tapatalk wont login or update feeds anymore

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mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
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No one is pushing anyone to use anything. It may be hard to envision for some, but I can see a world in which one can have a useful mobile friendly site as well as app compatibility.
I can't see that world, because the app vendors try to degrade the app-free experience to push people to the app, where lock-in is easier.
 
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lumdol

Member
Jun 9, 2016
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From what I gather the reality is less sinister than you imply.

But if you know the motives of Tapatalk and I’m mistaken, it would be illuminating to back up your statements with the facts you use to reach your conclusions rather than just stating conclusions.
 
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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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But if you know the motives of Tapatalk and I’m mistaken, it would be illuminating to back up your statements with the facts you use to reach your conclusions rather than just stating conclusions.
They were paying around $1.50/ mo and indexing all of our content so searches would go to Tapatalk often instead of the forums. By pushing folks to their platform, they devalue the underlying forums. Why go to STH when you can aggregate over many forums?

For $1.50/ mo it is not worth losing that traffic and having to update yet another plugin. In the event you were wondering, Tapatalk paid us low single digit tenths of a percent of what other ad networks paid.

Take traffic, pay virtually nothing is their model.

I am actually regretful that we ever even turned Taptalk on in the first place and would wholeheartedly suggest any other forum owner not go down that path. I do understand that limits the number of people on the forums, but I would rather have people who want to engage on topics because they are meaningful rather than just because it is easy to do so on an app.
 

mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
505
118
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From what I gather the reality is less sinister than you imply.

But if you know the motives of Tapatalk and I’m mistaken, it would be illuminating to back up your statements with the facts you use to reach your conclusions rather than just stating conclusions.
This is a company that I used to like. Once upon a time, when browsers on phones sucked, it served a useful purpose. I even paid for the pro version. But then they started screwing around with the UI to put everything into a curated feed (that they could insert ads into). It got buggier, crashing a lot. If you try to get support you get no response. If you give a 1 star review they respond very quickly, suggesting that you just need to contact them. "Please write to us to support@tapatalk.com with more detail and we'll look into it. Thank you." That's been their canned response literally for years. (Seriously, look at the critical reviews.) They won't actually fix anything, but they think it makes them appear to care. The pro version went away. Then the pro version came back, but I have to buy it again for even more money. Now you can give them money every month to take away the ads they added. AND NOW CRYPTOCURRENCY BECAUSE WHY NOT? It takes a lot of work now to get around the list of things they've decided I should be interested in. How much of that is based on my actual interests, how much are they taking kickbacks? Certainly it has a pretty warped view of what I care about. But wait, why the hell are they trying to monitor what I'm reading in the first place? I just got this thing to make it easier to read a forum back when it had a lousy mobile browser interface, not to have some sketchy company monetize me. And the forum I got it for in the first place has long since upgraded and works fine on a phone now. So I guess if someone doesn't think they're getting enough ads based on companies with bad track records scooping up personal info, tapatalk is a good fix for that. Otherwise, run away. AFAICT whoever wrote this thing back when I was using it a lot (6+ years ago?) is long gone, having passed it on to some other bottom feeders. On the up side, this conversation reminded me that I still had it installed, and when I click links in google searches I have to tell my phone to just use the browser and not open the link with tapatalk (which doesn't actually open to the message I'm interested in; functionality is obviously less important than showing me another ad). So I finally remembered to uninstall it--thanks!--and I'll just deal with the annoying prompt that tapatalk-enabled forums constantly pop up to try to get me to install tapatalk.
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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I'll just deal with the annoying prompt that tapatalk-enabled forums constantly pop up to try to get me to install tapatalk.
That's the biggest reason I hate them now. If you want to offer it once, fine. But pestering me with it constantly when I access the forum with a mobile browser is insane. Particularly if I'm logged in. You know who I am and that I don't want it, yet you pop up the stupid ad about it. Not that they are the only ones, Reddit is worse. Facebook should also get a dishonorable mention, though they aren't as irritating.

If it were like it was initially, and just provided a unified UI/API to the forums and didn't pester me or try to monetize me, I might use it still. To hear that it causes problems for the forums as well makes me ignore it all the more.

If only all forums were as snappy as STH. I think some of them load up far too much JS and bog down the browsers on mobile. On STH it's a non-issue.