With the ad adjustment came these banner ads on the top of comment sections and they are atrocious so much so I don’t bother reading comments anymore. They all have the obnoxious white backgrounds and they flicker since they move. It feels light no matter my phones britness they are blinding and since content doesnt get loads of comments the banner is just distracting while reading. I’m on board with ads as I haven’t paid to remove but this specific style changes how I’m using sync now.
I find it hard to respect opinions of those who do not seem to respect developers. Lemmy is a very niche product, third-party clients are an even more niche subproduct. We are lucky to get something as polished as sync and if the guy values his own time at $20/user for the good experience with this few paying users, it seems very ungrateful to complain about it without suggesting an alternative to keep the guy fed. There cannot be a very large market for premium lemmy apps. Compound that with designing his app in a way that dns adblocking doesn’t break the app. I dns adblock, have never seen an ad on sync, and I still paid for the ad-free version anyway just to support the project.
I am a software developer, I understand what goes into developing software. He is allowed to value his work at whatever he thinks it’s worth.
But as users we are allowed to think he is asking too much or pushing too many ads or whatever. It’s not disrespect, it’s an opinion, about a mobile app that now has ads on the main feed and in every comment section, that only works based on a platform that is very specifically known for being open and not pushing ads. And it’s an especially high price for an app that is still very under development and has only recently just gotten an update for the first time in months, even when some features had stopped working.
I have no issues with him asking to be compensated for his work, and I am glad he makes it available for free, but the ads are getting intrusive, and we are all entitled to our opinions. I don’t think there was anything disrespectful about the way I shared my opinion, but I do think it’s crap to tell us we are being disrespectful just because you don’t share that opinion.
New here commenter chiming in…
You do raise some good points about maybe there not being as many customers as I thought, but there sure was a lot of buzz when the app first launched. Sync for Reddit was an very popular app. We essentially got kicked off of reddit and didn’t want to be there anymore, so we moved the Lemmy.
Hell, maybe it was only a few hundred people paying $20 and a few dozen paying for lifetime Sync Ultra at… $99?
But the Discord server has 2600+ members. If even half paid $20, I would think we deserve to be able to edit titles on our posts 6 months after launch of the app. Or use the proper Lemmy markdown, or not crash when you enable certain features, but that wasn’t the case! (Plus a hundred more bugs.)
If you charge money for an app, it shouldn’t have such dumb bugs for literally months. Don’t charge a premium price for a beta app. $20 is kinda nuts for a phone app where there are free alternatives that do exactly what you want 9 times out of 10, but maybe aren’t as fancy or are missing a bunch of niche features.
I’m not trying to rail on LJ too hard. I don’t know what demons he has. But saying we’re “lucky” to get a hasty hack of a reddit app rubs me wrong. Especially when having to pay for it or get horrible ads.