this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Sync for Lemmy
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I spent money on it because someone spent the time to make the thing and I like the thing. Should people not get paid for making a thing? Do you only want to have something unpaid volunteers made?
I've been involved in open source stuff for decades, and it's pretty close to dead for user facing things. The biggest reason is that no one can get paid for their efforts.
Clearly not an argument made in good faith, but ill bite anyway.
I never said people shouldnt get paid for stuff. Im saying the practice of making a service a worse and then asking people to pay you to undo the things you intentionally put in to make it worse is scummy.
No, I want a good service, and if my choices are between an app that takes a free service, adds in their own shitty ads then asks you for money to restore it back to its original default quality, and an app that just provides that original default quality without asking me for money, then of course im going to go for the latter. Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole are things people have put time and effort into developing and they dont gimp it to try and sucker people into giving them money, have you spent money on lemmy? Would you be okay if the lemmy.world admins gimped this instance and asked you for money to un-gimp it? Probably not.
Its just a scummy business practice and avoiding it is a big reason WHY im on the fediverse in the first place.
Do you think that app developers can get by without ads? There are three options, with ads, without and give them a few bucks. Take advantage of community volunteers who do free labor.
Sync used to have separate versions, paid no ads, and free with ads. The Google Play Store penalized them for that. I don't think that would make you happy, though you seem extremely hostile to the notion of people being paid for labor
Yes, because every other lemmy app seems to.
And if people were so willing to give money to these people as they claimed they could have a voluntary donation system no?
So you want option three, to take advantage of donated labor? Basically, as long as you get free stuff, you don't care.
If you don't want to give someone money for their time and labor, and you don't want ads. Just don't use the thing. You don't have to be a dick about it alongside.
Now if you want to talk about the merits of Free Software, as in freedom, and how sync doesn't adhere to that. That I would be more engaged in. But it's pretty clear that all you want is free stuff made by other people donating their time and effort, with you benefiting.
3/10 concern troll dude. If you want to get a reaction out of people it's better to not be so obvious about it.
If people didn't want people to use their apps for free, then they shouldn't make them for free. However, if I have a free app without ads, why in the hell would I turn to the guy who is asking me to pay for the same thing someone else is offering for free?
Thus was difficult to read. You think the sync developer 'doesn't want people use the apps for free'? No, they just want to not starve.
Do you have a job? Do you want to get paid for doing that job? Most people do. I do. If someone came to me and said oh fuck off you want to get PAID for this code? When some open source things also exist? No no no, you can't, because open source things exist.
Ads like this really arent all that scumny my dude, i mean at least IMO lol.
You gotta pay the creator to use the app. Sync isnt free, You either pay with ads, or you pay with your buckaroos. Thats just how it works. And its pretty transparent. No trying to dupe you, hes not secretly selling your data (at least as far as i know). Either view ads so he gets paid, or pay him directly. I dont see anything wrong with this business model. The issue i have with ads is the intrusiveness of them, or the stealth of them. Reddits ads are scummy because they look like reddit posts, thats not cool.
Implementing ads after getting a user base (like in your lemmy.world example) is different because they are changing the model. If i were to join an instance that started off with ads, id be less miffed because if i like it enough i can stay and view ads / pay, or i would move to a different instance. I wouldnt call it scummy. I would understand that they gotta pay bills to keep that server on, and thats how they decided to do it.
For what its worth, i am a FOSS guy all the way, and take all opportunity to block ads. But im also willing to pay for software that i think deserves it. I donate to my lemmy instance, and have paid for Sync Ultra, because they are both great and the maintainers deserve to get paid :)
I wouldn't have as much an issue if it was their own service, but the fact that lemmy exists without ads by default makes it feel like them adding their own ads is scummy.
Genuine question, would you feel the same way if there was no ad-supported option and instead was just the paid option?
There is no making the service shittier in this scenario, instead you get the additional layer on top of the base service that the app provides. The value proposition is a different discussion in this case, but the app and developer believe that their tool adds functionality that the base service doesn't provide and they feel that that functionality is worthy of compensation.
I would feel better about, but I still wouldn't buy it.
I guess it's a matter of perspective and subjective. I see it as paying back for a decade of practically free Sync experience for Reddit that I absolutely enjoyed, and as such I'm compensating the dev for that. Not saying others should apply the same logic (they shouldn't). But it being a scummy practice is really up to what posting users interpret as value.