I have no concrete answers, but this was fairly common with the Sync for Reddit app as well. We'd go several months without updates before they'd resume for a while and then drop off again.

I'm relatively confident the same will happen here, so updates will probably return soon^TM .

As someone who uses gold to buy WoW tokens for both game time and shop credit to make other Blizzard purchases, I have a hard time getting upset over this. I've been playing the game without spending money for years, and tokens are also how I buy both WoW expansions and other Blizzard games. Asking me to pay money for a month of sub time every few years seems reasonable, especially if this change makes it even the slightest bit annoying/harder for bot accounts.

That might be better, but I'd still worry about people rep farming (for lack of a better term). Any time you give people a score, title, or other personal metric, you run the risk of people posting to influence that metric rather than to post for the sake of contributing content.

It's possible the good such a system could do would outweigh the bad, but it will definitely always have elements of both.

While karma might help spam/bots in some ways, I feel like it would also lead to karma farming, which I'm personally happy to not have here. Maybe they could instead allow communities to set requirements for minimum time subscribed or minimum interaction (voting, commenting, etc.) before people could post? I'd prefer that be set per-community, though, and not a site-wide mandate.

Sync! It's what I used on Reddit, and having it here made switching platforms so much smoother.

In recent years there's been a shift from "white/black list" to "allow/block list" in an effort to avoid the stereotypes associated with those terms. I wouldn't say it's the new norm yet, but it's slowly becoming more popular.

You make a fair point - there are plenty of free apps for Lemmy with no ads or purchases at all. For me personally, I use Sync (and paid for no ads) because I used it for years on Reddit and struggled to find a Lemmy app that worked/looked exactly how I wanted.

The price is on the high end, imo, but I don't consider it unreasonable given that I would've wanted to donate to the creator of whatever app I settled in anyway in order to support their work. The only difference to me is that this was a one-time upfront payment rather than a monthly donation on Patreon.

My biggest feature request is an option to view upvotes and downvotes separately rather than as one combined number. Ideally the current combined method would remain an option as well.

While I enjoy some Reddit drama every now and again as much as the next person, this article had a plenty of words but very little substance. A few former mods are concerned that new mods don't have the proper knowledge and background to moderate effectively (but with no concrete examples of a post's misinformation directly leading to harm), and researchers are worried they may no longer be able to use Reddit data for their studies (although Reddit has a policy around research-based access and is working with Pushshift to improve access).

These examples feel cherry-picked, and the article itself says that it's too soon to say whether or not content quality was impacted by the API changes and mod replacements. Without actual data - or at least many more examples of specific concerns that weren't present before the changes - it doesn't do much other than say "a few people are worried that something bad might happen."

There currently isn't a way to see upvotes and downvotes separately in Sync like there is in some apps like Jerboa (I was wondering the same thing a few days ago), but it's listed as an enhancement request on Sync's GitHub so hopefully it'll be added at some point!

If you click on Sync Ultra in the left bar menu, it gives a list of everything currently included as well as a few features coming at a later time:

This sparks a few different thoughts for me:

1. I believe there are a few Lemmy instances that don't have downvotes enabled. (Beehaw might be one of them, but don't quote me on that.) If downvotes are a stress point for you, you could try joining one of those instances.
2. I personally find both upvotes and downvotes to be useful as a way for me to quickly see the community's reaction to a piece of content. If I'm scrolling through my feed and see a post with many downvotes and few upvotes, for example, I know that post is unlikely to interest me and will move on. Conversely, a highly upvoted post or one with a mix of both upvotes and downvotes is more likely to have a good conversation in the comments in my experience.
3. If I make a post that receives a large number of downvotes - or if most of my posts tend to be downvoted - that's a signal to me that I'm either not communicating my message well (confusing, passive aggressive, etc.) or that my message itself may not be welcome (hate speech, misinformation, etc.). In either case, I use that as a mental trigger for me to reflect on my posts rather than a reason to become unhappy with the community/platform as a whole.