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Sync will shut down on June 30

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Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#71

Post by willis936 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #50
georgemcbay wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit is not too big to fail.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#72

Post by Rhedox »

tredre3 wrote: post #66
june_twenty wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I truly don't understand the narrative from the past few days. These third parties lived by serving their own ads instead of reddit's. They paid $0 to reddit yet made a very good living themselves (at least for the top ones like apollo and sync). And yet the narrative is now that they provided tremendous value to reddit by providing them with exposure (lol!) and that their users were creating most of reddit's content…

The problem isn't that they're expecting third party clients to pay for API usage.

The problem is that their prices are completely outlandish and multiple orders of magnitude more than they would've made of the same users had they used the official app.

On top of that, the transition period for third party apps to somehow implement a way to make these ridiculous sums of money is 30 days. That's just impossible.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#73

Post by willis936 »

wpietri wrote: post #41
aaomidi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seems more like a tantrum than anything. Not making money fast enough? Better break it.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#74

Post by wincy »

x0x0 wrote: post #58
mort96 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It’s still there. It’s just at patriots.win now. Although upvotes vary between 100 and 1,000 so, much smaller than it was on Reddit where you’d easily get 10,000+ upvotes.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#75

Post by teruakohatu »

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 bookmarklet works very well with Chrome, is very easy to use and no need to install any applications:

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

It relies on old.reddit.com, which everyone assumes will be gone not long after the API changes. So use it while you can.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#76

Post by CameronNemo »

remote_phone wrote: post #53

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…

Sadly 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).

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#77

Post by teruakohatu »

andrewstuart wrote: post #62

It'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".

I 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.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#78

Post by robotnikman »

scosman wrote: post #39
kenhwang wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only a paid version or an ad-supported version, so yes.

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 Reddi…

I would have rather settled for this than their current plan.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#79

Post by qingcharles »

jjcm wrote: post #57
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…

Login needs an email address? (hackernews is rejected)

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#80

Post by brookst »

wincy wrote: post #74
x0x0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It’s still there. It’s just at patriots.win now. Although upvotes vary between 100 and 1,000 so, much smaller than it was on Reddit where you’d easily get 10,000+ upvotes.

So like 1 to 10 real people, where it used to be 100?
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