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Sync will shut down on June 30

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Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#51

Post by sorenjan »

I 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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#52

Post by peanuty1 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #46
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.

Reddit moderators are unpaid volunteers.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#53

Post by remote_phone »

Reddit 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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#54

Post by intothemild »

willcipriano wrote: post #25
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.

Build a alternative reddit api that is 1:1 and then wire that up to alternative content sources? RSS to start as a POC?

Not the worst idea.... Build an API that sits as a middleman to reddits api, it's paid for... But caches requests to cut costs.

Possibly use some amount of web scraping too

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#55

Post by vanilla_nut »

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.

Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation.

Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#57

Post by jjcm »

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.

I have an unlaunched open source reddit alternative. Before I go into that too much though, note that there are a bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

My vision:

Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month.

For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app that user is using.

With this model, creators make money, and the site hopefully is self-sufficient without ads.

Right now I have a working website, backend, payments, and payouts. What I don't have is a mobile app. If anyone is interested and wants to partner, my email is in my profile.

Site: https://non.io (feel free to play around with login hackernews, pw: helloworld)

Github: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio

API: https://api.non.io (slightly outdated, I need to do an update pass here)

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#58

Post by x0x0 »

mort96 wrote: post #35
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.

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?

Building an alternative to reddit generally is quite hard.

Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#59

Post by sureglymop »

_proofs wrote: post #49
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…

My 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.
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