Curious how you would prefer this be resolved? Or are you just saying you would have made different decisions and it's fine that Sync is doing what Sync is doing?
Ads are not a necessary business model.
The fact many people would, that Lemmy isn't affected one way or another, etc, makes it seem more like preference than morals or something. Just getting a lay of the land of the hate Sync is getting (on Lemmy, too).
It comes across as "we don't profit [like that/at all] so you shouldn't either". But as someone that doesn't see it as unethical, I just see user choice, and in this one case a paid plan subsidized by users that don't mind the ads.
It is shameful in my personal opinion which is why I am expressing it.
I thought maybe you'd go in the direction of laws or licenses being used to prohibit advertising in certain contexts, like downstream use of content, but what I'm hearing is that profiting off other's free content is fine, but in your opinion doing so with ads just isn't cool with you. That's reasonable, I just thought maybe your desired solution was more systemic.
Ultimately he's trying to cover his own salary. Would be interesting to know what that salary is, and what the price point would have to be to eliminate the ad revenue completely. As it stands, many balked at a one time cost of $20.
For clarity, it's not a one time cost, it's a subscription cost, so $17 per year is what it shows inside my copy. I grant there is also a $99 "lifetime" option that is a one time payment, but my experience has been that "lifetime" means the lifetime of the business, not my lifetime
I don't meant to take any issue with the rest of the comments about needing to put food on their table, just that some folks in the syncforlemmy community itself even were complaining about the ongoing payment being harder to swallow that just paying for the app once like how most in-app purchases work for a situation like this