Sync will shut down on June 30 • Hacker News Board

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#41

Post by wpietri » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

aaomidi wrote: post #12

bsuvc wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#42

Post by tough » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #30

bsuvc wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#43

Post by waboremo » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #30

bsuvc wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#44

Post by jelling » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:50 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#45

Post by hinkley » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:52 PM UTC

I guess none of these apps are interested in banding together to make a new backend to replace Reddit?

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#46

Post by YetAnotherNick » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#47

Post by goolz » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:57 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #30

bsuvc wrote: post #9

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…

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.

This is awesome and I will be following suit, I urge others to do the same, great advice!

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#48

Post by graypegg » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

1270018080 wrote: post #37

dilap wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't know either. How hard could it be to build though? I say that half-jokingly... Is the reddit API complex?

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.

Yep, definitely. The API was only a small sample of the actual business logic inside the Reddit site as a whole.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#49

Post by _proofs » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 11:01 PM UTC

politelemon wrote: post #10

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 spen…

i 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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#50

Post by add-sub-mul-div » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 11:02 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #30

bsuvc wrote: post #9

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…

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.

> Honestly just kind of done with mass market social media in general at this point

I've been saying, the current leaders are too big to fail or get disrupted by competition, but if there's a silver lining it's that in lieu of a better Reddit happening we may realize it's a good time to start being less online.