
- andromeduck 3y agoSame. Didn't ditch my Android until Apollo came out.
- andromeduck 3y agoSame. I still remember the day it came out, and raving about it for months. The offline feature was such a game changer as starving college kid with a 2 hour commute and no data - IDK how I even survived without it.
- SxC97 3y agoI never used sync, but what are some of these experimental gestures?
- dilap 3y agoRather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.
- graypegg 3y agoWhat’s out there? I genuinely don’t know of any that would fit the Reddit data model.
- dilap 3y agoYeah I don't know either. How hard could it be to build though? I say that half-jokingly... Is the reddit API complex?
- 1270018080 3y agoI doubt the API would be complicated, the issue will be in all of the little QoL/scaling features: moderator settings, automoderation bots, hosting photos and videos in a scalable way. I imagine behind the scenes bot/spam detection is an entire engineering team.
- graypegg 3y agoYep, definitely. The API was only a small sample of the actual business logic inside the Reddit site as a whole.
- alvarezbjm-hn 3y agoYou are talking in past tense. Reddit is not dead, yet. The couple communities I participate in ("top 5%") aren't aware of anything happening
- gs17 3y agoThere's Lemmy, not perfect but it is designed to be Reddit-ish.
- jeroenhd 3y agoIt's sad to see all these good Reddit clients disappear. I hope someone will be able to make them usable again. I've already seen some people start work on an implementation of the Reddit API to interface with Lemmy (though obviously porting the federated nature of the fediverse into Reddit is very difficult) but other workarounds would still be welcome. I suppose you will be able to plug in the API keys for the official Reddit app into these alternative clients until the API breaks but long term a better solution is needed.
- hinkley 3y agoI guess none of these apps are interested in banding together to make a new backend to replace Reddit?
- web11 3y agoBut infra is not free. To buy it one needs to raise VC money. Story repeats
- sorenjan 3y agoI wonder why these app developers are announcing that they're shutting down their apps before the upcoming blackout. If the apps have already shut down, what exactly is the blackout supposed to achieve? I don't think the developers really thought Reddit would change their mind over a 48 hour blackout, but doing this now kind of removes the main reason for it. The mods are probably risking getting their subreddits taken away from them by Reddit by doing this, the app devs could at least wait until after to announce even if they already made the decision.
- remote_phone 3y agoReddit made a huge mistake taking VC money and trying to become billionaires. They could have maintained a smaller footprint and created essentially a lifestyle business like Craigslist and served the world. Taking VC money and trying to extract more money from its users is going to change the site irrevocably. And the biggest problem I have with Reddit is that the investors and employees are going to become rich off the backs of the moderators who are the ones that create the culture and the content for free. They get zilch except a thank you from the millionaires. And the mods are so dumb they don’t seem to realize this.
- CameronNemo 3y agoSadly Craigslist is a shadow of it's former self. OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace have far more listings in my experience (major metro in US, shopping for electronics and furniture).
- npteljes 3y agoI mean, first it's a huge mistake, then the employees are rich? I think if they became rich, they haven't made a mistake. And the mods were volunteers to begin with. If they are fed up with Reddit, they'll just serve the world elsewhere. You could say that it's shame that things like Reddit don't last, I mean in the form of not serving the interest of investors. It could be such a good place. But to me it seems like this is the conscious decision of the powers to be. And so, no mistakes at all.
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- Animats 3y agoOh, I was hoping that Mozilla was dumping Sync.
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt's like Twitter. The next Reddit CEO will turn up and their grand plan will be to invert whether or not the company loves/hates developers using their API. Then they'll try to convince developers to come back, because "this time I've really changed".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- teruakohatu 3y agoI don't think we have ever seen such a reversal, the closest might be Microsoft's attitude towards open source, but that is apples and oranges. Facebook used to be more open. You could connect to Facebook Messenger using any Jabber/XMPP. They never reversed course, if anything they made it harder to use Messenger without the application.
- Avamander 3y agoMicrosoft would turn back the moment they could, if it made business sense. Right now though, they have to play nicer or get left out.
- extr 3y agoI first created a reddit account in November 2010. I've used sync for years. Pretty sad to see it go down this way. o7
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoMany moons ago, I distributed a mobile app that was effectively just a UI client into a SaaS API. The first step in the setup was to login to your account in a web browser, obtain an API key, and paste it into my app. This was the key used to authenticate and authorize all requests to the third party API. Why can't the same flow be used here? Just require users to obtain their own Reddit API key, and let the app be a thin client that doesn't ship with any keys owned by the devs themselves. I'd be happy to pay-for-my-own API usage.
- axutio 3y agoGetting a Reddit API key seems to be a more complex process than the usual, with the first step being submitting a service ticket [0]. I imagine that this would also help Reddit prevent people from doing what you're suggesting, if it were to become popular. [0] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/api https://www.reddit.com/wiki/api
- kernal 3y agoFor all of the iOS people that rave about Apollo, Sync is on another level for Android.
- dirtyid 3y agoRIP crazy how many developers made living off reddit 3rd party app for 10 years. Bad bet.