[HN Gopher] Sync will shut down on June 30, 2023
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Sync will shut down on June 30, 2023
Author : LawnGnome
Score : 131 points
Date : 2023-06-08 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| bsuvc wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Unions don't make business decisions.
| wpietri wrote:
| Unions 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
| wpietri wrote:
| I suspect it's too late to stop much of the madness. Reddit
| took $1.4 billion in VC money, and like mobsters, VCs like to
| get paid back without much regard to how it happens. Even if
| the Reddit workers unionized, I suspect that Reddit's execs
| would happily fire every union member rather than
| significantly jeopardize their IPO. After all, Twitter shows
| how you can fire the great bulk of your staff, treat the
| remainder horribly, and still have a content site limp along
| for quite a while without immediately dying.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Ran into a user who shared a screenshot of the mobile app
| (for unrelated reasons to the topic at hand). They admitted
| the mobile app 'sucked' yet didn't care.
|
| Apathy is real, and most users have it. Reddit will be fine.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Power users are the most affected here, and power users
| bring the most value to Reddit.
|
| Mods specifically have always been Reddit's golden goose.
| Free content moderation by volunteers is Reddit's only
| advantage over other social media platforms. FB pays absurd
| numbers of humans to do what power users do for Reddit for
| free.
|
| When the mods fall, the quality falls.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Is Sync a business?
| kenhwang wrote:
| There's only a paid version or an ad-supported version, so
| yes.
| scosman wrote:
| I love my 3rd party Reddit app, but when their business
| model is either 1) don't show Reddit's ads and instead show
| their own ads, or 2) charge a fee to remove all ads
| (including Reddit's) - it does feel like it was just a
| matter of time before this happened.
|
| Reddit should have said Reddit premium users can use 3rd
| party clients / unlimited API calls. Messaging something
| like: If you want no-ads you have to pay Reddit (not
| someone else), but if you feel their client is better feel
| free to use it. The landscape for 3rd party clients would
| probably still dry up (who wants to pay 2x subscription
| fees), but it would have been better PR.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| It's also a gamble to build your business on top of user
| created content and then piss off the users.
|
| I just used redact.dev to delete over 10 years of reddit
| comments and posts on my 125,904 karma account.
|
| Honestly just kind of done with mass market social media in
| general at this point, so it wasn't that hard to push me over
| the edge here.
| goolz wrote:
| This is awesome and I will be following suit, I urge others
| to do the same, great advice!
| tough wrote:
| Could you request a backup of your user data?
|
| Upload it to new reddit open source backend, offer that to
| the app devs at a resasonable price
|
| Fork reddit
| waboremo wrote:
| Seconding the redact shoutout, although the UI could use a
| lot of work, it's certainly much easier than looking for an
| extension for the bunch of supported services or having to
| use an outdated script in tampermonkey.
|
| The nice thing about redact specific to the reddit module is
| the edit before deletion, that way reddit can't keep
| monetizing your comments/posts. Useful for people who posted
| personal content as well, who thought their selfies or
| artwork or whatever got deleted with account deletion but
| remained up.
| politelemon wrote:
| There 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.
| june_twenty wrote:
| Sync 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| And they shouldn't expect _any_ public API even at a fair
| rate. No other platform does it at this point.
| aaomidi wrote:
| And they're not and they're shutting down?
| not_a_shill wrote:
| I agree & I'm glad we've come to a resolution
| flangola7 wrote:
| username does not match
| [deleted]
| not_a_shill wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Not 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.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| This completely writes off the difficulty of and time
| required to build a great mobile app. If it was simple and
| easy Reddit would have just made their own instead of
| buying out an existing one.
| mbreese wrote:
| Were the ads a necessary evil in response to the API pricing
| changes?
| kenhwang wrote:
| They were present long before API pricing was announced.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Would 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 wrote:
| You could've just bought the pro version for a handful of bucks
| to get rid of the ads...
| max_ wrote:
| The official Reddit client is worse.
|
| I am sad I won't be continuing to use Sync
| ljm wrote:
| The only good official Reddit interface is old.reddit.com
| really.
|
| I can't wait for the SPA cargo cult to end.
| flangola7 wrote:
| SPA?
| OtomotO wrote:
| Single Page Application
| dilap wrote:
| Rather 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard,
| especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not
| talking about the technical side of things, but the community.
| How should the developers of these clients feel certain that
| whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like
| Voat?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| The simple fact is that you need money to host a site, to have
| moderation, to develop and maintain features etc.
|
| The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want
| to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose
| even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without
| resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.
| graypegg wrote:
| What's out there? I genuinely don't know of any that would fit
| the Reddit data model.
| gs17 wrote:
| There's Lemmy, not perfect but it is designed to be Reddit-
| ish.
| dilap wrote:
| Yeah I don't know either. How hard could it be to build
| though? I say that half-jokingly...
|
| Is the reddit API complex?
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yep, definitely. The API was only a small sample of the
| actual business logic inside the Reddit app.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Build a alternative reddit api that is 1:1 and then wire that
| up to alternative content sources? RSS to start as a POC?
| nullindividual wrote:
| Reddit already purchased one of these apps and 'improved' upon
| it over the years. I don't see why they would feel the need to
| purchase another app.
| dilap wrote:
| I meant go the other way -- the apps band together and all
| decide to support some alternative backend, instead of the
| official reddit. Ultimately it's the users that make a site
| valuable, and the clients seem to have a lot more goodwill
| than reddit itself right now.
|
| Of course, "just add a backend" is easier said than done!
|
| But not unachievable.
| jelling wrote:
| The problem with Reddit as a business is that they have the
| least profitable users of any social platform. So one would
| have to build a backend, incentive the app makers to switch,
| get advertisers and do it all more cost efficiently than Reddit
| does it.
|
| That's a small needle to thread.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I guess none of these apps are interested in banding together to
| make a new backend to replace Reddit?
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(page generated 2023-06-08 23:00 UTC)