Apollo will close down on June 30th
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435&p=4
For other recent threads on this topic, brace yourself and go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36251707.
Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.
What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.
In retrospect, some of the accounts might have been intended to make the left look extra ridiculous, not sure, but I don't really believe that's true, I've seen people chase enough bad ideas en masse now that I think these were well-meaning people who believed that by participating in this infernal attention mill, they were doing things that would change the world for the better.
Reddit has likewise never been even mediocre at what it's purporting to be, these are all just what happens when people approach the internet, which is one thing, as though it was a super cool television, which is a whole other thing. The illusion of participation and having a voice is really what people are buying with all their attention, because actually having a voice on the actual internet means knowing html at a minimum. Not actually a tall order for anyone who has a couple days and a willingness to do a bit of mental labour, but why bother when you can just post on whichever corporate daemon you favour.
The weirdest thing of all to me, I don't even know how I found this place but it's got some of the best interactions I've had since Usenet died, and I didn't know know what ycombinator was or why it wasn't called hackernews.net or whatever. To learn just this week that the platform is just a service operated by the people behind quite a lot of this VC fuckery, I'm still integrating it, but it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts.
Anyways didn't come to talk about that, came to say, been using Mastodon the last month or so, and I am also having pretty high quality interactions there. Nothing remotely like the idiocy I encountered daily in my Twitter feed. Occasionally a thing that I don't care for, like, I really don't need all the furry porn, holy crap are there ever a lot of very dedicated people servicing the furry market and I'm gonna be looking into that cause I know how to make tails move. But that filters out easy.
I'm on the main instance and I'm looking around at others while I decide whether to just self-host, but I enjoy the scroll with the accounts and hashtags I follow, the quality ranges from boring to amazing, very little annoying, trollish, spammy, Mindset-infected trash comes through my feed, and like I said, the only heavy filtering I've done is the porn.
Best part: I loved Facebook when I first joined and when I started to get discontented was when the default feed stopped being "what you follow in the order they post," and that has never been around since, except notably on reddit I suppose. Nothing wrong with having an algo feed available for discovery, and Mastodon has that, but your feed is just what you follow in the order they post as a default. So you scroll down till you realize you've seen it already, and you know you've seen it all for now and you move on. There is no machine trying to hold your attention, there is just what you asked for. What a concept.
The tech genius hobos, burnouts, and weirdos come here to rub elbows with the Patagucci vest crowd. The guy who manages this place ("dang") seems to tolerate us unwashed types, as long as we don't post polemics. You're not necessarily in the wrong place, but I can see how you might feel outnumbered.
Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.
Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.
There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.
Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.
Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.
It's because of misaligned incentives.
Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.
First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.
First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.
1. "better is subjective" and what reddit's native app is trying to do is "better" for reddit's bottom line. 2. more importantly, there is a case of "good enough". As I'm sure we've seen over the history of the internet, the "better product" doesn't always win. this is 1000x truer for social media. Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives. it lets you scroll, look at pretty pictures, and maybe up/down vote quickly. Anything else to that user is fluff. You can skimp out on a lot of features, even core ones, if those 3 parts are good enough.
The problem with that, if it's true, is that those people are less likely to be the content creators and more likely to be people who come to read what the 'serious' Reddit users post. Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.
Ultimately, Reddit's main work is to serve a small core group of people who post new content, and that content is what draws the rest of the users. They'll need those users to be happy in the first party app. That might be the case already. If it isn't, Reddit are taking a huge risk.
I agree. I guess the gamble here (that historically, usually pays off) is that the casual userbase size is good enough to keep the power users around, who ultimately want visibility. That's the hardest part of the modern internet and why social media survive well past what would be downfalls for any other product.
I'm not going to say Reddit is too big to fail, but I don't think reddit's death will be by a thousand paper cuts. it will heal with new mods as fast as the old ones leave. Whether it whither and rots away over the years with that new modbase is the big question mark.
They are risking the relationship to their army of unpaid cops though. These people are absolutely crucial for maintaining the gentrification of that space. Without them, all the hard work to slowly change the tone towards an ad-friendly and ideologically compliant tune is going to be lost. It is not unlikely, but by no means guaranteed that they can recruit another batch of people wohnst willing to do this for free after ruining the relationship with those who got invested during a time when the company was masquerading itself as a community.
It's a natural consequence.
This seems like half the argument. The other half of the argument is that you could build a federated system of similar efficiency where everybody notifies/queries a central hub decided by convention.
The important-ish distinction is that you don't need as many resources (for polling) if you can generate enough trust that ~everyone is willing to push to you.
(I don't want to get up my own ass here, so to my mind the only thing that matters about "having enough resources to make a better product" is that you have all the content, presumably by crawling the entire network on shorter intervals than anyone else.)
I wouldn't phrase it like that.
I'd say 'The anti-federation reality has always been that centralized entities have the authority to more quickly evolve their product.'
Whereas federated models have always had a terrible time upgrading standards in a timely manner, even when upgrades are obviously needed.
However, products typically exist in distinct phrases -- rapid growth/evolution is eventually followed by stability/maturity.
Once the product switches to that latter mode, the evolutionary speed benefits of centralization dull.
Obvious example: AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ's initial popularity... before multi-client Trillian et al. became preferable... because the limited intersection feature set it supported already covered everything everyone wanted to do via IMs.
Reddit reached feature completion and maturity a while ago, which made it ripe for disruption via a decentralized clone.
However, they're just realizing the emperor has no clothes and their only remaining moat is their existing users, and users are a fickle moat.
All good things have to end but this was avoidable.
But don't worry, that's not going to happen here. You don't need a decentralized non-profit community, trust me. It's going to work out this time. Really.
With that said it's in YC's best interest to keep users happy, only change what is requested and generally keep the status quo. Unfortunately for a company like Reddit that is a social media site and has to make money with their social media product, keeping users happy at all costs is not in their best interest (though that has yet to be seen).
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...
I built HACK specifically to be able to be notified when people reply to me. That's one of my selling points.
I was spoiled by Apollo for Reddit and HACK has done the same thing for HN. Thank you!
And now I’m posting my first HN comment on this app to the dev hahah.
Note that all of these are still centralized, so still subjects to similar issues. Once again selfhosting is the best xay forward
But for the rest of us, there's always a choice to foster a new community. Whether there is enough for that, and if a server is ready for that load, are big questions to answer though
The reach of contrived political philosophy, fiat economic hustle, and pop culture gabber can be constrained; the obsolescence of /. , MySpace, and the like did not destroy reality. Now we know the outcome of the social media experiment. Utter dumpster fire.
It occurs to me people made a whole lot of small business work before handing sacks of cash to cloud SaaS
We need less adminisphere in all contexts so we can screw up again, let the wrong people helicopter us with banal AI bots, make lizard brain m sedate until it gets bored with AI bots. Then we’ll trot out a new copium for the masses and they can lean back again, super proud of their commitment to whatever hallucinated ideology they believe they’re serving.
All while waving off the ecological impact, because reality is just a big graph, mmmk
It's the normal users that suffer. Hopefully that suffering will hit Reddits usage/cash flows enough to make them u turn.
They still can, but most sites these days are fine going where the people go, and linking to their custom stuff.
The alternative is the god awful updated site or their app. I hope you like adverts.
Only if there was a way to host websites where no central authority ever owned the data and the people who ran relays got paid in some form of cryptographically secure crypto currency. Frontend clients that made requests would need to pay in the same token to avoid abuse.
Then musk took over, and he banned them from using the API and forced them to close down. What a stand up guy.
Unfortunately Mastodon feels a bit empty, there's not many people on it yet.
If Alice posted once the last months, and Bob 20 times, and they both post another post, then ... maybe Mastodon will promote Bob's post and demote Alice's because Bob has been more active? (I would have preferred the opposite, hmm)
Exactly! I can comment on a post and have real engagement with someone which hasn't happened in years on Twitter.
It's no surprise that can end up feeling like an echo chamber. It's getting better than it was when I first started using it about six months ago but some of the posts people catch heat for seem a bit too over the top.
One of my favorite examples was a user who posted a photo of their dinner. It was nothing crazy just like rice, veggies, and chicken. They were immediately accosted for not posting a trigger warning since some people have eating disorders. That's the type of community I have no patience for.
We can build a Reddit replacement… we just have to want to
To me it signals you're a fairly new entrant to the intertubez.
Third party frontends for a given backend have existed since time immemorial, with or without sanctioned access to the backend's innards.
Alternatives to Explorer and Program Manager for a Windows shell are one of the older examples, more contextually relevant and newer examples would be programs like Pidgin and Trillian which served as third party clients for AIM, MSN, YIM, ICQ, etc.
None of this in any general sense is going away, though specific examples might.
He probably could have walked away will at least a few million vs shutting it down if there was a small level of negotiation that took place here. I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call but strategic accounts normally get pretty seasoned sales folks assigned to them. They are used to having hard conversations around pricing and pissed off customers. That's all part of negotiation.
That call was brutal to listen too.
Or, is saying you're shutting down part of negotiation too? This likely took it too far if it was, in that you're making reddit look like the bad guy very publicly now. So, it's probably worth it for reddit to cut ties and force people into the reddit app.
No winners here:
* Apollo the company is gone.
* Apollo users are gone.
* Reddit has no customer paying money.
* Reddit cannot reference them.
* Reddit users are ticked off.
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situation is probably incredibly stressful, but when you have 50k+ subscribers per year + millions of happy loyal users, you gotta start bringing in outside people to help with these things. He's just letting a lot of people down.
I don't mean to trash the guy, but I hope that the other third-party apps see this example and change their response to find a better outcome for their users.
This should have gone like, "Hey, in a few months we're rolling this out and wanted to give you a heads up so you know before anyone else, since you're a major API user. We wanted to offer you a grace period and special pricing. When's a good time to chat we'll fly out.". Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.
This is all just my opinion based on what I've read so far.
If they wanted him to pay $20 million, they'd certainly have given him much better than a brief phone call.
But that's the point. They're revealing with their actions that they don't actually want him to pay the money. What they want is to shut it down. Charging a sum of money that they know he won't pay is just an easy way to do that.
I pay Apple more than a million a month and I don’t even have a contact email.
Just saying, a Christmas card would be nice.
He's made it abundantly clear why he doesn't want to do that, who are you (or anyone else but him) to say "No you're not allowed to have opinions, you MUST create your own alternative"?
> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.
> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.
Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.
Reddit from 2017 or so is open source!
It’s pretty clear that there’s no negotiating left, so I’m not sure what relevance this has anymore. A few days ago? Yeah maybe.
If the CEO is maliciously accusing you of threatening them, then there’s nothing left to negotiate. The relationship is beyond broken.
> Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.
He has already made it clear he’s not interested in building a competitor (the quote is literally right there in the comment you replied to), so, once again, what’s your point?
It’s plainly evident that Christian is done, and I don’t blame him.
The RIF and Sync devs are too, and I’m sure all the other apps will soon announce shutdowns at the end of the month too.
Because some people don’t want to! And that’s okay.
Would you want to moderate Reddit? I get that Apollo is in a good position to take their users with them, but it's not like it's going to be easy to build a Reddit when what you've made so far has been a frontend for Reddit and some mobile widget spin-offs.
Many of us can make a frontpage for hacker news in a few hours, some might even be able to grow a userbase on it but that doesn't mean we can do what dang does.
But I would enjoy HN more with a soupcon of joking (currently considered zero-value). I benefit from my bread being leavened, I like programming tutorials with humour. So it's understandable why people might want to change the policy.
> ... I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.
If a bargaining chip is only useful in making a deal you've decided cannot be made, why bother holding onto it? Better to tell your fans outright that you're worn out and not interested.
I suspect that both reddit and apollo know that most of the content generation happens on Reddit controlled properties.
Apollo users probably do not generate enough content to sustain a reddit-like website.
In addition to what everyone else has said, he really has 1 month if he has any chance of siphoning off reddit users.
Yeah, what's the deal with this iOS developer not wanting to start a competitor to checks notes one of the largest websites in the world? Surely you just up and did that last week, it's no big deal.
I guess I should start getting used to saying "Jesus christ, HN" now that I won't be saying "Jesus christ, Reddit" anymore.
That is not at all the same as building an iOS client using an API as a one man show (or 1-3) and directly selling that.
Yeah, the conversation is so cringe. Why is he beating around the bush so much ? He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout. It sounds easy to make that proposition. Instead, he uses terrible verbiage like, "go quiet, I'm joking, opportunity cost, Bob's your uncle, yada yada". Why is he so terrible at talking ? Nothing in the call resembles a sales pitch if he is actually trying to sell a product for $10M.
He's a 20-something year old developer. This isn't his comfort zone and did not expect himself to be in this position.
I know I would be terrible if I was in his shoes.
The response seems to be a resounding no.
This call was awful to hear as an entrepreneur. He is not at all clear about what he wants, and I think he's honest when he says it's "mostly a joke" - I'm getting the sense he threw out a strangely-worded scenario hoping that he could perhaps get some money. If he was serious about getting money, and he's primarily a software developer and not a negotiator, it would've been lovely if he had gotten proper counsel for this negotiation.
He is asking for clarification, something you do when you have a good business relationship with someone.
> He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout.
He doesn't. He is saying that 20$M is clearly overpriced and that if it was true then reddit would come up with a ludricous number like 10M to make that API be turned off. He just uses quiet because reddit described the API use as Loud.
It's not an offer, it's calling someone's bluff out.
Think in poker someone says "my hand is worth 20 million" and you got pretty good cards you would tell them "go all in because I am gonna keep covering whatever you raise" and then they do not go All In, you got a pretty good case to think their initial comment was not true.
From the post:
> I bring this [audio recording] up for two reasons: ... It shows why I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.
He mentions that it was spez AKA Steve Huffman the CEO of reddit. The call really does sound amateurish and the joke/negotiation tactic/money request/??? was really unprofessional but Steve seems to have completely misconstrued the whole interaction and blown up at him. I would say this is worse of the CEO to use this to spread slander especially when he already apologised for misunderstanding Selig and then privately walked it back
Christian is acting in a surprisingly civil manner despite the repeated lies and smears made by Steve and others at Reddit. I see that as being professional.
Also, what things are priced at is not what they cost …
> Also, what things are priced at is not what they cost …
So if that’s the best argument in favor of Reddit, then it’s Reddit that’s being illogical. Or to be more straight, lying.
> Why go for $10m if there is no need to because you have already adjusted your own pricing upwards.
Because $20M is neither the amount Christian was earning, nor the cost that Reddit was paying to provide API access. Steve explicitly said it was a lost opportunity. There was simply no way that Christian could’ve paid that insane price. However, Reddit could’ve earned $20M themselves per year by acquiring Apollo. If the $20M opportunity was even remotely true, that is.
Reddit pays Apollo 10M, starts serving their ads in the app, and now rakes in 20M/year without any extra effort.
Conversely, now they need to convince all the angry users of Apollo to come back to use their shitty website/app, something that will never happen. A lot of people that aren’t even using Apollo are going to be angry at the mistreatment and leave the site altogether. On the whole it’s quite likely that Reddit’s losses will amount to more than the 10M they’d have to pay once to get a ton of money in the future.
They are. They're just pretending they aren't. No one is going to pay the amount they're charging.
It's really confusing. He wants Reddit to pay $10 million so he isn't "loud" with API usage? He wants them to buy and takeover the app? He's wants a payment to shutdown? Is he even serious about any of this? I get the impression he lacks the confidence to ask for a $10 million acquisition, so instead he approaches the subject casually as a joke, and the entire conversation spirals into confusion due to the lack of clarity.
Either way, that's not a great deal for Reddit. They might as well charge the $20 million, and if he can't find a way to pay it then Apollo shuts down and the majority of users return to the official Reddit site/app for free. There's no benefit to paying $10 million.
The call was a failure between the two parties and likely destroyed any future negotiations. I think the best suggestion was from another user here. Only allow Reddit official subscribers to use third party apps. Reddit can charge users whatever they want, and app developers can monetize their apps however they choose.
Apollo has no leverage here unless there is strong evidence most of the Apollo users will leave Reddit if the app shuts down. I don't believe they will. The other potential leverage is the upcoming subreddit blackouts, or hinting at taking the Apollo users to start a competitor. The developer said they are not going to build a competitor (that was a mistake, they shouldn't have revealed that card), so I think the blackouts are the only chance of lowering API costs.
If Apollo's userbase was actually generating $20mm/yr, acquiring Apollo for $10mm is a no-brainer. But if that were the case, keeping Apollo running as it is would also work.
Obviously this is not the case. Apollo is confusing costing $20mm with generating $20mm.
I think you underestimate the fallout here.
I don’t know if I’ll quit Reddit entirely, but I’m certainly done engaging at the level that I use to. I no longer trust how Reddit will decide to use my data or how they’ll pull the rug from me. They’re pre-IPO and already getting desperate. Shits going to hit the fan when they IPO and investors expect constant growth.
Lemmy is developed by and its main instance run by tankers. We need a healthier alternative.
> Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history.
> ...
> The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of authoritarian communist states, such as the People's Republic of China, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Additionally, tankies have a tendency to support non-socialist states if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general.
---
Or a quick way - if you think of countries that have military parades with tanks rolling down city streets, those are supported by "tankies".
Does it matter though if Lemmie is run by such a group when you could potentially spin up your own instance where you enforce totally opposing values?
(alas, its shut down... but it used to be that if you looked at the 'moderated servers on a mastodon site you'd find parler in that list which was a modified mastodon instance that no one else wanted to talk to)
If your content is sufficiently shunned from the main instances/interchanges how discoverable would your posts be? Or would you go "ok" and accept the political or philosophical lean of the main site so that your content got syndicated/federated to others?
Obviously there's nothing stopping from some instances from creating closed or gated content, but the public facing ones with like 10-20 years of gardening input freely given by end users can never be taken away from the community, which is what's happening with Reddit and has happened with IMDB and countless others.
Any thread about Google Search on here is filled with people saying they have to do "site:reddit.com" to get accurate results. I've never seen another site used in that example. I'd love to be proven wrong on this because it means there's some great internet resource I've been missing out on.
Those were the people using Apollo in the first place.
1) ok so, according to you I’m costing you $20M/year in API load
2) How about you pay me $10M which is 6 months of your cost, and I turn off the $20M/year burden immediately.
3) you make your money back in 6 months and within a year are up $10M
The problem is Apollo does not cost Reddit $20M/year lol
Your first sentence misrepresents what the Apollo dev said. Actually, it's the exact same misrepresentation that the Reddit CEO knowingly made in public.
First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.
The CEO, in contradiction with publicly available data, claimed that Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year in lost opportunity. So the dev jokingly offered to sell Apollo for half that price. Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.
Further I wouldn’t be trusting a hot take from ~100 points GuestXXXXXX at this point of the PR dumpster fire cycle.
I disagree, I think the Apollo dev would have happily taken the $10 million.
> Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.
The $20 million price is irrelevant here. Reddit doesn't need to pay to acquire these users. They are Reddit users (they're registered there, and Reddit knows everything about them). They can close down Apollo and they'll get almost all the users back for free.
If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition. But, that's not the case here.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not siding with Reddit and I think both sides are losing here due to their poor management.
That doesn't mean he was demanding money.
> If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition
I do agree it's difficult to calculate the value of a user in this case.
Yes, Apollo users are Reddit users, but they are specifically Reddit users who don't use Reddit's official clients. The question is how many of those users will move to Reddit's official app after June 30, and how many will look for alternative platforms that aren't so manipulative and abusive. I for one have deleted my Reddit account and won't be going back.
I think you're in the minority. If there was a well known Reddit alternative at the moment, I could see Reddit having their Digg moment and losing a large part of the community. Subreddits could blackout and threaten to leave to the other website. That is something that would be taken seriously. Dozens of subreddits with 1-50 million users potentially jumping ship at once. If you had the right platform, with the right attributes and reputation, the stars would be perfectly aligned to take in a mass number of Reddit users. But, no one is in the right position to catch the ball at the moment (I don't claim it's an easy position to be in). It's actually unfortunate, because these moments don't come too often and I believe it allows Reddit to make these changes with little repercussions. Fans of old.reddit.com better watch out, I bet it's on the chopping block within the next year.
It was the same with Facebook: You want me to use my real name? I'm gone. Never used Facebook again. Specifically in Germany (where I would argue the population values privacy more than in other nations) that was a deal breaker for a lot of them when they started enforcing that policy.
(This example is not about a platform but more of an example of quitting a product because of "bad" behavior) Mobile games getting more and more P2W and have a half-life of ~1 year? Yeah, count me out. Especially with that example I know a lot more people that said "fuck that" and won't touch mobile games with a ten foot pole anymore.
And honestly it will be the same with Reddit. It's not like it's essential. I'll be good without it and I would guess many more people too. The two examples I gave made my life better (less screen time) and the Reddit move will do the same.
As for how it'll play out for the majority of people: I guess we'll see. But looking at Reddits latest track record of bad decisions I would argue it won't be the last one and there is a lot of potential to create a new Digg moment.
I don't have a real name on Facebook not have any of my friends. There are also a lot of fake/troll accounts on Facebook. I don't think they ever enforced that policy.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
> Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.
Not sure how people are misunderstanding him, he literally said he was joking… He knows it’s not a great deal for Reddit. His whole point is that the app isn’t actually worth $20 million a year, which is what they want him to pay. It’s not even worth $10 million. Not to him or Reddit or anyone else.
Right now there seems to be two options on the table.
1. The Apollo dev pays $20 million per year for API access.
2. Apollo shuts down and the users return to the official Reddit website/app for advertising.
If Reddit is refusing to lower their API pricing, doesn't this mean the users are worth $20 million? If the users were worth $1 million, then why wouldn't Reddit charge $2 million for the API and double their income on those users?
That being said, something else must be at play here. The users are not worth $20 million and Reddit refuses to take anything less than $20 million. If I had to guess, they want to boost metrics before going public and are willing to take a hit to their reputation to do so.
It’s the same reason I don’t use instagram—seeing an ad every two images bugs the crap out of me. The difference with Reddit is there was a nice third party option.
Him not rabble rousing their user base against them would have been the benefit.
If he's leaving all that on the table out of spite, well thats his money to lose. But he shouldn't call the world unfair
Reddit's actions here make it pretty clear that they just want the app (all third-party apps) to shut down — if they actually wanted a solution they could easily lower the pricing to something more realistic and/or give a slightly longer transition period.
No. Apple chooses this on their own. Their internal teams find new and interesting apps, songs, etc.
When they announced the iPhone X, they used a band without telling them before. They asked the band to send them some music samples and just a generic "this might end up on an Apple marketing material one day". The band was shocked when it turned out to be THE song on THE intro video for the iPhone X.
Let that be the lesson: don't sink your time (and money) into building OSS (or a business) on top of a platform. It's like building on sand.
The business plan and your personal savings should reflect that it can (and will) disappear in an instant.
Don’t be afraid to bring people in when something is outside your area of expertise.
In a way, Reddit couldn't have asked for a worse outcome, they have come out looking terrible and he has come out looking great and defining the community discussion.
The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.
RIP
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/144jp3w/sync_wi...
Personally, 1) is not really an issue and people are enjoying the outrage train, and that's ok and valid and whatever, but it's a third party app. It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make more money. At the mid term is a great incentive for Reddit to improve their shitty app experience ("but Ads!" yeah, ads of course, you're not paying shot for using it, it's an impopular but pragmatic business model)
But 2) it's the one that's really concerning. Hopefully they reverse this course for this point specifically cause this has a measurable impact on eyeballs, which ultimately means money.
inb4: "Apollo dying means less eyeballs too dummy", yeah as I mentioned before the outrage is the fad. Once it passes, will see how much people actually leaves (little to none alternatives for Reddit btw). My bet is that could result in a small hump, if anything, in the long run.
Cue people being understandably upset.
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhisto... covers the moderation side.
https://reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_recently... Talks about accessibility.
They could have simply said "Due to business pressures, we're going to stop offering our API in 1 year" and honestly, nobody would have blinked an eye.
Or they could have said "Due to business pressures, we're going to include advertisements in the API. Any clients found deliberately not displaying the ads will have their API keys permanently revoked."
Or they could have said "Due to business pressures, we're going to stop offering free API access. Users who subscribe to Reddit can use their own personal API keys with a limit of 1000 calls per day."
They did none of those things; they raised prices to a point that was completely untenable and gave app developers 30 days to FOAD.
Third party apps representing less than 5% of Reddit's traffic, this is by far not "most people's" favorite app.
Surely there is a reasonable business case to be made for this policy change. Attempted character assassination of a 3rd party developer with blatant falsehoods, not so much. I dunno, maybe they aren't worried and there's plenty of investors an wall street ready to hand over big bags of money to a demonstrated liar.
Why is this not an issue for user's protesting? I use Relay for Reddit on Android and I think it's absolutely the best way to view Reddit on mobile if you're a fan of old.reddit.com.
That app is going to die and I say screw them. I owe reddit nothing. If they want to turn the site into something that I don't want to use because it makes them more money that way. Good luck with that but I won't be around to see it.
I'd gladly pay for Reddit Premium (which has no ads) to continue to use 3rd party apps that I like. But it's not about the money or the ads -- it's about control.
I get the feeling that some people are trying to spin this into a crusade of sorts, I fully get this feeling from your words.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that I guess, but look a the big picture as well: you've used the services of a private company for years, paying zero cents. They made a business decision after potentially delaying it for years, and you rant about control. This outrage makes little sense, we don't own Reddit, never had. We're just making noise because some of us confused private property for their own.
In the end, it's their site and their decision to make, but it's understandable many people are upset by their actions and no longer want to use the site (which, btw, even if you were using it for "free" you may have been contributing in other ways via posts, comments, moderation, etc).
It also means losing potential customers - I would have been willing to upgrade to Reddit Premium to continue using Apollo, for example, but now I wouldn't even consider it.
But if they're profitability involves alienating me as a user then I'm going to be alienated and I'm going to act like I'm alienated. I think the outrage makes perfect sense in this case. I'm equally outraged at other companies doing things that manipulate their customers for a tiny bit more profit (like shrinkflation).
Ironically they could have turned this situation into profit from me as I'm happy to pay for Reddit if it was required to allow me to use it in the way that I'm accustomed. Instead of embracing me as a customer, they want me gone.
While that's not false, look at it the other way: I've provided content for a private company for years, taking zero payment. Millions of us have. Reddit lives and dies by user submissions and comments, and taking what seems to be a stance that's wildly hostile to users feels very foolish to me.
Can you realistically expect to have some sort of return, wether in control or whatever for that? It feels more aligned to a tantrum rather than a coherent argument. Have we consiously forget how Web 2.0 works?
The no-brainer decision would be to make your app a lot better than any third-party app instead of pulling the rug from under people whose work has made reddit better in the long-run.
Let's see what that would cost the average user.
As mentioned in the post:
$0.24 for 1,000 API calls, average 345 requests per day per user
I have no idea if they prorate charges if you use less than 1000 calls so lets assume they don't, so the minimum daily cost for a user is $0.24.
$0.24 per day, for a 30 days is: $7.20
Hmm, I can't see many people wanting to pay that monthly.
Maybe if reddit had a lower tier (0.12 for 500 calls would be $3.60/month)
That's not even dealing with the fact that this process would be difficult for users to actually use, and may run afoul of Apple's app store rules.
While that solution may be appealing to tech-savy end users, it's completely untenable for a popular app, especially given the tight time window required.
Why 30 days? I mean, I know that Reddit announced that that's when they'll kill the API... but that's a completely arbitrary deadline.
I stopped subscribing after after I got GPT4 API access because I developed a little personal app which used the OpenAI API to just read and write directly from plain text files and that suits my workflow better than the ChatGPT website.
But it sucks because I’m constantly thinking about how much I’m using, and how many tokens I’m putting into my query, because each API call costs me money. It was way nicer just paying a flat fee and using it “as much as I want”, even though this actually costs me way less because I use don’t use $20USD worth of API calls in a month, even with GPT4.
It would be a nightmare to use Reddit if it cost money to scroll down or post a comment. On the other hand, that might actually be a good disincentive to help me spend less time on it.
My problem is that before I send each query, I think to myself “is this worth a fraction of a penny?” and, when I have a bunch of follow up queries, I think “the previous query/response history is getting pretty big, should I trim some of it before I send my next query?” or “Should I skimp on this one and just use GPT3.5?”
… I now pay $25 for their unlimited option even though I probably use less than 1k searches per month anyways
The way these things work nearly everywhere is that $0.24 for 1000 API calls means your cost in a given billing period for N API calls during a billing period is 0.24 ⌈N/1000⌉ or 0.24 N/1000. The first is if they do not prorate, the second is if they do.
If it takes on average 345 requests per day per user, that would be 10 500 per month per user, which would be $2.64 per month per user if they do not prorate and $2.52 per month per user if they do prorate.
However, it naturally stopped working when Twitter basically killed the free tier of their API.
It would likely still work on the "Basic" API tier, but I'm not paying $100 a month to use a Twitter app.
That said, while I realize it's just his side of the story, the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational (and he apparently has the receipts to back it up), while Reddit comes across as embodying typical corporate greed. On a related note, I think everyone should understand that, in the long term, "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations - the incentives are just too strong to prioritize short/medium term revenue growth over user experience.
In any case, while I don't think the people shouting "I'm done with Reddit" will make much of a dent in Reddit's overall usage numbers, I personally am deleting my account and blocking reddit on my devices. If anything I think this drama gave me a nice little push to take more control over my time that will make me happier in the long run.
I only name drop the app because it has served me well for ad blocking and custom rules (like blocking Reddit).
I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion.
It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.
The more I talk to people the more I feel like people just like to party/waste money more than work.
Is... that a surprise to you?
The parts of Reddit that people actually like – a single lightweight web app (old.reddit.com) minus all the fluff (constant redesigns, broken video player, live streaming service, overengineered mobile apps, avatars, NFTs, coins/gifts, social networking, chat, clubhouse competitor, expensive acquisitions) – would have survived perfectly well without VC money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate...
Seriously- I’ve had my eye on a Patagonia black hole duffle and now I’ll pull the trigger.
- The guy who now has too many nanopuff jackets, but I will die on this hill.
https://qz.com/patagonia-s-3-billion-corporate-gift-is-also-...
That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.
This was very obviously not done "for pure personal financial gain..." But should billionaires be able to donate billions, tax-free, to exert political influence, which, generally (though, with rare exceptions, like perhaps Chouinard), they will use to directly benefit themselves and their family? And, should they be able to do so in a way that maintains that political influence for their family for generations to come?
Maybe Chouinard and his family have good intentions, but, like the article said, "one doesn’t want a constructed tax system predicated upon everyone being like the Chouinards."
Chouinard's goal was for his mission (the raison d'etre for Patagonia – to make high quality goods for outdoor activities, and to use the profits from this venture to protect outdoor spaces) to outlive his personal stewardship of Patagonia's control.
When that's your goal, the set of options available is rather narrow. You have to pass on control to people you trust, whom you've developed strong relationships with, and whom you trust to evolve and pass that mission down to the next generation. Most importantly, you want to avoid the kind of grifters that Patagonia has been allergic to in its history.
Plus, Patagonia already has a rich synergistic history of funding activism. It's not at all comparable to Gates, Carnegie, or Rockefeller who made their money and decided what "good" to spend it on in two discrete steps. For Patagonia, the most important thing is effective stewardship over an already-sailing ship
Chouinard has written a lot of material that you can read for yourself and form your own opinion on. He's remarkably direct and transparent, there aren't really smoke and mirrors to navigate.
That being said, anything he does with his "wealth" (itself an absurd idea, as he would never liquidate Patagonia shares and still never has) is going to rhyme with what other powerful people do with their wealth. You have to judge the people, not just the structures they're working within.
Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.
Fashion benefits from exclusivity and brand identity. It behooves Patagonia to brand itself as "not evil" or "not capitalist" or whatever, it's ultimately a fashion statement.
Social networks suffer from exclusivity, and brand identity is an afterthought. I'd wager that most Reddit users have a neutral/negative view of the Reddit brand, but they use Reddit anyways because of network effects (everyone is there) and the brand doesn't really impact their favorite subreddits. There have been many attempts at "exclusive" social networks with carefully crafted brand identity, and they always fail.
There's a theory that social media also has fashion phases, but I don't think we have enough data to back that up. MySpace lasted about 6 years. Facebook is 19 and Twitter is 17 and both are going strong.
[1]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/an-update-on-microfiber-po...
Patagonia do make high performance plastic products for activities where performance matters and in a better way than most, but have not been a performance focused company for decades. The original breakthrough of using plastic fleece in the wilderness due to it's non water absorbing properties doesn't really justify the size of their production with those materials today. They make most of their money selling plastic fleeces for people to wear to coffee shops. This segment of the market didn't realy exist before brands like Patagonia so they while they may offer a better alternative today, they are helped to create this particular problem.
And if you've ever seen their clearance lists, they're as bad as other fashion companies for overproduction - new colours every season which need to make way the following season.
Replacing plastics in their casual ranges and extending the lifecycles of the colours alone would make a bigger difference than a couple of research grants, but is risky for sales and less sexy. So take those statements with a pinch of salt.
They’re not. They’re also “evil” in this way. Perhaps less so. But it’s a property of money making endeavors to prioritize making money.
Not a perfect company, I mean almost all of their iconic garments are plastic, but they're doing far more than other technical outerwear companies.
I wear it about a third of the year here in Seattle. In the five years I have owned it I have washed it maybe once and possibly never. I don’t even wear it in the rain often because I have a rain shell which is also plastic and also doesn’t get washed.
I do also have some hemp pants from Patagonia. I wear those often. They made it about three years before they needed to go in to have pockets repaired from cell phone damage. Those fibers require farm land and water to grow. Repairs help mitigate that damage but it still exists.
I’m honestly not sure which garment has the most negative effect on the environment.
I'm gonna use that statement from now on.
I would assert that there does not exist a company which is both larger than Patagonia, and more moral than they are.
If you keep a company private, and you don't take sizable outside funding, you can pretty much do whatever you want with your company.
Reddit owes absolutely nothing to those developers. This guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions, meaning he made millions, if not tens of millions, off of exploiting the API while not displaying Reddit's ads.
Poor Apollo developer, he's going to have to wipe his tears with Benjamins and blow his nose with his silk disposable tissue.
2) Sure, he made a ton of money running Apollo, doesn't make what Reddit did less scummy.
3) No requirement, but it's largely accepted as courtesy to notify developers of any changes to the API policy, especially when it comes to pricing. Giving the developer only 30 days to rework their business model, change app architecture/design/code, pass App Store Reviews with Apple/Google, migrate subscribers to a higher-priced tier to afford the increase in pricing, and more is tantamount to spitting in their face. Especially when it's a drastic change from 8+ years of more or less the same.
4) Even if the developer did update pricing to be able to afford the new API rates, the developer himself stated he would have to be $50,000/month in the red for months while he waits for current subscription holders to have their subscription terms expire and renew at the increase rate, and that doesn't count lost subscribers who just decide to not renew.
5) Reddit admins and their CEO slandered the developer in interviews, outright lied, and got caught as the developer recorded the audio of all of their calls proving those lies. Reddit has done this stuff before (Back in 2016 the CEO was caught editing comments critical of him in the production database).
6) Reddit has every right to do what their doing, as Apollo has every right to call them out on how shit this whole thing is, when just back in January they said they had no plans to change their APIs in the short or medium term.
Bad situation all around, but Reddit knows they're doing this to kill third-party apps. They just have to lie that they're being reasonable to save face so investors will buy them up when they go public in a few months.
Doubly so if you've been repeatably telling developers you're not changing it & that developer has reach out specifically to say I know you have an IPO soon. Anything we can do on our end.
Reddit has discoverability and single sign on for a bunch of forums. It also has some fun nice to haves like a mixed feed of all your interests. But old school forums tend to be less commercial and sometimes can be a lot more tightly knit.
I use old.reddit.com on mobile and desktop so I'm not directly effected by these changes aside from the likely steep decline in moderation quality as longstanding mods lose their tools.
I feel compelled to migrate from reddit and only utilize it as a resource for knowledge when it's the only resource for some obscure niche thing or sub-culture. That last statement alone speaks volumes about the danger of centralizing communities as reddit has done.
Maybe a federated internet is back on the table for the future.
Reddit for amusement is a blackhole.
For the best really to leave.
Bye bye.
1. From Marcus Aurelius, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit. I remove that pool of thought from my lived life and arguably my happiness ought to increase.
2. From Epictetus, "It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them." I'll admit do a lot of mindless browsing on reddit. In the past I've used site blockers to block loading reddit for me and I'd have the muscle memory of cmd+t then typing in "old" to load reddit. That all too common doomscroll of post after post, reading comment after comment, still has a pronounced grip on me. It would serve me well to reclaim that time and my unconscious self away from reddit.
This APIgate honestly, in an entirely self-serving way I'm thankful for it. For it to give pause to reflect on my own relationship with reddit.
If they're doing this, old.reddit.com is on the chopping block too, might as well get ahead of that sooner than later.
I know this whole situation is doing a lot of harm and there's a lot hurt over for folks, especially financially, but I'll take this as an opportunity to grow.
I think there's something weird that goes on with having a sub be a part of a whole and subject to the norms of the whole to some degree. Subs can keep things good, but it takes effort. There's some subs I'm part of where it's just super toxic all around. Part of that is because of the nature of the sub (for a game where the users constantly feel ignored and a little put upon by the devs), but that only partially explains how bad it gets.
For desktop, it's the best, and I'll seriously consider ditching Reddit for good when it's killed, but it seems to be extremely poorly optimized for mobile (unsurprisingly)
But I deleted my primary account some months ago *after an admin hijacked my mod status* in a sub that has 2MM users...
EDIT:
>>I'm not a head mod for any subreddit. But I do mod a few. It seems to me that reddit could simply replace the mods on subreddits that close down and force them open again.
Was posted in that thread - and this is precisely what they did to me after being top mod for TEN YEARS
https://i.imgur.com/6Y5u7O7.png
as far as I am concerned, /u/spez can go eat a dead baby as he so much stated in the early days of /r/cannabilism. Maybe reddit WILL be the dead baby he gets to eat.
-
I have never used a 3rd party app - but everyone always spoke highly of apollo - but this post just shows that apollo's founder has more class than the entirety of reddit's staff (or at least c-suite) combined.
I imagine they got some sort of 'consultant' or some stupid MBA firm like McKinsey or something telling them their KPIs were failing...
They needed to increase the revenues from their API to pay the consulting fees for their 'experts'
And frankly - reading the comments from spez and other reddit respondents in that thread, read like the idiots in Succession when they went to LA
Essentially what they are doing is trying to reach equilibrium in terms of users and income sources so it all looks tight on the books. They won’t IPO until they can figure out final changes in user numbers, etc.
That said, I have to think something is wrong: I seem to have been served the desktop version in Safari. I do have 1Blocker and AdGuard running in Safari.
honestly that's why Apollo is one of the rare apps I've actually fully paid for - iamthatis aka Christian is such a solid dude, always keeps his cool, no drama, gets his work done, cares about his users, like - it's a tragedy that Reddit is killing off his masterwork. They ought to be hiring him to do their mobile apps for them.
So you have to figure that all the revenue is largely from contributing users and the dynamics on social media go something like 5-10% of people post all the content. Also, i heard it has great tooling for mods as well.
We'll see how big of a blow this is but yeah, you're right, a lot of Apollo users are probably high value reddit users.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
To be fair, this doesn't seem that bad, especially in comparison to the API price hike and their handling of it.
The thread he changed the comments in was filled with users literally accusing multiple innocent people of being pedophiles who ate children, but sure, it's a bridge too far to change the user tag of comments literally threatening him rather than e.g. banning everyone who commented there or reporting the threats to the police which would have been well within his rights!
I'm just saying that it could be a dangerous thing to do, if only because it creates doubt and deniability.
However in this case...
He already admitted to changing post titles (in his own words to fix typos and other minor corrections). So he got the hang of modifying prod data with a "good cause" and once he had the know-how he turned around and sued it to edit someone's comment.
Had that not caused a big stir, maybe it would have become his new past time. maybe it has, maybe he goes back 5-6 years to comments you cannot reply to because the threads are locked and adds little jokes there, who knows cause he is now totally untrustworthy on this matter.
Only a founder would get reprimanded for manipulating production data, anyone else would get fired on the spot (as they should). I'm not here to argue which action is worse, I'm simply pointing out that this guy clearly has a control issue and poor judgment (which is common among CEO's, granted) and it's been obvious for years. Of course he's gonna distort his reality to suit his needs, that's what these guys do.
People don't learn when they get away with things like this, they just go bigger and crazier.
Absolutely not at any serious company; fucking with user data is a major taboo.
But the CEO? Who presumably presided over numerous discussions involving appropriate data access policies and risk to the company’s reputation? That’s shockingly juvenile and shortsighted.
It focuses on the "[apollo can] quiet down [for $10M]" topic in the conversation, and the apparent misunderstanding between Apollo and Reddit, Reddit taking "quiet down" to mean "go away quietly, without a lot of public noise", as a threat.
Apollo states that they meant "go dark", "reduce API usage", "reduce reddit opportunity cost". But for that position to make sense, Apollo would need some leverage here. They're using Reddit's API and platform behind the scenes - they have no leverage I can see. What am I missing?
> "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal!
And it would have been a deal: 6 months of opportunity cost upfront to then turn into real profit. Instead they are permanently lose the [possibly] majority of that opportunity when those users lose access to Reddit.
I dont think that is accurate. Reddit doesnt make 20M a year if they buy Apollo in this situation.
If something costs 20 million/yr to operate, buying it doesnt reduce that cost. You are just out 10M upfront and then 20M/yr.
The solution is not to buy it, but to make it stop.
Even if they could only get a quarter of that from users, they'd be rolling in money after a year or two.
> and then 20M/yr
The servers don't cost anywhere near that much to run.
Reddit has to say that the pricing it has is reasonable which means that they have to say Apollo can earn (at least!) USD 20M a year. If Apollo can earn USD 20M a year, buying it for USD 10M is indeed a steal. Normally, if you think a company makes 20M a year, you have to pay at least x 5, so USD 100M to buy this money printing machine.
>If Apollo can earn USD 20M a year, buying it for USD 10M is indeed a steal.
Not if you can get the same thing for doing nothing. Buy Apollo for 10M up front and make 20M/yr or dont buy Apollo and make 20M/yr. Does it really look like a steal when the alternative is free?
They claim that they would.
Sure, but that doesn't mean buying/owning apollo helps them eliminate that lost revenue. They eliminate lost revenue when Apollo stops existing, not when they buy it. What is the point of buying it if you dont want it to exist?
Take 2 options:
A> Buy Apollo for $10M, Apollo shuts down, 20M new revenue
B> Don't buy Apollo, Apollo shuts down, 20M new revenue
Spending $10M doesn't stop the losses, Apollo shutting down does.
I guess I want to emphasize that despite not being 3p client user (I was using old.reddit.com), this situation hurts sites reputation enough to bleed me as an user, enough for me to go through the trouble of actually wiping the account, in stead of leaving my content with me under <deleted>.
It is unlikely they'll feel short-term traffic effects of this, but content quality will suffer for sure, will see how that'll pan out. (From the safety of HN comments, of course).
If I can't use Sync I'm not going to use reddit.
The 80% are anonymous lurkers or accounts that very rarely post anything.
The remaining 20% is split 15/5, with the former being frequent contributors to discussions - and the final 5% being _content submitters_ .
The 5% power users interact via 3rd party apps because, quite frankly, the "official" UIs (App, Website) are totally shite.
They also maintain the automated tooling to keep order of communities - again, accessed via API.
Without the 5% submitting content, the 15% won't interact and provide the remaining 80% material to read.
No material to consume = no advert page impressions = no revenue stream.
Reddit can just force Apollo to shut down and accomplish the same for $10M less.
Apollo already has monetized users with subscription costs.
Well, had monetized users.
If Reddit purchases Apollo for $10 million, then those customers now belong to Reddit. For the first year, Reddit would "only" earn $20 - $10 = $10 million, but after that those customers would continue directly earning revenue.
It's all about reasoning with the value of the app in terms of the api rates. Either the rates are unreasonable, or that would be a reasonable sale to Reddit.
Do you think anyone believes that to be true?
This doesn’t make what reddit is doing any more reasonable though, imo.
Apollo's leverage was "We help keep power users on your platform, and keep them happy." And, as it turns out, while their numbers are not necessarily large, they are also some of the loudest and with most influence (see how many subreddits joined the blackout). What the outcome of this will be is to be seen, but it's a very shortsighted take from Reddit, in my own humble opinion.
But in the game of Christian vs Spez/Reddit Corp, I wonder about the wisdom of posting these recordings and going this nuclear on Reddit's brand. I suspect Reddit's got some good lawyers, whether you're in the US or Canada.
I don't think Apollo is using this argument as some sort of leverage. Reading through the post, they seem well aware that they are defenseless. They only have the court of public opinion.
Reddit's free APIs left a lot of uncaptured value on the table. This has become obvious by the sheer number of AI models trained on Reddit data. Free Reddit data goes into the machine, and piles of VC money comes out. Reddit wants in on it, but is unable to stop free API access without the consumer apps being collateral.
We're not disagreeing. The comment I was responding to was saying they are "paying" Reddit with content. As you noted, Reddit doesn't want that, instead, it's asking API users to pay real money so they can see the content without ads. That in itself is pretty reasonable I think - what may not be reasonable is how much Reddit is asking for.
> Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all
What's the breakdown of content producers on 3rd Party apps vs reddit.com and reddit apps? It is reasonable to assume this is a rational decision being made by Reddit after looking at the numbers and doing some projections.
Edit: removed references to ads from parent commenter paraphrasing
I never said any such thing about ads.
I mean, I'd rather not, but that wasn't even part of the discussion.
YouTube got away with lots of bad changes because many creators are getting paid to produce content and competing with YouTube is near impossible. But Reddit is one of many primarily text-based online communities and they are currently destroying the only things holding people on their platform. Aside from the userbase Reddit has no redeeming qualities that would make anyone hesitate to leave.
If you assume they know all what you said, and that they have dashboards showing breakdowns of submitters/commenters/voters by client, can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions? Even if you do not like the reason, do you think it may be rational?
IPO value. This entire scheme, is a last ditch attempt to maximise exit value for the founders. The actions all point in that direction, many fo which are borderline illegal.
Let's break it down. Reddit has had a metoric rise in the past 5 years, adding like 200 million mobile users to their official app. This started in 2018 when the first news of the IPO began. Reddit started heavily advertising.
They initially redesigned the web version, started giving a worse mobile experience and had a massive, intrusive banner that said "try the official app" on the mobile client. So we have a "friendlier" web experince and an aggresive app marketing push.
We now have more users than ever. Should we focus on efficiency, tools for mods etc? Nope, the entire product stack of reddit since 2019 has been releasing Monetasation tools. From badly hidden NFTs as profile pictures, to reddit awards paid with money, to ads hidden as actual content on the front page of the new web and mobile app.
So now we have record users, a new set of money making tools what else can we do to maximise exit value? We reduce 3rd party users, this way even if a fraction come to the app we still have new record user numbers. And we generate as much content as possible, preferably in areas that will be considered growth vectors in teh sale.
So reddit made a ridiculous API pricing plan, with 0 time to implement to essentially kill 3rd parties but not having to do it officially. Other less verifiable events that seem to be happening is that bots have increased, and some non english subs like the french and german communities are having new content generated by badly translating popular reddit posts with AI. This would benefit reddit as more content (even if by bots) is a higher exit price and communities that do not speak english using reddit more would also be seen as a positive by whoever would buy reddit. This is not attributable to reddit, bt if it was, it is straight up fraud. However the timing of the bot activity increasing and the non english subs seeing increased activity directly benefits the IPO plan therefore it is worth mentioning.
In other words, the charitable explanation is that this is the last hurrah in a 5 year plan to make the owners of reddit rich before they off load a website full of bots and angry users to whoever is silly enough to think they can fix this mess.
Then again. I hate using my phone in general, so I always think that any content creators would use desktop and maybe old reddit.
I can type just as quickly on a phone as I can on desktop, and in many ways I prefer it.
Imagine a free music festival with zero security. It would be chaos and the volunteer artists would stop performing.
Labeling that as "only costs" is extremely shortsighted.
Reddit is a shell of what it was when I started on the platform 14+ years ago.
It takes someone who is more than just a bean counter to realize that maybe, just maybe, the only reason people are interested in those free requests in the first place is because of the communities on Reddit that bring all the actual value.
And who knows, maybe one day everyone will realize that the “free social media monetized by ads” business just totally sucks and can only ever lead to situations like this.
Anyway, I quit cold turkey end of last year after being a daily user for those 15 years. Definitely right move.
I’ve only been using Reddit for an about 5.5 years, but when I first signed up I just didn’t use it because I used the website. Then I found Apollo and I became a daily user and it was my main social media.
I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.
Steve Huffman is not a good person.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
It is always remarkable to see what an absolute bankruptcy of ethics some corporate leaders are burdened with, and a relief to see the consequences hit them in the face.
No spez you utter cunt. The data is not yours. It's my posts on your website. Your own fucking terms say I grant you a right to copy it, not that it's fucking yours.
> We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrow
Is that a threat, lol?
>Blackout
> We respect your right to protest – that’s part of democracy.
>This situation is a bit different, with some mods leading the charge, some users pressuring mods. We’re trying to work through all of the unique situations.
>Big picture: We are tolerant, but also a duty to keep Reddit online.
>If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue. That’s a loss for everyone.
AKA: If you protest we will remove you from the mod team for that sub, and force the sub back to public.
What's the definition of a mod tool?
If a mod uses Apollo to keep up with the posts on their subreddit, is Apollo going to be exempt?
Or should Apollo pivot, add more moderation features and rebrand itself as a mod tool?
https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
It just makes no sense otherwise.
At least have your facts straight.
I can buy that Selig's words may have been intended, at some level, as a jokey hypothetical to draw a point into contrast. That is, he meant it as (fleshed-out sympathetic rewording): "If this really is just about a $20M drain to you, it'd be a dead-simple & efficient solution to pay $10M to make me go away quietly forever. But of course I wouldn't ask for that & you wouldn't do it, thus this isn't really just about solving your $20M/year cost center, but other mutually-agreeable futures."
But Selig's actual wording in the clip is exactly how people coyly/semi-deniably imply that they be handed various kinds of "go-away" or "hush" money. (That includes arrangements that might not technically be "blackmail" as a legal definition, but feel like vernacular 'blackmail' to laypeople or business-negotiators.)
Selig's opening words, of this audio clip, absolutely sound like an actionable offer "pay me this specific cash amount & your troubles – both technical/competitive & in terms of any ruckus I can raise in public – go away." I mean, here's Selig's exact words:
"Uh, hey, I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20M a year, you cut me a check for $10M, and we can both skip off into the sunset. 6 months of use, we're good. That's mostly a joke."
Until "that's mostly a joke", & depending on earlier context/levels-of-mutual-trust, that sounds like a specific offer to do whatever eases things for Reddit in return for $10M cash.
And even after "that's mostly a joke", the 'mostly' leaves open that maybe something of this shape is legitimately in Selig's mind as a resolution.
Wait a second, isn't that exactly what Reddit is doing by charging for API access with thirty days notice?
This is an offer to sell Apollo. The opening stage of a negotiation. There’s nothing wrong with saying this, at all.
The word choice, to my ears, more implies a "just gimme cash to make me shut up & disappear" attitude, or at least openness to torpedoing every other goal as long as the cash prize is big enough.
I further think Selig's rush to qualify it as "mostly a joke" is evidence that he noticed, in the moment, that what he just said sounded a bit brutally grubby. Maybe by this point he was getting angry his other hints that he mainly wanted an attractive buyout weren't being met by serious offers.
As I mentioned, such a tactic could be far from what the law declares as actionable 'blackmail' but still feel like a tough, "play ball or else" shakedown on the other side of the negotiation – the sort of thing people commonly describe, though somewhat figuratively/hyperbolically, as 'blackmail'.
Is there anything "wrong" with that style of making joking payoff offers to "skip off into the sunset"? Well, in negotiations, as long as you're not breaking the law or sabotaging your longer-run reputation, what's 'right' is largely what gets you what you want, both for now and in enduring relationships.
Did Selig get what he wanted? Does he come off as a desirable & trustworthy counterparty in other future collaborations & negotiations?
I think he's got a legitimate beef with Reddit in many dimensions, but at the same time this audio clip doesn't make him seem super clear & fair in his communications.
The Proposal was to have reddit by Apollo and monetize it, all the talk about going quiet doesn't make sense.
Really a thinly veiled attempt to ask for a buy out. The guy only needs to charge his users 2.50 more to make up for lost ad revenue, but instead he chose to burn down Reddit.
TBH that doesn't sound menacing to me...however you misinterpret it, it feels more like making a deal than blackmailing. Granted, even taking money to let a publicly discussed issue go away is more akin to a settlement.
1. You avoid all of this drama. Christian makes a post that says, "Reddit offered me a lot of money and I said yes because I want to have a lot of money. It's been a pleasure working with them and it's been a pleasure developing Apollo for you. Peace out." Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
2. Reddit could rather enshittify Apollo gradually, and/or fold Apollo's subscription model into Reddit's own model to maintain a premium power-user experience. It is an absurdly well-polished app, even if you added advertisements to it. It is a better user experience if the app gets worse slowly than if it disappears all at once and forces everyone to migrate to a new app. Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
[1]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
edit: I still think it was the wrong way to approach the situation. Consider this from reddit's perspective, it would only make sense for Reddit to pay for the traffic if they think they would lose it if it Apollo went away, but then it's not opportunity cost.
It doesn't make the change any better of a look for reddit, and you can certainly question whether it's true that Apollo users would just use reddit, but if you accept that then I don't think you can claim the moral high ground if you offer to accept payment to "make it go away". The developer should have approached this from the perspective of the value that Apollo offers users and reddit instead of the cost to make the problem go away. I imagine the dev doesn't accept that Apollo users would just switch over, but they shouldn't have made their statement in those terms then, and I think that was a mistake.
Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.
I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian's offer is for Apollo to "go away quietly", as in he personally won't make noise about it. I'm not honestly sure that there's another sound way to interpret this.
Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It's not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.
This 'clarification' that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will "go quiet", doesn't make sense, because Reddit doesn't need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.
What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that "Christian will shut down the app and go quietly" is the only answer that makes sense in context.
We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren't necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: "Vote for our initiative or else we'll stop funding you and fund your opposition"? No, almost certainly not. They'd say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.
Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he's offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It's not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. "Buy me out or else I'm going to cause even more public fuss about this". The way that it's communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
yes, that is the threat. Yes, it is also a business transaction. The two are not mutually exclusive.
black·mail:
demand money or another benefit from (someone) in return for not revealing compromising or damaging information about them.
They're buying Apollo. Then they can shut it down and make the app stop making API requests.
That means Reddit entered in bad faith - at that point you can't fault Apollo for reacting to that bad faith in any way really, as long as it was legal. You can't be expected to act in good faith if the other party isn't.
So, I still see no blame for Apollo folk (I don't use the app or know who they are before today)
It's bad all around, my friend.
Apps cost them money they could be making in advertising, So they want big money or will cut the apps off. If apps could offer more money than reddit thinks they could make without them, then everyone would be happy, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
If we are being real, Reddit wants Apollo gone. The only definition of fair would be terms both reddit and Apollo mutually agree to, but that isnt going to happen.
Apollo had a good run while it lasted, and I hope the devs walk away with some money to show for it.
Why piss off your userbase by trying to force them back to your inferior option when you could just buy the thing they've clearly shown they prefer and give it to them yourself?
Because Apollow doesnt bring in the revenue but Reddit's user hostile platform does.
The goal isnt to make the users happy or their preference, it is to make money.
If you run a restruant, and the restruant next door gives food away for free, of course diners will prefer it. The problem comes if the place next door is using your kitchen and supplies. Buying the restruant next door doesn't help your problem.
On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it "blackmail" - meaning they're losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can't they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo's costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?
When I negotiate the price on a piece of real estate, I often will include things that I want the owner to fix before closing (this is very common). The implication is "fix this or I won't buy the property".
Is that "blackmail"? Apparently according to Spez it is.
Joke was to offer the app for half the price if the pricing was legitimate, and keep the users.
Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...
Basically, the whole post hinges on the claim that spez was telling internal employees that Christian was making threats. But neither the calls nor the transcript seems to give any details about what exactly spez said. I'm inclined to take Christian's word, but we should all be aware that we are in fact taking him at his word, rather than the claim being proven.
It seems really hard to believe that spez would apologize for misunderstanding him and then immediately tell employees that he was threatening Reddit. This feels like a misunderstanding rather than malicious intent.
> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
This doesn't sound like a transcript. I don't know what it is, but that's not how anyone in a work call would behave. Supposing Apollo did threaten Reddit, why would spez even mention that to the mods? Something's weird.
He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators. He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place. Both are in the OP reddit thread here. Just search for "transcript" in the page.
It's the sort of thing you'd say to mods if you think it will get them off your back.
The part I pasted, right?
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
That's not a transcript. That's a sentence devoid of context. We're now two steps removed -- not only do we need to believe Christian, but Christian needs to believe whatever mod sent that to him. Who's the mod? Why is the mod telling Christian anything? Why was Steve talking to mods about Apollo's threat? None of this makes any sense. I don't think anyone has malicious intent here –– bet you $50 that it turns out to be some weird miscommunication. After all, there's zero benefit for Steve to be doing any of those things, and a whole lot of downside. Ins't a miscomm the more plausible theory?
Ironically, if Christian's claims are unsubstantiated, then he's slandering Steve. But Steve slandering Christian to internal employees is precisely what Christian's so angry about. But why would internal employees break ranks and go tell Christian?
There's something more going on here. I'm not sure what.
> He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place.
That's the point -- all that he's posted is a transcript where Steve says mea culpa. Then he posted some other person's two-sentence "transcript" of Steve badmouthing him. But it's not a transcript; it's weird.
> Me: No, no, I'm sorry. Yeah one more time. I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that's a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too. As is, it's quite difficult.
> Reddit: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think it's… I don't know what you mean by quiet down. I find that to be-
> Me: No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-
> Reddit: I'm going to very straightforward to you too, it sounds like a threat. And I'm just like "Oh interesting". Because one of the things we're trying to do is say "You have been using our API free of cost for many, many years and we have absolutely sanctioned - you have not broken any rules." And now we're changing our perspective for what we're telling you - and I know you disagree with it. That hey, we want to operate on a thing that is financially, you know, footing. And so hopefully you mean something completely different from what I said when you say like "go quietly", I just want to make sure.
> Me: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> Reddit: Oh, like, because you were like, "Hey, if you want this to go away".
> Me: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
> Reddit: Oh, go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry.
> Me: Like it's a very-
> Reddit: Yeah, that's a complete misinterpretation on my end.
> Me: Yeah. No, no, it's all good.
> Reddit: I apologize. I apologize immediately.
> Me: No, no, no, it's all good.
> Reddit: Because what we're hearing in some conversations is folks are, you know, like in other- making threats, and we're like "Hey, that's not a conversation that we want to have". So I immediately apologize.
> Me: Oh, no, no, it's all good. I'm sorry if it sounded like that.
Link to audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
I'm talking about after the call, which is what the central claim of the post hinges on. The claim is that Steve went to internal employees and said that Christian was threatening Reddit. Where's that transcript? There's only two sentences, and those two sentences came from some third party moderator that wasn't even introduced in the story.
Everyone is being hypnotized by the audio recording. But the audio recording doesn't say anything about Steve. The only one who said anything about Steve was the unnamed moderator, which we get no info about beyond two very weird sentences.
EDIT: Ah, https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c... gives the rest of the context.
That was posted 20 hours ago. And yeah, if I were Christian and saw that, I'd probably go nuclear too.
I thought Steve was badmouthing Apollo behind closed doors, and then someone behind those doors went to Christian. But that's not what happened. Steve publicly accused Christian of threatening Reddit – a council meeting counts as public.
Thank you to PrimeMcFly for posting that link! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246777
Well, that's awful. I don't know what Steve was thinking.
Steve, come on. Maybe Apollo shuts down, maybe you figure something out, but this whole thing becomes a lot easier to judge as an outsider if one group starts throwing mud like this. You should know better.
This is from the Apollo developer's own telling of the story:
> As said, a common suggestion across the many threads on this topic was "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal!
If someone said that to me, i.e. "hey, just give me $10 million and I'll stop making things difficult for you," I would interpret that as a threat, even if they denied that it was.
I would love to see someone state clearly:
1. What was Christian actually offering to do in exchange for $10M?
2. What did the Reddit person think that Christian was offering to do in exchange for $10M?
3. How are (1) and (2) different?
The reddit person seems to have thought that Christian was threatening them in some way??? I genuinely don't know what Christian could even have threatened them with. It seems to me they didn't understand the power dynamic at all of a small solo app developer talking to a massive corporation. Maybe they thought he was threatening simply shut his app down for that amount without telling anyone which might have avoided this ruckus? I'm sorry but I genuinely cannot fathom what they thought was going on
1 and 2 are different in that clearly the admin thought Christian was making a threat to their business whereas he was merely calling their bluff and possibly opening himself to business negotiations if reddit actually thought his app was worth that much. Through all this it feels like Christian did not communicate what he wanted effectively (though this seems to have been a throwaway line in a much longer call that got misconstrued gravely) and the admin was simply not equipped at all to handle negotiations
Reddit: If we had all Apollo's users, and showed them ads, we could make $20M/year more than we are making now.
What Christian meant to say: Ok, if that's really true, how about you buy my app and all my users for $10M? Then you can show them all the ads you want. If what you say is true, that's quite a deal for you. But my real point is that I don't believe your $20M number.
What Reddit heard: If you pay me $10M, you can have my app and all my users and I will stop making a fuss. Otherwise, I will badmouth you to my users and the press, encourage boycotts, and otherwise try to force your hand.
This read mostly makes sense to me. The only part I don't get is the part of the call where Christian says:
> I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
If Christian's intention was to sell the app and all its users to Reddit, then the load on the API wouldn't change, the only thing that would change is that Reddit would own it and the users would also see ads. So Apollo wouldn't "go quiet" under this scenario, and I don't understand the comment.
Of course, this is all a deliberate reframing by reddit. Reddit wasn't going to "lose" anything so much as "not get".
For example, I had a boss once that would interpret everything I said as a threat (I had a friendship with the owners of the company).
It's just, stupid, and insulting.
Apollo is fully allowed to make things difficult by complaining on social media that he thinks the pricing is unfair. What is illegal or even unethical about that?
I stopped reading at that point. I probably would have laughed at the suggestion instead of taking it as blackmail though.
Regardless, if they wanted to create a better app they'd do it. They don't want to.
Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recording his calls with them for over a year (legally I might add). Reddit has 0 wiggle room here.
EDIT: Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value? I feel like this is going to significantly reshape Reddit as moderators of large subreddits will be furious and quit if not destroy entire subreddits. Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...
EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
EDIT 4: #1 Reddit Android app "Reddit is Fun" is shutting down too https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...
You'd think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app.
Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they're the one's submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform.
With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the number of actual visiters to the site will also go down. Thus lowering potential revenue.
If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?
BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.
I know that you do, and you have your reasons, but...well, I don't. I think people are taking reddit commenting way too seriously if heads need to roll over a comment edit.
Suppose dang edited your post to say "I like to get drunk at work", and there it is for the world to see. You never said that, but anyone looking at Hacker News would see:
"qup 10 minutes ago: I like to get drunk at work."
No, that's absolutely not OK! Now, consider that spez could just as easily edit some old Reddit comments someone wrote years ago to say something horrendous. Do you often go back to verify that all your old comments are unchanged? I certainly don't.
I have no way of knowing exactly which comments spez edited, or how significantly he changed them. And honestly, the not knowing is simply inexcusable. All we know is that he has tampered with the production database, not how often or how much.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...
Should he have been able to? No, that's a concerning setup for the reasons you say.
How bad is what he actually did, from what we actually know? For about an hour, comments that said "fuck spez" after he banned the pizzagate sub were changed to "fuck $the_donald_mod_name".
I just don't find that a big deal. It's not like editing your comment to say you drink at work.
If he only made those changes and solemnly vowed never to do it again, fine, shouldn't have done it but whatever. But who besides him can say for sure?
You mean changing fuck spez to fuck $mod?
> We just don't know to what degree
Well I'm not sure what auditing they have, and I know there's public databases of all Reddit comments. It's been a while and I'm not aware of other claims.
My point was more that you two were arguing at crossroads. You seemed more concerned about what could have happened, and they were talking about what has evidence.
> He played his hand that he is willing to put words in other people's mouths basically just for entertainment, so why should we believe he hasn't done it in much more important cases?
I find this logic a bit backwards. Willing to do something when the stakes and impact are low to annoy someone trolling you is very different from changing comments in important situations.
Dang can edit my comments. (He does have to edit comments sometimes, I'm sure, but for reasons you approve of.) I would find it annoying. Until this comment thread, though, I'm not sure I would have considered that dang would get fired for it.
I don't think I nor anyone should be held accountable at work for comments made on Hacker News. If I lost my job over dang editing my post, I would think I worked for a really shit company and nobody went to bat for me. Basically, I would continue believing the interaction on the forum was totally unimportant, and I would be dumbfounded by the idiocy of my manager for elevating it to that a fireable offense, particularly after I let them know I did not make that comment.
FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.
HN isn't partnering with the CIA to catch some Russian spy by modifying a comment so that the drop is in a monitored location. He's just going to delete the comment if it contains something it shouldn't.
> FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.
Great, but now bring it back to real life, because a ton of people are held accountable at work for comments made on social media and do have a boss.
Bringing it back to real life: I don't fire my people for what they say on the internet.
This is the saddest thing I've read all week and my uncle just died.
Before: I have no evidence that spez tampers with anyone's reddit comments in production
After: I have evidence that spez tampered with ONE reddit comment in production.
The new status quo does not increase the likelyhood of "I have evidence that spez may be inexplicably tampering with old reddit comments habitually" being more true.
And thinking that it does shows a poor understanding of human behaviour and nature, especially under stressful emotional circumstances.
You're generalizing the action described in the article to something that feels very different to me. Yes, his actions fall under "editing comments"; yes, your hypothetical falls under "editing comments"; yes, I think that his actions make him more likely to do something like your hypothetical; no, I don't think that we should treat his actions like your hypothetical because they are different.
> Reddit CEO Steve Huffman today admitted that he had edited Reddit user comments that criticized and insulted him, wielding his power to anonymously change references to his own username, and replace them with moderators of the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald.
> Huffman — who posts on the site as "spez" — admitted to the transgression after being called out by users of r/the_donald, saying he was inspired to edit the comments after a spate of insults emanating from the pro-Trump subreddit. "I messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," Huffman said, indicating that the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults.
* Any media reporting on what’s happening within Reddit. Remember when WSB was all over the news cycles? Picture that but with some malicious mod/admin setting somebody up to take the fall for equities fraud.
* Any person or entity with legal or fincial muscle looking to protect their reputation or product. You don’t want Wizards of the Coast sending the Pinkertons to your door because they think you’re selling stolen goods.
* Anyone who values their own reputation in the internet. Imagine being an aspiring politician and having somebody insert racial slurs into your historical posts.
The issue isn’t somebody being petty, it’s that there is potential for systemic abuse of power and trust.
This isn't the old days when everything on the internet was in good fun. For a lot of people these days, internet unironically srs bsns. And a lot of those people think it's okay to harass folks over their passing thoughts on the internet.
what attacks are you specifically referring to here, other than kicking them off the site?
I don't think there is a neutral interpretation better than "the_donald was a lot of trouble for reddit as a business and social network, because they caused hostility, even by their existence, and it's not reddit's business to make humans less tribal, so why continue supporting them? Especially after they were clearly brigaiding and manipulating front page content. This front page manipulation was different from what the reddit owners wanted to be on the front page, which for the most part is benign and fun stuff that's easy to monetize."
The admins always had some new rules and some specific ways they had to be enforced, and were always happy to heap ever-increasing punishments on the subreddits capriciously
Oh, you can't say "Retard" any more, if we find any more examples of this prohibited hate speech your subreddit is going to be actioned against. Also we banned half of your most active moderators for wrongthink. We'll continue banning moderators and levying punishments until the situation is rectified.
I think we're on the same page overall here, just that I never put any faith in the sanctity of Reddit's database
They sure as fuck were not! Even to this day, /Conservative still claims the moral high ground bastion of free speech and balance while banning you for any slight question of the narrative being encouraged. Importantly, this is VERBATIM what they claim /politics does.
On the other hand, we expect some level of fairness and professionalism from Reddit and its administrators.
But Reddit is and always has pretended to be a "big name" company like Youtube, Facebook, etc.
They would even feel good about it because they have managed to obtain an unfair advantage and get away with it.
It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.
Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.
Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.
I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.
I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
Pretty much. Long tail of tiny-userbase clients probably doesn't matter that much, I suspect a small number of apps that can reasonably be spot-checked if it complies is the vast majority of traffic.
> I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
No reason third-party apps couldn't be allowed to be ad-free for premium users too. (or if the API is explicitly pushing "show ad URL X to user in this context" the API can take care of adjusting that)
I cannot understand how anyone in his team with a sturdy ethical compass could look him in the eye after seeing that post, especially if they were party to the original conversation. I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate leader get caught in such a high profile absolute falsehood, especially directed at a single individual.
If this reflects the company's culture I have no idea how it can succeed as a public firm. How will Steve deal with criticism from public investors? What is he not willing to lie about?
Can you point to a source for this for those of us not familiar with his comments?
Additionally, someone else in the comments here linked the text of a post[0] made in /r/partnercommunities with similar accusations to what's quoted in TFA.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
This is rich. The entire for-profit Reddit business is based on people contributing data for free, subsidizing their for-profit business. These guys couldn’t be any more clueless.
We owe it to the world to make sure touching the stove DOES burn you, otherwise it's just DARE all over again.
See the section titled “ Bizarre allegations by Reddit of Apollo "blackmailing" and "threatening" Reddit”
I don't use the app and I don't have any great attachment to Reddit, but I wondered if Reddit screwed themselves a bit here by not having a clearer link between the two parties. If either the Reddit employees involved or Steve entered the fray with any sort of bias/grievance, they likely misinterpreted the developer's comments.
Their best case scenario is really Twitter’s case, where they go public, have middling performance, and then get bought out by a billionaire after annoying them with bad moderation decisions lmao
Is that a matter of fact? How do you know it isn't higher? Also consider that it's not just advertising, it is also about funneling users to new products Reddit may want to develop
Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.
Within the realm of folks who are willing to pay for a Reddit skin, imagine that very few of them will just give up the site once their skin is gone.
More likely is that someone comes in and makes a similar app and charges more for it. Power users and professional users will pay, and most of them will gladly pay a premium.
Not gonna lie… I think op said he charged $10 a year. I raised my eyebrows… that should probably be the bottom option of a three-tier monthly price matrix.
I think someone should buy this app and just price it properly based on value add. Im not sure what the various user profiles of Apollo are, but my guess is that there are a few profiles that can be profitably monetized even with the new Reddit API charges. Imho, Reddit is being shortsighted, but they do have a unique and large community.
I'm so annoyed with three-tier monthly price matrices. It's honestly a red flag for me at this point.
On an aesthetic level, I agree with you. For some business, it’s just not needed.
That said…
As someone who has optimized pricing matrixes many times, I will just say that it works incredibly well. Also, for the whatever number people (like you? sort of like me?) who drop out due to “red flags”, there are legions more who allow their behavior to be shaped in an incredibly profitable way.
From the post:
> Me: "Because I assume the majority of it isn't server costs. I assume the majority is the opportunity cost per user."
> Reddit: "Exactly.""
Reddit's doesn't care about the $0.12, they care about the ads that doesn't get shown.
For reference, approximate global ARPU if converted to monthly for other social networks in 2022: Pinterest: ~$0.5, Snap: ~$1, Twitter: ~$1.6, FB: ~$3.3
This says the IPO roadshow will say Reddit has potential somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, which feels like the right sales pitch to me.
I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.
I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:
1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API
2. Developers don't want to pay that much
3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly
4. Developers push back and announce app closures
If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.
They think $X is vastly larger than the $Y they would get from third party app developers. So, goodbye to third party app developers.
which is absurd... the entirety of reddit has already been scraped before. the marginal utility of this today onward feed of data is a lot less than they think it is.
>Hi Mods,
We’re providing a follow-up on the last API update we made to make sure our mods, developers, and users have clarity on changes we are (and aren’t) making.
API Free Access
This exists and continues to be available.
If usage is legal, non-commercial, and helps our mods, we won’t stand in your way. Moderators will continue to have access to their communities via the API - including sexually explicit content across Reddit. Moderators will be able to see sexually-explicit content even on subreddits they don't directly moderate.
We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API. We will support legal and non-commercial tools like Toolbox, Context Mod, Remind Me, and anti-spam detection bots. And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.
Developers can continue non-commercial usage of the API, free of charge within stated rates. Reddit is also covering hosting for apps via the Developer Platform, which uses the Data API.
Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).
If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.
I'm a little surprised reddit would not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.
This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.
Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.
Reddit is worthless without community contributions, and Reddit is very clearly telling the community (both users and developers) that they aren't valuable and should go find somewhere else to spend their time.
Apollo will never pay, because it's shutting down. It was always an option to monetize 3PA but Reddit decided not to.
This 100% reeks of business people who don't even care to understand what Reddit is coming in and seeing the raw metrics of "% of users who aren't seeing ads" and the "lost" revenue.
10 years too late.
I really don't see why Reddit doesn't just purchase the app.
They've all but stated openly that their goal is to kill Apollo in its current form. Why pay millions to do that when they can accomplish it for free?
> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?
> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.
> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.
seems reasonable.
How long will Reddit survive if they don’t do this? I have no idea. But I do know the CEO has to deliver more than happy users.
Had they set out a reasonable timeline for the new prices, they would have had a new revenue stream. Instead they killed it and at the same time created an incentive for some of their most active users to leave.
This is *literally* what is expected of someone running a company with intitutional investors - anything other than this and investors are not interested.
What more proof do we need that there is nothing more important to a small group of humans that own all the money, than them getting more money?
What is the employee culture like it Reddit?
I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite.
Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions based on personal relationships, rather than anything else.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...
I don’t really understand how they could make that hire or why they would have thought that person was a good choice…
Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing.
I don't know how monthly subscriptions work, but yearly subscription refunds are pro-rated.
> I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing
I'm not, at least not for apps like this that need consistent revenue to support regular maintenance and/or server costs in an era where customers balk when an app costs more than a few dollars. To achieve this you end up balancing whether or not to serve ads, hope you can just grow enough new users forever, charge for major updates, charge a subscription, or beg for tips. While there are some exceptions, you can probably tell that ads or subscriptions are generally winning this nowadays.
One-time purchases are a tricky thing, since you've realisitcally now precluded ever charging for a major update. This is great for them, and might be for you if you've gotten your math right, but if you haven't (or it changes) then you're stuck. And, for better or for worse, they tend to be the loudest users.
Marco Arment talks about this balance in general on an episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast a couple weeks ago when discussing how Casey (another host) should price an app he's writing. For context if folks aren't aware, Marco created Overcast, which is a popular 3rd party iOS podcast app. The discussion spans a couple episodes but I the post-show of [Episode 535](https://atp.fm/535) captures the gist.
Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.
Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?
Yet for some reason, the Twitter client devs (who had happily shifted all their users to a subscription-only model) all of a sudden realized that they had sold a bunch of one year subs they had sold were going to be useless as soon as Twitter turned off the API and, more pertinent to their pocketbooks, all those customers would be entitled to request and receive a refund through the App Store for their now non-functional app. The devs started whining to their customers about being “small businesses” and having the food snatched out of their families’ mouths and why would anyone be so cruel as to seek a refund?
Christian is showing a hell of a lot more integrity and toughness than the Twitter client authors.
Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.
Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space?
If he isn't "10+ million"-wealthy that's extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.
But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:
* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.
* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"
Because according to Reddit, the problem with Apollo is the opportunity cost of Reddit not being able to monetize its users.
Acquiring Apollo is user acquisition. Destroying the app does not necessarily mean that all those users will now start using Reddit's official app and become monetizable, they might just quit Reddit entirely. By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.
After what Reddit did to Alien Blue I don't know how many Apollo users would be too keen on playing that game again. I personally have no confidence that a Reddit owned Apollo would retain what makes the current app great.
> A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
That's practically the definition of tortious interference.
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/liability-and-insuranc...
"The most common form of [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance."
"By way of illustration:
If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."
Generally speaking the law doesn't care whether or not you personally think it applies, merely that you've broken it.
Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs, which Reddit was not under a legal obligation to continue providing at historical rates that Apollo had based its entire product around, despite long-standing advice not to do so.
"I didn't refuse to transport your goods, I just said it would cost a billion dollars per pound to do it and you couldn't afford it" is not the gotcha that you think it is. The law is technical but it's enforced by humans.
It's straightforward: Apollo and Reddit have a longstanding business relationship, via these APIs that Reddit has provided for a long time at zero cost. Reddit generally no longer wants third parties to use the API, so they are increasing the price to a level that they know will cause everyone to balk (other third-party clients are closing up too) so that they can direct that traffic to their own native client and first-party sites, while knowing that Apollo has these long-standing business relationships of their own that are built on this relationship with Reddit.
In short, reddit is deliberately taking action to sabotage and cause economic harm to a business partner by changing aspects of the relationship that make it impossible for the partner to fulfill their contracts to third parties, so that Reddit can direct that business to themselves instead.
That is an improper taking under tortious interference, and the rest of the tests (intent actual economic loss - not just refunds but future income, etc) are trivially satisfied here.
I know people are libertarians here but the right to swing your fist ends at someone else's face, and legally speaking if you take actions that you know will result in a business partner being forced to sustain economic losses due to your improper breaking of your business relationship with them, you are generally liable for that damage you cause to the partner. That is the basic concept of tortious interference, you're paying for the damage you caused to your business partner. Swing your fist and hit someone's face and you get to pay for the surgery.
(IANAL and Reddit's lawyers would obviously say their conduct is proper, but, generally this is the type of situation where people can unexpectedly get themselves into legitimate legal trouble based on actions they think are perfectly legitimate. And generally they may have been legitimate if you didn't have this prior relationship, that changes things! It's different to not build an API at all, vs having the API be free and have third parties start selling clients and then to stop doing the API.)
(As a sibling comment notes, estoppel is another - if you promise something to someone, even a verbal promise, and they take a financially detrimental action on the expectation that you will follow through on your side of the promise and you don't, then you are generally liable for the financial harm you have caused them too. Libertarianism doesn't mean you can wiggle out of contracts, even verbal ones.)
This is the part that you seem to be confusing.
Apollo and Reddit do not appear to be business partners. Nor does Apollo seem to have any contractual agreement with Reddit, outside of the API usage agreement.
The API terms were lasted updated May 25, 2016. These include this language:
> a. Fees. Reddit reserves the right to charge fees for future use or access to the Reddit APIs, rates to be determined in Reddit’s sole discretion.
I assume these are the terms that Apollo are bound to. If that's the case, I don't see how you can support your claim. Reddit is using it's contractual right.
Sorry, I am confused what you are arguing here. If you think a usage agreement is binding they are certainly business partners. They may still be business partners or generally covered by tortious interference even if they do not have an explicit contract either.
This is quite a wide legal net by design - it is a "swing your fist and hit someone and their lawyers may have something to say about it" area of law, of course it's a wide net. You really don't even have to have an explicit contract.
Precisely. If the API agreement wasn't binding, why would it bother saying Reddit reserve the right to vary the fees?
Reddit's Data API TOS has always allowed it the right to start charging for access. That it chose not to do so until recently was its prerogative. That it chooses to do so now, is also it's prerogative.
This is not a unfair taking, since Reddit isn't taking anything from Christian, they are simply no longer freely providing something.
This is not an issue of estoppel, since Reddit never promised to make their API free forever. And Reddit gave him due notice, as required by their TOS, of changes that would take effect...several months after notice was given of the changes...
This is not tortious inteference, since Apollo could have continued to provide Reddit services to their customers, though this might have required Christian to change his business model.
This is not slander, since on the call Christian clearly suggests to Reddit to give him $10 million and he'll go away and not make a fuss about things.
It's irrelevant that they have a "prior relationship" since that means nothing in this context, since Christian did not have a binding contractual relationship that entitled Christian to perpetual free access to the Reddit Data API.
As I said, I'm looking at this from the legal perspective, not the emotional perspective.
So, this is the one thing I'm not sure I entirely agree with. While it's true that Apollo could have changed its business model, they only had 30 days to migrate users to a new business model, including some users that are on a yearly model.
Furthermore, Reddit had previously stated to Christian that the timeline was flexible, and that they'd be open to extending it. They then walked back on that promise, leaving Apollo scrambling to move all their existing users to the new model in very limited time. And that's after telling christian multiple time earlier in the year that no change to the pricing policy was being considered for at least the year to come.
There's essentially no solution for Christian here. They don't have the money to pay for the usage of their existing 50k yearly that won't migrate for up to 12 months.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd be very surprised if a case couldn't be made with this behavior.
Not that it'd ever go to court anyways - it'd be a huge time and money sink with unclear outcomes. Better to focus on the next steps.
I am a lawyer. I can say, with 100% certainty, that this case would never make it to trial. It's unlikely that Christian would even make it to discovery, as based on the facts stated, by Christian himself, even viewed in the light most favorable to Christian, he does not have any colorable legal claims.
There's nothing obviously improper about a site replacing a free API with a paid API even if it causes problems for those who relied on the API being free.
I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?
> Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years." > "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
At least for the yearly subscriptions
"We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps."
I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...
Now, even if they backtrack on this later on in a few months or years, they burned the good will, so I doubt developers are going invest the time to make a good Reddit client after this.
Truth, being perhaps the most interesting, because the main personality behind it sort of compelled it to be semi-well-known simply because of media coverage. The other attempts do not share that effect, however.
You're right that early movers have some advantage but it's a big world and the Next Big Thing doesn't have to win the whole market on day one - only enough of it to plant seeds that can grow over time.
Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.
So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
> So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
If you read the post, it's not just about the willingness of users to pay. It's also about the existing obligations (prepaid subscriptions), the timeline of the changes, and the amount of work that would be required on his end to adapt to the new changes within the next three weeks.
None of that would be an issue with the proposed solution of Reddit charging the users directly.
He could fire up a new system with appropriate pricing as soon as he can manage. All customers, if they want to come back, are then forced into the new system at new pricing levels. Maybe this takes a month or two or three. He's not losing money in the mean time and can re-open at something resembling a profitable stance when he can do so.
Yes, it sucks. But there's a path here if he wants to go for it. I don't blame him for throwing in the towel. He's tired of getting yanked around. I would be very hesitant to keep throwing good time(money) after bad.
Good call out. It's like the business equivalent of:
You changed the rules of the game because you didn't like how I played. So I'm not even going to bother playing with the new rules. I retire.
The rules of the game changed so severely that playing the game isn't just disagreeable, it's impossible.
What would you have done instead?
Charge $5 monthly and refund the annual fee for those who want it (which is already being done it seems, regardless of Apollo's future).
Apollo has options. They're just choosing to shutdown. That's the founder's prerogative, of course, but it is totally unnecessary.
Look at the support in this thread alone - Apollo has tons of people willing to throw money at them.
He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app. Now he's put into a position to support those customers at $2.50/month. (He estimates their server cost is $0.10 per month.) That's an instant $125,000 per month out of his own pocket that he can't recoup from existing customers for at least the next 6 months.
Over the course of 2023, he'll have to pay Reddit $1 million MORE than he has made from the app this year.
Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps. That's fine. That's their right. But it's certainly not the app developer's fault that he's forced to quit.
This sentiment is obviously false. Reddit doesn't want to support third-party apps at Reddit's own expense. That is reasonable.
> He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app
And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.
I take him at his word that he was willing to pay a reasonable amount.
Again, Reddit has the right to run their business however they wish. Not arguing that it should be free.
Christian has already shared his correspondence on Reddit with this. He pretty clearly sought and received regular assurances that when and if Reddit moved their API to a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost and with a flexible timeline to accommodate third party apps.
After telling him no such big moves were happening in 2023 they changed their mind, set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
What does this even mean? "Reasonable" is subjective - and from Reddit's perspective, I'd bet they believe the fees are reasonable.
It's on the business operator to mitigate risk. Apollo didn't do that - and is now throwing in the towel instead of charging their customer's more.
> set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
Just stop.
You’ve been told multiple times, by multiple people, that this was not the case.
You’ve been provided the timeline, which you refuse to acknowledge.
You very well know that he was not provided the pricing until 8 days ago.
At this point, you continuing to say this is just being disingenuous and talking in bad faith.
What, exactly, are you getting out of this? Is unreasonably placing the blame on a single developer your way of getting your rocks off?
You may want to believe and be sympathetic toward Apollo - fine.
That doesn't change the circumstances nor realities. Apollo screwed up, and is now throwing in the towel. It's really hard to be sympathetic towards a business operator that's made a series of bad choices and now is playing the victim card and shutting down.
You’re the only one who is finding it hard, and your constant push to shift the blame off of a massive corporation and onto a developer is frankly weird.
Re-evaluate your life choices if you truly believe this, but it’s clear you are the extreme minority here.
There is no chance I'm paying for a "service" where power-mods will ban you for disagreeing with their radical politics, where most of the subreddits are actively taken over by similar power mods who push their radical ideologies, and where any attempts to evade this stuff and simply use the website can get you permanently banned from the service.
Imagine spotify, but if you listen to the wrong songs, you get banned from other random artists, and if you try to work around this you just get banned outright from spotify.
No thanks.
In that case, app developers have several options:
* start showing users ads, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit
* start charging a monthly fee for the app, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit
* some combination of these two (e.g. pay a subscription for ad-free use)
Sure, Reddit could make this easier for app developers, but isn't it all basically the same thing at the end of the day? Reddit wants (or needs? I have no idea what their financials look like) to make a certain amount of money per-user or per page view. Apps take home ~100% of their profits currently, and make Reddit ~nothing. So Reddit is pricing in a profit rate into API access.
I mean, just to look at Apollo, they have 166K ratings on the Apple App Store, and surely far more users than that. Reddit wants $20M a year from them. That's high, maybe too high, but how does it compare to the value of (say) a million users a year on the official Reddit app? If Apollo switched to a subscription model on which they charged $1 a month to users, would they be able to pay Reddit's API fees? (Assuming those API fees would drop by at least 50% after non-paying users quit using Apollo.)
The issue is that the actual numbers are closer to 2,000%, not 80%. [0]
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
- Reddit is charging the equivalent of 20x its published revenue per user for the API.
- The new API agreements ban the display of any advertising by API users. (Apollo did not show ads, but other third-party clients did, and Reddit claims the low quality of ads was harming Reddit by association.)
- Charging $5/month would be break-even given the API pricing, and only for new customers. Apollo would still have to serve earlier subscribers at a huge loss. API fees would certainly not “drop by 50%” — the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users, so the average API usage per customer would _increase_.
There's a lot of strange stuff happening in your comment. On the one hand, let's take for granted that Reddit is charging 20x its revenue per average user for the API. But that's just the average user; as you yourself point out "the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users". Surely they are worth much more to Reddit than the average, extremely casual user?
The underlying problem explained in the post is that the author pre-sold access to Reddit through an app to users, while this access was actually conditioned on the continuing availability of access to the Reddit API. No doubt this does put the author in an uncomfortable position! Given that the current plan is to shut down the app anyway, surely cancelling active subscriptions should also be on the table? Subscribers are going to lose access to Reddit through Apollo either way! So realistically, what we're talking about here is whether $5/month is a reasonable price point for power users. My answer is... maybe?
I think my instinct is to say that this is all ultimately the place where negotiations are supposed to happen. Reddit needs to go from making zero dollars off the API to making something. Is what they want to charge too high? Probably so. But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
Is that the case? Every reaction I have seen has been to the magnitude of the price, which is much, much, much more than what Reddit makes off of users
A text website is easy to run.
Its greed that they got here. They made choices, and then as a consequence of those choices they made choices that are significantly reducing the value they provide to their users. Its enshittification, its killing the golden goose, its destroying a public good for the benefit of investors who don't care about anything other than making a return.
The worst part is the investors don't care about anything other than making the numbers look good in the short term so they can dump their investment onto other investors. Its like all of corporate america decided to watch The Wire and go "Oh see how they're pumping up the numbers to make them look good for the mayor, but not actually solving crime? THAT should be our business plan!". Providing value is a side effect of making money, on the false equivalence that making money means you're providing value, so therefore making more money means you're providing more value.
Wikipedia is pretty fantastic. Signal is pretty great. I'm pretty happy with NPR. Archive.org makes me happy.
Appeal to people with money (the professional class) and then beg.
I feel like the next great social media platform will result from a rich person disillusioned by reddit (a Bryan Acton type) creating a platform resistant to "next quarters profit"-ism.
So ultimately they want 3rd party to use subscription model to ultimately get worse experience.
I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is really beyond the pale.
From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?
And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good.
Edit: not to mention Christian's full-time job has just been ended by this policy change. How especially and thoughtlessly cruel to now also make him out to be an extortionist liar, and for nothing really.
I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.
https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255714/reddit-app-dau-w...
Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless
Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.
Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?
Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.
As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.
I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.
In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.
Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019768/us-retailers-app...
I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.
The app sucks.
I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to
Apparently all five of them use my little web browser extension with Reddit-specific features, requested by users.
But I can guarantee that your estimate is totally wrong.
I know reddit is pushing it's all but even that is not 3th party apps.
I just hope they don't get rid of old.reddit.com
For me I will continue to use reddit as I have before.
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo
1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat
2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App
A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit
3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper
You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.
Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.
And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.
Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good
likely untrue. its not just 3rd party apps it affects. it changes api access for anything using the API
for instance modtools will be affected which means literally everyone can be affected desktop or not https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/12rt5f8/how_wil...
some subreddits make heavy use of bots
these are all going to be hugely affected
Yeah, but that adage has never been true. It's just something said by people who get bad press to make themselves feel better.
Reddit is not a bank account
I argue bases on them but they do not matter to me.
I do not use a 3th party App. For me it makes sense. But if they lied they will hurt themselves anyway
Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.
The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.
plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:
If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.
you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)
voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.
Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.
But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.
So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.
It is when you're about to restate what I've said...
> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term
Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?
> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?
> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either
> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO
> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people
Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"
It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.
My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.
I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.
It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.
In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.
To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.
If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.
Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.
Reddit won’t work without API access… it just turns into a 4Chan-like cesspool over night without auto moderation.
After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."
That's not what made Reddit seem like a cesspool to me. It was the commenters.
Mods can be great, and many of them are. But... there's plenty of bad ones out there that make participating in some communities stifling at best.
I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.
Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.
This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.
Oh --- wow --- another SNI clause!
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
But he will be the person to increase revenue anyway.
Because he can now say that whatever app survived this is now paying for it instead.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.
That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
Hmmm ...
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
--- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat.
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat. ---
Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million."
> Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.
(for the record, I almost feel like he's in the right to do so. Still weird how this is being presented)
It seems like he was trying to invoke a sort of ironic use of quiet down to ease the situation, but ironic extortion is still extortion.
The alternative is that he has no choice but to shut down the app, given that they've announced what the price will be 30 days before it's introduction. Even if he'd said nothing there would have been a shitstorm; the timing would be obvious.
Reasonable notice of the price increase would have given 3rd party developers time to monetise and meet the new costs. A more reasonable price could have been borne by 3rd party apps with very little fuss. Making API access a premium Reddit feature would have put even more money in Reddit's pocket. Buying out the 3rd party apps would have been unpopular but would give Reddit the appearance of being less incompetent, underhanded, and duplicitous.
Instead, Reddit made literally the worst possible choice in this situation: alienating their users and the moderators that do most of the work on the platform.
It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.
Of course this was a threat. It wasn't a language issue. And the post-hoc explanation was nonsense. It was an obvious and indisputable threat.
And it’s even more amazing when people think they are smarter “than the average” and go the exact opposite way just because, failing a proper evaluation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0
I think that interpretation is incorrect and based on Christian's attitude towards the whole thing. More likely it's projection on the part of Reddit's CEO.
In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.
I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.
And do you think if Steve had made this offer, would we have even heard a second of this recording?
I mean, come on guys. He literally said "I can make it easy on you," named a price, and then clarified that he was mostly joking.
edit: Thank you for catching that! I've now changed "Steve" with "Steve's side."
It was not Steve on the call, it was an unnamed Reddit employee. Christian makes this clear in his post.
The misinterpretation came from the ‘quieting down’ expression, which referred to the API usage (I think quite obviously).
instead of your thought experiment, I'd request you just pose your impartial take on the most charitable view for Steve and explain why in that view it was a reasonable act of good leadership for him to make these comments. Otherwise I don't think we're really talking about the same thing.
You've quoted the transcript elsewhere for people to "decide for themselves" and I'm not sure how you could be convinced we all did in fact read it and already did, and just don't agree with you.
There's a common error where, because one believes they have been aggressed upon, they can behave as if they actually have been aggrieved without actually examining realistic positions of actual evidence. I've seen this sort of thing happen in a variety of circumstances. Whether or not the Apollo developer intended to threaten or not doesn't actually change the behavior of the person who took whatever was said as a threat, and acting in a reconciliatory manner when one feels threatened is actually a very reasonable thing to do.
You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.
If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.
And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.
Christian: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
I just listened to your audio link several times, and I totally disagree that it sounded like a threat.
Also, the call was not with Steve, as Christian explained:
> Have you talked to CEO Steve Huffman about any of this?
> I requested a call to talk to Steve about some suggestions I had, his response was "Sorry, no. You can give name-redacted a ping if you want."
I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."
That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.
Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.
It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.
The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.
To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.
They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Reliance-based_estopp...
At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.
The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!
No, but sarcasm is a tool and using it carries its own meaning, especially in negotiations.
Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
Days afterward, spez got on a conference call and falsely claimed that Christian was blackmailing him. An employee of Reddit itself affirmed that he said it in a summary of the call they posted to a (private) sub of high-level moderators, replicated here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
(The summary in the main thread was written by members of the community on the call, the comment I linked is Reddit’s own summary.)
Reddit has also repeated the same claim off-the-record to multiple journalists.
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
edit: just read that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248834
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.
I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.
Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response
This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)
He also spearheaded entirely killing off reasonably sized and loud portions of the community - love them or hate them, r/The_Donald was a massive, advertisable bloc of users.
Bit soon to whitewash history.
Uh, no. Turns out that there's a noticeable percentage of Americans who are white men for whom education is apparently not relevant, but they're far from a majority - they're just obnoxiously loud and in your face.
And I'm not going to say that they're dumb, but it's undeniable that approximately half of people in the USA are of below-average intelligence.
Think of the average Mexican, the most average you can picture. Now think that half of the population is WORSE than that (in terms of education, culture and "dont give a shit about you")
Its frankly scary to realize the situation of at least half of the world.
In the US, the male to female ratio is roughly 97 to 100. This means that in most areas of the country, there are slightly more females than males.
White men make up 31% of the US population.
Just under 90% of Americans have a high school diploma or GED: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
A year of high school history about how the south actually were totally the good guys with slavery and it wasn't that bad has turned out to not be the wonderful enlightenment we should strive for.
What are they buying? What would be advertised to them, and by whom?
I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.
I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.
I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.
That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/...
And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that.
I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with.
likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.
Not against a private company, no. Reddit is still owned by Conde-Nast, I believe. What to do with it is up to them.
Also in general *employees* don't bring shareholder lawsuits. Even if you own significant stock, getting fired for suing your boss is usually a losing proposition.
I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.
It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?
How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn't seem possible.
> Why not just increase the price of Apollo?
> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.
> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.
> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.
Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.
This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.
The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
Nobody really cares about your opinion on him or a monthly subscription; he explicitly said it's not going to happen and at the end of the day that's his decision to make, not yours.
He doesn't even need to give a reason for shutting down. It's his personal project to manage and he's the only one who's ever worked on it.
It's also clear you haven't read the article, because he explicitly calls out a bunch of criticisms you have of him directly.
> Isn't this your fault for building a service reliant on someone else?
> To a certain extent, yes. However, I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I've made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."
> Another portion of the call:
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023. Me: "Fair enough." Reddit: "And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way."
> Your initial post in April sounded quite optimistic. Are you dumb?
> In hindsight, kinda yeah. Many of the other developers and folks I talked to were much less optimistic than I was, but I legitimately had great interactions with Reddit for many years prior to last week (they were kind, communicative, gave me heads up of changes), so when they said they were aiming to have pricing that would be fair and based in reality, I honestly believed them. That was foolish of me in hindsight, and maybe could have had a different outcome if I was more aggressive in the beginning. Sorry. /canadian
> (And to be clear, they did indeed say this. They used the word "substantive" and I wanted to make sure we had the same definition of something "having a firm basis in reality and therefore important, meaningful, or considerable")
> > Reddit: "That's exactly right. And I think, thankfully, the word is exactly the right one. It's going to have a firm basis in reality. I also just looked it up. We're going to try to be as transparent as we can."
Reading this with 15 years of corporate experience the developer was at best naive. In corporate speak Reddit is completely consistent in their actions and words. It's a crappy situation and I'm sure the developer is a great person and I agree Reddit did them dirty but also that's how these things work. You don't take dependencies on third parties without a lawyer and a contract.
> There's not gonna be any change on it.
Nobody can make this promise, those are just words to make you feel good.
> There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
Plans can be made quickly. Action can be taken without a plan. What is the guarantee on lead time?
> And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way.
Define improvement. Improved for who?
> It's going to have a firm basis in reality.
I have no doubt that Reddit based the API pricing on them making money on it. We can debate if they got it right.
> We're going to try to be as transparent as we can.
Try is a weasel word, this sentence is meaningless. Zero transparency can be provided and still meet the standard of being "as transparent as possible". "Try" here even gives them the opportunity to be less transparent than possible. The Glomar defense ("We can neither confirm nor deny") is "as transparent as possible" and actually meets a higher standard than Reddit promised here because the CIA didn't just "try", they successfully provided the most possible transparency (almost none).
> I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you.
Y'all need to find a better hobby. As per his own words, he also clearly realizes that in hindsight he should have been more pessimistic. But that's all moot now. The past is in the past. Pointing it out is not going to do anything.
Reddit could simply treat them reasonably and things would be fine. There's no need for favoritism, they just need to stop being actively harmful. And part of that is the fees (they're not reasonable).
It's like, I know this funded company that's doing a lot of work using intel SGX, if intel kill it, about 80 people lose the jobs and several million in VC goes up in smoke. It's insane to me that people are building businesses that can be killed by 3rd parties that they have no hope of influencing, and have no contracts with.
Another chapter of the internet drama concludes, I suppose. I wish them all the best and I'll be curious to see if reddit survives.
How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? Or a business having to renew their contract with the power company?
You pay for your cloud provider...
First being Reddit wouldn't have suddenly needed to stop supporting 3rd party apps for free - apps that only cost Reddit money and generate no income. If the API made Reddit money, instead of costing them money, there would be no need for a sudden change. The "suddenness" of this change is due, in no small part, to the cost of supporting basically free-loading 3rd party apps that consume resources but offer nothing in exchange.
Secondly, Apollo would have formed a business model that supported paying for API access, be it monthly subscriptions, freemium, etc. The current model of pay-once-use-forever is simply unsustainable (on an obvious level) - and the $12.99 annual subscription equally so. The Apollo model, as it was, required free API access.
Even if Apollo had been paying for API access all along, and Reddit decided to suddenly hike the prices - Apollo would have been in a better position to raise their own prices accordingly, and would have had a userbase more accepting of paying.
Paying for API access also compels the business to be more efficient in their calls. As it was, there was little-to-no incentive to operate large content caching on your own servers/services, etc. I have seen, but do not know their credibility, that Apollo was not very efficient in it's API calls and essentially hammered the API far more than was necessary. If you're not paying for it, why would you bother designing a more efficient system?
The API fees were inevitable. More are coming - be sure of that, as corporations tighten their figurative belts and look for ways to stop bleeding money.
And the "hammering" is addressed and strongly countered in the article.
Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications...
$12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low.
$12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.
If the polling was the bulk of the traffic they could just remove that feature.
And there's no way the compute burden is an entire dollar to do 4000 requests.
Specifically, the $12.99/year model is floating a ton of free users, in addition to paying for server resource usage. None of that $12.99 currently was allocated to paying Reddit, and we know Apollo calculated an approximate cost of $2.50 per user per month with the new API fees.
This $2.50 fee seems to align costs with what we can reasonably expect Reddit to earn per user on their platform. Reddit prices Premium membership at $5.99 monthly, which among other benefits removes all ads. $5.99 likely indicates a $2-3 profit when all ads are removed but user engagement remains constant.
The typical mildly engaged Reddit users probably easily spends an hour a day looking at ads via the app - so while the math may be fuzzy, it seems like Reddit possibly based their API pricing off something like this.
At a minimum, that is $2.50 x 12 = $30 of cost annually per user. This means all users need to pay Apollo $30 a year to break even on just Reddit fees, or some subset of users needs to pay a lot more than $30 a year to float a bunch of free users. Apollo has other expenses too (labor, servers, etc.).
Even if the API fees were reduced 80% down to $0.50 per user per month, that's still $6 annually per user - and Apollo has a lot of free users.
All of this is to say, the $12.99/year membership for Apollo was never going to work with any API fees.
I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.
These things are different though, we must admit. Imgur used to be much bigger, but today hardly pulls the same audience volume that Reddit or Twitter do, for instance. I don't think Imgur could get away with API pricing like Twitter is, and Reddit will soon be.
> I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.
Given the number of ads you see while browsing via the official app, I would peg it around $2 per user per month (which mostly aligns with my previous statements and estimates, as well as with API pricing), for someone that uses Reddit for 1-2 hours daily. I suspect, without evidence and can be wrong, that 1-2 hours daily is typical for a mildly engaged Reddit user.
Apollo doesn't need to drop free users - they need to get revenue from them. If not directly, then via ads. Although that seems antithetical to what Apollo was trying to create... but reality has come knocking.
He probably could, but not in 30 days.
> but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
Or chose not to.
Reddit will begin charging for access to its API (nytimes.com) 303 points by alexrustic 51 days ago | 339 comments --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617763
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... was posted April 19th.
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates
> ANNOUNCEMENTS Staff • April 18, 2023
> ...
> To ensure developers have the tools and information they need to continue to use Reddit safely, protect our users’ privacy and security, and adhere to local regulations, we’re making updates to the ways some can access the Reddit Data API:
> We are introducing a new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.
The prices themselves were announced May 30th. I guess if you’re feeling generous, that would be 32 days notice.
He had notice there would be a change and was explicitly told:
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
There is absolutely no actionable information there, and everything they said indicated that it wouldn’t be an unreasonable change.
30 days is ample notice to Apollo's users.
Apollo has had since April to figure out how to make a monthly subscription work, on a technical level. Now... having done nothing smart in the meantime, are left with very little time to make the changes. That is 100% on Apollo.
You shift the blame like there’s no tomorrow. At this point you either work for them, or are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to defend them. That’s the only reasonable explanation for why you’d be pushing the blame so hard.
Even if he had a full system set up in a month and a half (a fairly tight deadline), 32 days is an unreasonably short amount of time to make any sort of material change to your terms, let alone raising the cost exorbitantly.
Hilariously, your first comment wishes people would pledge to pay for Apollo. How we got from there to… this bullshit is beyond me. At least it only took a few hours to show your true colors.
Your "32 days" timeline you keep going on about is false no matter what way you look at it.
Apollo has known since April API pricing was coming, and there was no way their existing "pay once, use it forever" or even the $12.99 per year model was going to be sustainable - particularly given how many free users they float monthly.
Not knowing the exact fee in advance is completely irrelevant. The infrastructure needed to be built to support a monthly subscription model, freemium models, or whatever they needed to do to pivot and remain in business.
100% of the reason people use Apollo is because of the data and community Reddit has built. Apollo basically leached off that data, and made a profit while doing so. Any sound business operator would understand and plan for risks that endanger their business. Apollo failed to take action in a timely manner, and failed to mitigate risks to it's business.
Now they're being asked to pay for the API access that makes Apollo's business possible - and even if the API fees were 1/4 of the proposed amount, Apollo was going to need to change their model. That is the point you, and many others seem to be missing - Apollo was not going to survive paying anything for API access - Apollo had no plan.
I cannot make it any more clear - Apollo failed to plan for, and mitigate risks and failed to take corrective actions in time to save their business.
Apollo was run like a hobby side-project - not a business.
Not everything has to be run like a business, you understand that right? You’re acting like this is a big when it’s a feature.
This is a project run by a single person. And has been, since its creation. On purpose. You clearly don’t like that for whatever idiotic reason and your entire premise hinges on the fact that you think every single project in the world needs to be run like a perfect megacorp. Guess what? The world doesn’t work like that.
The rest of your BS has already been debunked. Multiple times. By multiple people. You restating it continues to be just that, regardless how many times you insist on it.
If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your obvious shilling for no discernible reason.
Sure, that is reasonable. But then the victim card cannot be played when the business fails to act accordingly, no?
> The rest of your BS has already been debunked
Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.
> If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job.
Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.
What business?
It’s not a fucking business. Stop insisting it is. We literally just went over this.
> Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.
The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death, and that multiple people have pointed out your straight up lies should tell you plenty about who is dealing in “alternative facts”.
> Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.
Yeah that hasn’t seemed to work with you for the past half day, so I don’t understand why you would expect people to keep trying when you clearly don’t bother with things like “taking things to heart”, “having a discussion in good faith”… or really “reading”.
Next time, stick to actual facts and don’t pretend everything is a business that needs to be maximally efficient.
Apollo was/is a business, handles hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and has a huge customer base. We cannot make up definitions and then insist others agree.
> We literally just went over this.
You mean, you did. Sorry to not play into your fantasy universe - out here in the real world, shouting something louder doesn't make it true.
> The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death
You make the mistake of placing stock in whatever button people click on a website - usually based on emotion, but not always. Either way, Internet Points are not real...
You may not like the facts - but that's why they are facts. They do not change even if you hate them. Calm down, re-read the original posts, and then we can discuss things more civilly.
https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/
Apparently Apollo has paid subscriptions as a way to finance it.
He would have to turn off the functionality if there is no subscription in order to avoid spending too much for API calls.
Currently this subscription is described as:
> second is Apollo Ultra, the highest tier, which includes everything in Apollo Pro plus additional features. Apollo Ultra is a subscription offering of $1.49 USD per month (or $12.99/year, or a lifetime unlock option is offered in the app) and is a subscription due to options within it having ongoing monthly costs to me, the developer.
The approach would be to do a subscription price change for Apollo Ultra from $1.49/month to $10/month (or whatever the math works out to be - I'm using $10 as an example).
About subscription price changes - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252
> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.
Everyone who is subscribed would get an alert and no payment would go through.
However, the code is already there to work as a subscription app.
---
I would also draw attention to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/141mjij/lets_tal...
> My last thing I wanted to address, and I might be burying the lede a bit here, is some of misleading, or downright inaccurate and untruthful claims that the admins have made in regards to these changes..
> > Apollo could reduce their cost by 3.5x if they were as efficient as these other 3P apps.
> So I have not dug into Apollo specifically as I didn't have an iOS rooted device handy. BUT, my guess as to the "increased calls" is due to them more frequently checking if a user has messages, and/or less caching of comment sections and more re-pulling them for the latest on navigation. Could Apollo not check for messages as frequently? Sure.. Reddit is Fun used to check for messages on any refresh it seems, and they sometime somewhat recently seem to have changed that and for game day threads which I frequently use it for, I often miss responses to my comments for a very long time because it seems to only do it now every so often.
> ...
> Edit: it was brought to my attention that Apollo does push notifications for messages even when you aren't using the app. This is almost certainly the main discrepancy between it and other apps API usage. And it could have been a back end change then related to the polling for those notifications that caused a reduction in API calls
Some of the architecture for that is described https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...
> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.
> I understand the logic in not charging for basic system features such as camera usage, but push notifications require a server in order to function, and servers aren't free (in fact they get costly quick). I also offer a completely free system that does not use a server so those who don't want to have to pay can have their device function as the server and use local notifications (which are slightly delayed as it uses Background Fetch and using the device uses more battery), but remote notifications necessitate a server.
As it is designed, Apollo is very heavy on active polling for notifications.
This is described by Christian here - https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1729 that it is polling reddit once every 10 seconds for each user of Apollo constantly.
Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say.
The relationship is broken.
Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.
HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.
That's entirely on Apollo...
Monetisation of social networks only works via ads/tracking.
You're just being an unconstructive critic.
And you have no evidence it's temporary.
Right - and in 10 years everyone will still be using Reddit, Apollo will just be a distant memory, and nobody will give any thought to the API pricing model.
Just reality...
The 30 day window was not enough time to rectify that and would cost him 50k in the first month to cover the diff. The author suggested he needed at least 3 months to implement changes and switch at least some portion of yearly subscribers to a higher price.
If they came out with a reasonable set of conditions to do API access, people would be a lot less upset. But they didn't. And those API fees are guaranteed to go only up, up, and further up.
Time to get out of reddit when the gettin's good.
Those 3rd party apps are leeches that are playing surprised_pikachu.jpeg when the blood supply is cut.
The simple fact that this guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions shows the insane amount of money he made off of the back of Reddit.
Hypocritical much?
Are shipping companies leeches in your worldview?
Correct.
He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.
Like, I can't remember a time that there _hasn't_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that's for sure.
I'm sure a few will but, I can't name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it's just a job and pays money. And pays well.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/zynga-to-employees-give...
Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.
This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.
So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats & Reddit getting the approaches covered, & this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content & in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.
Oh please. Let's be honest, this is not financially going to hurt the company.
It would definitely impact my view of the company as an investor.
An old-school investor would be fuming right now, but VCs only care about IPOs and they probably blessed this strategy already.
That's been the economy in the US for two decades now.
Guess no more bathroom reddit for me. 4chan still works.
Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.
§205 : https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-05-20-28/KAPITTEL_2-...
EDIT: See now that he was in Canada when it was recorded, and they have the same kind of laws.
You can sue anyone for anything anywhere, but I cannot imagine the Canadian police being interested in a citizen doing something lawful in Canada if the California (or wherever) cops call to complain be broke a Californian law.
And I can even less imagine a civil action demanding damages or court actions in Canada for doing something legal there. It would be like a Saudi company suing a US driving school that teaches women.
I don't think there's a there there as far as liability or worry. IANAL, of course.
Like Apollo. He could build a backend himself.
Subreddits are run by volunteer moderators and are entirely at the whim of reddit. If any substantial subreddit tried to shut down or go dark permanently reddit would just remove the moderators responsible.
There are lots of permanently dark/private subreddits out there that have been "lost" to some dispute or another.
I'm not throwing in the towel like most people are, but I will just relegate myself to viewing it only in a desktop browser. We'll see how long old.reddit.com lasts after this
One day I looked at it, not logged in.
Turned out there was a post, "pinned by moderators", at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.
I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.
I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.
Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!
Bloody hell.
At that point I knew Reddit could not be trusted.
*their sub.
It's my understanding that Apollo users make up a fraction of a percent of active users. Reddit almost certainly doesn't care. Fact is they've taken in over a billion in funding and aren't really returning a profit, charging for API access starts moving them in the right direction though.
Why would he lose his job? Realistically, it's a smart business move to monetise their users. It's Reddit, them being pissy about having to pay is part of the course. There is a reason they're the lowest valued social media users.
>EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
What would he have a claim for? He wasn't paying for the API. He could pay for the API and continue to operate. You can't sue someone because they stopped letting you use their services for free. You sure can't sue a business for asking your for-profit company to pay expenses.
Realistically, these app users would have made tens if not hundreds of thousands a month if they just added subscription model to their app and only had paying customers. These apps could still exist and be extremely profitable for a one-man apps.
Simple maths $5 a month subscription $2.50 to reddit $1.50 to apple and $1 to the app developer. Say 10% of their users convert which seems very reasonable considering the reception a price increase to $6.99 seem to get on the Apollo subreddit. That would have been $100,000 a month profit. But instead, they shut it down.
This is the inevitable outcome of a human who has never been told no or punished for their misdeeds. This is what it looks like for a spoiled child to run a company.
We have a lot of that lately.
Tech employees are somewhat notorious for not enforcing their shareholder rights. Most companies, for example, ignore their books & records requirements under Delaware law, or force private sales to occur at terms favourable to management and the Board’s friends.
Voting rights are relatively irrelevant for minority holders. It's all the other rights, granted by contract and more importantly law, that tech employees can be generally regarded on to not exercise (or bullied into not exercising by management).
Is there a running list of subs (over a certain high number of subscribers, to keep it focused) that aren't in the blackout list? That would be interesting to see. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, at least while the API is still free...
I paid for the app years ago - it was $5 or so and I don't expect to get anything back. That's just how the game works.
I know he also had some sort of monthly subscription - it seemed quite absurd for whatever additional trivial features it provided, but then again there apparently was some sort of Apollo fanboy group who got a lot of excitement out of new app logos, which seemed to be the main updates in the last few years, even at the expense of serious bugs that lingered for months.
I'd assume those subscriptions would just stop being charged going forward. So again, who is getting $250k in refunds?
Furthermore, if he is refunding that much money, I wonder what kind of revenue and profits he was pulling in? I had kind of assumed he was making a very good living (deservedly - it was a good app) - maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but now I'm wondering if he was making a order of magnitude more than that...
I bet he was making enough that he didn't need another job but not significantly more than that.
I mod a top 1% sub and one of our moderators exclusively uses Apollo for moderation work. Official Reddit app doesn't work well, and their workflow for modding doesn't involve a computer.
....what's that worth to Reddit?
Part of me thinks that one of the reasons they want to kill 3rd party apps is because they're embarrassed that they're all better than whatever Reddit has come up in the last decade.
Maybe they should listen to mods and users instead of trying to push whatever they want down users' throats, because it's not going to last much longer.
They are thinking that there is "money on the table" without their ability to monetize their traffic...
As opposed to thinking of reddit as a fucking internet UTILITY -- they are doing the same VC / MBA bullshit as every single other tech company.
However, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. For generating more ad revenue here IMO. The sort of ill-will they’re creating will probably drive away the top-posters and moderators that make the site worth visiting.
Is ad space on a site that’s contracted by 1% of its users going to tank in value? No probably not. But is the 99% going to stick around when the content they came for is missing or not moderated? Ehhh…
It's all clown college over there and this latest saga is their new graduate degree program. I'm afraid to see what the doctoral program will bring.
They shut it down two months ago.
What are good tools for erasing one's Reddit history? I just learned about redact.dev (but haven't tried it yet) for example.
UPDATE: react.dev seems to work well. It's deleted 1.5K+ posts as I type this at 0.65–0.85 per second.
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
> Wow. Because my memory is that you didn't take it as a threat, and you even apologized profusely when you admitted you misheard it.
Wow, I didn't know it'd gotten that bad.
Edit: Maybe keep an eye on what they say to catch them performing material securities fraud? Wayback early, wayback often!
Edit 2: Damage control mode: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce... (r/reddit: Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API [Locked])
lol
Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.
> need to show reddit ads
I've always thought about this too but I've heard this is a non starter for advertising companies, most companies want to know exactly where their ads are being served before putting money on the table.
I think the new API pricing model was developed with a single purpose: extinguishing third-party apps to improve the official app's install/usage metrics before their upcoming IPO.
Hell you can't even browse Reddit without an account anymore!
Yes, you can, via old.reddit.com.
-- Replying to below:
???
I use OLD+RES for MY consumption and data density - if you dont know how to configure these together to create a much faster, and more aesthetically pleasing (to me) UX - then that sucks.
https://i.imgur.com/gdDawWz.png
https://i.imgur.com/jlTJGaT.png
So much more pleasant and quicker - especially with hover - I dont even need to click links
https://i.imgur.com/jDvjQwM.jpg
Which of the following do you find pleasing, its personal opinion, so choose what you like - I prefer old.
These are the same page, the only diff is old. vs www.
https://i.imgur.com/mnl5pCb.png <-- www
https://i.imgur.com/JfFZMQX.png <-- old
---
https://i.imgur.com/WxsmDkc.png <-- www
https://i.imgur.com/cKs3uVA.png <-- old
Old users may create more content than normal users, I don't know about that. The niche subs might take a hit, but the main website and big subs will continue on without disruption if they kill old. (Assuming mods continue to mod - and Reddit can replace/hire mods as needed)
5% old.reddit.com
>10% "iOS"
>10% "mobile web"
20% "Android"
50% new.reddit.com (non-mobile, presumably)
Most subs should have a pretty similar distribution, the numbers don't vary much.
Reddit doesn't specify how it tracks 3rd party apps and APIs in these stats.
(and dont forget that cannabilism was the sub ran by CEO /u/spez where he was openly talking about how much he wanted to eat a baby.)
I am not slandering him -- I am QUOTING him.
Christian's (Apollo developer) math of $20 million a year in API cost is based off of Reddit's entire revenue for the year and not just breakeven costs. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
> Was the asking price really so unreasonable?
Most third-party apps have announced shutdown plans. they would not do this if the pricing was reasonable.
Maybe so, maybe not. The way it was handled was absolutely unreasonable.
Of the affected reader apps, the only ones with subscription models were Sync (on Android) and Apollo (on iOS). Basically everything else was one time purchases for some combination of an ad-free version and/or improved functionality.
For those apps not using subscriptions, they were basically told "you must now set up to handle subscriptions and detailed tracking of API usage" and given either ~75 days (from the 4/18 announcement) or ~30 days (from the pricing availability) to design, code, submit, get reviewed, resubmit, etc their apps, along with any business changes needed to handle substantial cash flow through the app, with only fixed upfront charges available to receive money and only postpaid usage-based charges for disbursing that money. Oh, and any app displaying third party ads (basically all of them) must stop doing so.
Personally I think that the third party apps weren't even considered in the decision making process because they're such a trivial percentage of API usage (credible reason to expect that all of them combined were ~5% or less of API usage, slightly more reliable numbers to believe that Apollo was < ~1.4% of API usage). Whether not factoring those in was incompetence or not is probably a matter of opinion. Or maybe there was actual malice and someone did want them all gone if someone on the official app side regarded them as competition to eliminate.
If the apps were considered and it was (quite fairly) decided that they needed to be a source of income, that's trivial to accomplish with reduced impact on the apps and more income flowing directly to Reddit. Boom! New policy! API usage requires a paid account and has enforced limits based on the account type! Introduce account tiers other than just Premium, change some features between them, collect all the money instead of filtering it through developers paying 30% to the app stores, and it's all very easy to implement for the developers.
From the calculations I've seen reddit's average revenue per user is much lower at around $2-3. However, the price on the API for Apollo in specific is of $30 per user per year.
>Abundantly. Unlike other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter who pay their moderators as employees, Reddit relies on volunteers to do the hard work for free. I completely understand that when tools they take to do their volunteer, important job are taken away, there is anger and frustration there. While I haven't personally mobilized anyone to participate in the blackout out of fear of retaliation from Reddit, the last thing I want is for that to feel like I don't support the folks speaking up. I wholeheartedly do.
>It's been a horrible week, and the kindness Redditors and moderators and communities have shown Apollo and other third-party apps has genuinely made it much more bearable and I am genuinely so appreciative.
>I am, admittedly, doubtful Reddit wants to listen to folks anymore so I don't see it having an effect.
Man this is just a bummer to read.
While you might be right, super fucked up if their users care more about third party apps being killed than their long past acceptance of child exploitation.
Tha dam will burst, it's not a question of if but when. It's a guarantee from the ever declining quality of reddit.
You need enough power users to sustain interest, post content, and launch it.
The goal shouldn’t be to replace Reddit as it exists today, because if you go down that route you are doomed to repeat their mistakes of constant growth at the cost of everything else.
I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.
Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.
> Have just read your amazing, sad, comprehensive Reddit post about the end of Apollo.
> I was one of those long-ago paid-once users :-) and happily used Apollo for years. When I found out a few days ago what was happening to you, I actually deleted Apollo from my devices so I wouldn’t inadvertently cost you money through background stuff once Reddit’s API fees went into effect. Then, as I got really mad over what they’d done to you and the other third-party app devs, I spent hours deleting every comment and every submission I’d ever made to Reddit — because, of course, they don’t have a UI where you can do that easily — and then killed my account after seven years, just because all of this had made me no longer want any association with that platform.
This is the death knell of Reddit, and I hope that the blackout succeeds in getting them to revert their greedy plan.
Reference: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/141mdvt/apollo_o... (Video with timestamp: https://youtu.be/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=2780)
(In other news, TIL Youtube search seemingly looks through transcripts. Nice!)
I think the network effects of Reddit are a lot easier to undo than that of Twitter. There is little core functionality that didn’t exist in forum software from the Naughties.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m really rooting for Reddit to crash and burn. I miss the old internet…
It’ll be interesting to see how Blue Sky shakes out, if and when it opens up to the public.
I would say the 'social media era' of the history of the web has concluded in failure. When you consolidate everyone onto a singular platform, it creates a weird unhealthy community dynamic, and the business incentives do not align at all with users.
IMO this should be much more common practice, where it's legal. It would be cool to one day have built-in functions in our smartphones that automatically enable it when the detected location allows for it.
The legality is immaterial as this isn't a court case. If someone wants to record you without notifying you, they will.
https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/call-recording-on-xi...
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-ends-call-recording-app...
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...
Except for what happened with Twitter a few months ago.
Hopefully this is sarcasm, because in reality the opposite is true (except for the leaner part).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-is-now-worth-a-third-of...
Twitter is better for users now. Because it's not censored to high hell.
This is a totally subjective statement. For me its the opposite: All I seem to see there in replies lately are tweets about culture war bullshit talking points that are 100% noise and 0% intellectual value.
> Because it's not censored to high hell.
Except in Turkey, apparently
Hopefully for the owners’ sake they manage to finish their IPO before that whole situation explodes.
That just kicks the can. After the IPO there are more owners on the hook if things go critically bad.
This was probably the best-case-scenario Reddit was hoping for.
Someone should tell this dude about Excel.
Which I don't even have on my personal computer now that I think about it.
I was initally on Reddit's side in this particular matter (and I still think Selig's API pricing justifications are worthless), but I was shocked to learn Huffman is still the CEO, so his offhand comments about this situation and Reddit's general bad faith interactions with Selig in the past week are now very obvious to me.
Anyway, all the best to Selig.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
There’s absolutely nothing good that can come out of this for Reddit, unless they’re going to put up some concessions which are enough to get 3rd party devs back to the table.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...
Edit: Jesus Christ, that guy on the other end of the phone has just completely destroyed himself in the world of business by lying about the conversation he had with the Apollo developer: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
The users that don’t value the apollo experience enough to pay for it would switch to the reddit app, driving more ad revenue. The users that do value the Apollo experience would still keep providing their content to the platform, in addition to becoming paid, direct, subscribers.
This really seems like an amateur strategy.. kill the massively popular apps with ridiculous pricing and unfair timelines, and hope that the users of this massive community organizing tool you control don’t use it against you? Cut off (and piss off) a big segment of your power users in hopes that a sizable chunk of them move to the native app?
Reddit is just a dumb corpo that doesn't understand why they have success. Watch them backpedal hard.
If Apollo's users (or a good percentage of them) moved over to an alternative platform, that would be poetic justice, at least.
That way it would be even more likely to get critical mass quickly.
3 weeks should be enough time to come up with a coordinated plan. If anyone here has a connection to the app developers it could be a good thing to suggest.
Time for web1 bulletin board/forums to return!
Open standards, open-source based or decentralized platforms, or your own platform are the way to go (I'm talking here from the dev perspective, not from the end user perspective - but proprietary sites are equally annoying for end users when they get discontinued. Making a one-time exeption to my self-hosting preference, I had a blog hosted at Posterous until Twitter acquired them and they shut down).
I remember when my software career started in earnest back in 2011. There was a lot of positive energy in the air. A whole generation of people was discovering the joys of engineering and sharing their efforts and creativity through various forms of open access.
Now, it feels like that's all gone. The spirit of generosity and altruism in the tech industry is much diminished. It seems we have an odd combination of C-suite mental illness and activist investors to thank for that.
I didn’t think I was able to quit social media addictions, but I’ve successfully ignored Twitter since Elon took over. I’m confident I can do the same with reddit, although it will be much harder.
I suppose all I really need is like some sort of curated RSS instead.
I don’t see what they have to gain by doing an AMA, no matter what they say the comments are going to be scathing and people will be sharply looking for anything misspoken to jump on.
Why not roll out these changes slower and ramp up fees over time? Why not give app developers time to adapt?
Apollo is written by one guy. Is it really fair to tell him to rewrite his business model and make significant changes to his app in just a month or two?
10 million for Apollo is also a fucking steal. I mean fire your mobile team and buy Apollo for 10 million? WTF why is that not the obvious play here...
Yes, $10M is a fantastically low price even if they throw it away in a year.
It's hard to see how Reddit can actually survive with this level of mismanagement.
After you shutdown, can you turn Apollo into a site-specific browser? Like request reddit html, write a custom transformer to make it less bad, render with a safari webview, and push nav changes as views on the stack?
~current Tilderino
I assume someone already snapped it; since no permutations of the above work
Maybe fewer global social platforms and less time spent on them will do a lot of people more good.
I'm guessing Reddit gets less global and ubiquitous, in the same way Twitter is more of a slice of a niche crowd now too. Maybe that's okay.
I've always been shocked Reddit allowed this at all. No other major player that owns a platform- FB, instagram, Google, etc. offers this either.
I don't like it either but it makes perfect sense. You could even make the argument that not doing this would mean Reddit employees aren't doing their jobs, and aren't looking out for the company.
This is what people said about third-party Twitter apps, yet all of those power users and brands are still there, except the ones who are ideologically opposed to Elon (and were leaving anyway). It doesn't really seem to have made a difference.
Twitter is worth around a third of what Elon paid for it. I'm assuming you're happy to just assert that 2/3 of it's lost value is just those "who were leaving anyway" and changes like those to third party apps had no impact?
I certainly don't expect this, and if you read the linked article, Christian didn't either. His primary issue was that he was only given 30 days to find a solution, which wasn't a reasonable timeline. His secondary issue was the pricing of the API access. Having a paid API in the first place didn't make his list of concerns.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5yq7q/judge-affirms-jack-do...
That makes sense to me. I was also wondering how come I had never heard of this app.
It also changes the calculus significantly: how many users does Apollo have, and how many users does Reddit have?
Reddit just might not even notice the content produced by Apollo users.
The OP says Reddit claims they were being blackmailed (which clearly they weren't) but it's the talk around opportunity cost that I don't understand, especially as related alleged blackmail.
1) It would cost Apollo $20m to continue operating, and somehow Apollo, not able to afford it and offering to just kind of walk away from the app constitutes Blackmail?
2) The $20m opportunity cost claims. I don't get this. The new actual cost to Apollo would be $20m, that's not an opportunity cost for Reddit. The opportunity cost for reddit is really just the resources & attention it takes them to keep the API system running, which is presumable far, far, below the sticker price they will be charging 3rd parties per 1,000 API calls.
3) In general, I don't understand how any 3rd party has leverage to threaten or blackmail Reddit. Sure some people prefer to use 3rd party apps & services, but I'm assuming (is this a bad assumption?) that if those apps and services went away that a large majority of of their users would simply switch to native reddit options rather than stop consuming & interacting with content they enjoy.
I mean, that's not blackmail that's just, like, normal behavior for two groups that have a dispute.
2) No, the opportunity cost for Reddit is the users using Apollo to browse Reddit as opposed to official channels. This prevents Reddit from effectively monetizing those users, because they cannot display them ads, track their usage habits, and all the other things social media companies do to monetize their user base. The reality is that using a user browsing via Apollo costs Reddit directly (server costs) and indirectly (missed opportunities aka opportunity cost).
3) Reddits bet is that the majority of the user base will be retained. The vocal outcry suggests they will not. Only time will tell which side is right. The other point many 3rd party advocates are making is that moderation tools, the majority of which are considered 3rd party apps, will also stop working. This will most likely significantly degrade the quality of many subreddits. People aren't necessarily angry saying "we demand our equal share", but rather "this is really short sighted and you're going to kill what we care about".
I've blocked 2 dozen accounts in as many days.
It feels like Reddit is about to implode.
Everyone boycotting reddit is all talk and no hat. They will still be on reddit.
People making dramatic announcements of departure, on the other hand, are actually extremely engaged with the platform and rarely make good on their promise.
If you listen to the call this Christian guy literally said: "if your opportunity cost is really $20 million, you cut me a cheque for $10 million dollars and we can both skip off into the sunset"
A joke, seriously? Why on earth would you say this in what was audibly a very tense, high-stakes call and negotiation for both sides? There is no excuse whatsoever.
Very funny, because one week later he dishes reddit and Steve the biggest shitstorm in the entire history of the site - which it would be even without all the blackmail call drama. Hello? Costing and causing surely 10s of millions in damage.
Can we appreciate that even if this Christian guy is just so genuinely ignorant, selfish and toxic without intentionally meaning any harm that at least Steve certainly was fully aware of all the implications, the seriousness and non-funny nature of the conversation?
He had and has every reason and right to feel blackmailed. The only interpretation one can take away from Christian's behavior now is that Steve had better taken him up on the "joke". Clearly, the PR disaster could have been avoided by paying up instead of accepting the cost and reacting exactly as Steve did - in the call Steve rejected the offer and notion of doing any deals. The way he apologised is what you do to save the other person's face and keep the door open for the relationship. It's not what you literally think and mean.
Steve was never going to go back to his team and say "silly me! I'm such an idiot for getting this idea into my head. That he's threatening us because he's about to shut down, cause maximum damage on the way out and stage a user revolt. When he was just trying to entertain us with a funny joke about us buying him out for $10 million. When we have no legal or moral obligation to do so. I love him, he's so funny, glad I apologised on the spot.".
If anything, one should pay some respect to Steve, not taking up the blackmail and steering head on into this mess. Good luck!
I expected this to be a top comment, instead its buried 1000 comments deep, posted by a new account and down voted, just wow.
Its been years since I've used Reddit and never heard of this Apollo app, so I'm not rooting for anyone, but c'mon, what's the deal with the Apollo dev audio and mob'esque "deal you can't refuse" skit: 'you cut me a cheque for $10 million dollars and we can both skip off into the sunset', this alone sounds legally actionable even in a banana republic.
And yet, they're rallying for the Apollo dev on this entire thread and trashing Reddit's CEO. As despicable as they want to frame Reddit's CEO present and past actions, this dev sounds just as -- if not more -- despicable.
Consider the following: AOL instant messenger, ICQ, Paltalk, Tivejo, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, 11 different messaging apps from Google, Zoom, Go2Meeting, WebEx, Microsoft Lynq, Skype for Business, Slack, iMessage, CuSeeMe, Discord, …
A user looking superficially at those applications might notice very little difference or progress between them, the one thing they have in common is they are not compatible with each other, many of them are tied into a proprietary ecosystem (AOL, Facebook, …) and a major difference is they are tied into different proprietary ecosystem.
Such an app always follows a scenario like “You should install Skype and contact me, unlike Paltalk it really works these days”. You try it and you’re like “Wow! This really works!” but after a few years it becomes less reliable and buggier than it was when it started. Some new application comes along and is in a honeymoon period where it knows it has to actually work in order to add new users while the old broken app can coast because they figure nobody can disrupt their two-sided market. History shows that the old app really will deteriorate to the point where the incumbent advantage is lost and a new app will be better…. For a while.
What amazes me is that everybody from users to the app makers are stuck in this cycle and seem to have very little insight into it.
It’s a reason why you need a service that is separate from the client and have to have competition for both. Unfortunately users seem to violently opposed to this and open messaging platforms like XMPP have only caught on with military and law enforcement users.
The “fediverse” is a light of hope in this respect, what you learn when you get involved is it is not just Mastodon but there are many different systems that are inter operating. I wish the EU would take the problem seriously and just legislate interoperation between messaging apps, I mean, you can call an Android user from an iPhone, a Verizon customer can send a text to an AT&T customer, it is long past the time when you should be able to send a Slack user a message from Facebook messenger.
I don't think it's the protocol users have the issue with, it's that generally to get the best out of it you need to run your own server and nobody wants to run their own server.
I run my own server and don't want to run a server...
I'm not a client-facing person (a developer) so I might have been tongue in cheek myself as well. Not sure how any of that sounded threatening though...
Assuming the website is public, allows login using standard JS/HTML and provides results in JS/HTML/CSS: with all the hype around GPT4 etc, wouldn't it be 'easy' to catch the bullet using some converter? And keep deploying a machine to catch up with another machine that keeps changing its "API" (i.e. the look and feel of the website in this case)
I am only partially joking.
I asked Bard and this is what I got:
Reddit has not publicly released its financial information, so it is difficult to say exactly how much profit the company earns. However, we can make some estimates based on the company's revenue and expenses.
In 2021, Reddit generated $350 million in revenue, primarily from advertising. The company also has a premium membership program that generates around $17 million in revenue. Reddit's expenses are estimated to be around $200 million, which includes costs for salaries, marketing, and operations.
Based on this information, we can estimate that Reddit's profit in 2021 was around $150 million. However, it is important to note that this is just an estimate, and the actual amount of profit could be higher or lower.
Reddit is a growing company, and its revenue is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. This growth will likely lead to an increase in the company's profit. However, it is also possible that Reddit's expenses will increase as the company grows, which could offset some of the increase in revenue.
Overall, Reddit is a profitable company, and its profit is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.
That said, open sourcing the app would be great to archive it for posterity.
For a single user, the API is free. But every user would have to apply for a key, and there is no guarantee they’d get one.
I started using the mobile site after Reddit bought Alien Blue, and I saw how the user experience gradually deteriorated to push their mobile app.
I occasionally used Apollo as an alternative, and I can understand the sentiment of the users. As a reluctant iOS user, Apollo was one of the things that kept me on the platform.
Seeing the direction thar Reddit has been taking, I hope a new platform comes to take its place with the focus on discussions/community.
>Probably not. Maybe if the perfect buyer came along who thought they could turn Apollo into something cool
I get that it's something he built and loves, but if someone shows up with $1m and the alternative is to shut it down and get nothing. Then take the money even if it's not the "perfect buyer" and it won't be "cool".
The only solution Reddit has to that is complaining to Apple, who can reject the third party app from the App Store. There's precedent for this with things like "unofficial" Pokémon Go clients. Apple is usually happy to remove them. But I'm not sure it's ever gone to trial - it would certainly be interesting, given case law around APIs like with Oracle v Google, or LinkedIn v HiQ.
1. When I click a post, sometimes it goes to a different post's detail page. The only way to remedy this is to refresh and visit the sub directly via Reddit search function, or restart the app.
2. Video player sometimes just doesn't play the video no matter how often you click "play", similar fix as above.
3. Google search is better at searching Reddit than Reddit search.
Very annoying, but I still use it and never felt the need to use Apollo. To slightly defend Reddit, Apollo is just a client, and I assume they bring nothing else to the table. Apollo team should have had the foresight to see this coming years ago. Reddit can't be blamed for trying to monetize their data. If I had to choose between Reddit and Apollo, obviously I'd choose Reddit because Reddit is where the data lives.
Isn't this your fault for building a service reliant on someone else?
To a certain extent, yes. However, I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I've made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.
January 26, 2023
Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."
Another portion of the call:
January 26, 2023
Reddit: "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
Me: "Fair enough."
Reddit: "And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way."Then leave the app a review based on how well it compares to the system's accessibility font sizes which should go up to 310%.
So far so good. Speaking facts, no opinion, no bias.
> The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year.
No bulk discount?
I guess it's in Reddit's best interest to have people on the official Reddit app in the first place.
For the Redditors that laughed and criticized Twitter when they capped user counts in third party apps and raised their API usage fees, karma was waiting with patience to return the favor.
I view what Reddit did as an opportunity. Even though Mastodon was a spectacular failure, I could see a Reddit alternative that uses the federated model that Mastodon does.
* https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-...
Also I see no evidence that he was accused of blackmail. A linked comment in the Reddit thread states:
>Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.
The linked comment is from "BuckRowdy", apparently not even an employee of Reddit and that is not "blackmail". To me that's "hey, acquihire me and my company for 10 million and then you don't have to do the work!"
I deleted twitter a couple of months ago.
This feels like a positive move for me.
Over time Apple could then perhaps make the Reddit clone.
On the web I still use old.reddit.com but I can see them killing that off sooner or later.
How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
The outcome was unsurprising and it is unfortunate. But this is why third-party apps are always at a disadvantage. The same happened with Twitter and they made that clear and now so did Reddit.
Like I said before in [0]
"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."
For iPhone apps this isn't really an option in the first place.
Most of our commodity software is built & deployed by packages, APIs and frameworks we have very little control on. We just hope things don't break/change as drastically and we can modularize our projects as much as we could, to bear some shock or disruption. Unlikely anyone can build & maintain consumer grade softwares ab initio
I still feel no matter how natively one tries to build products - they cannot build everything. You cannot create CI/CD, monitoring, frontend, containerization, and cloud services just for your software or service. Those depend on some platform API which you won't create just for your product. Short or long business value - unless one becomes a major player with several software engineering teams building a product ecosystem - other people's APIs and frameworks will be used. And that is perfectly fine. That is how good products should be -using nice building blocks. No need to reinvent the wheel everytime.
(Ps. your obsession with citing yourself is one of the worst parts of reading HN)
Good. I don't care.
It is a priceless prediction that became true. Hence how unsurprising this is.
Or are you just saying third party clients shouldn't be considered viable to begin with?
Some RSS readers pull data per user. Others aggregate across their entire userbase, so that the most popular feeds are only read once (or once per data center)
This isn't the first story like this but the prices that are being calculated are absolutely outrageous.
I have a feeling Redit just figured they have cornered this market already and the AI training that's being done is definitely a good reason to start paying for the API.
But there are ways to offer "genuine enrichment integrations apps" a particular license.
This flat rate is just not tenable for most if not all!
But now, partially because of this (and partially because they've intentionally made the mobile web experience unusable over the last few years), I decided to quit Reddit a few days ago.
And it feels great. I've spent the time that I would have wasted on Reddit tackling my TO-READ list of books instead. And I feel much happier for it.
Wow. Now I know why reddit is tightening the noose. Third party developers making bank feeding off of the firehose that is reddit API.
The issue isn't that third party developers now have to pay for API access. That was a long time coming, and I don't know of anyone opposed to this. The issue is the price seems completely unreasonable, and the time frame is ridiculously short.
There is/was a Reddit ecosystem, it's not a zero sum game. It seems short-sighted.
So that fixed my Twitter addition - I just stopped using it.
The same will likely happen here - Reddit is going to find out that I'm happy querying for other users's content (from Google/Duck queries) but without Apollo, I'm probably not going to contribute.
Maybe we'll finally get some reddit competitors that aren't dominated by alt right blowhards.
Anyway, this will probably stop my Reddit consumption altogether.
Already deleted my account a while ago, because some discussions became too toxic for me. Stil enjoying to read there and Apollo made it really enjoyable, even better than rif is fun on Android.
Is there a good archive of previous Reddit content until now?
Was this always a thing? I cannot remember if this was in the case in the past, and I don't really have a Reddit account that I actually log into ever.
Next time this kind of situation comes up, I highly recommend using a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets.. (cough, cough)
As in: Maybe Lemmy has bad UX which is why it craters adoption.
Spending some resources on an Apollo version with Lemmy support sounds like a good idea assuming the dev time can be recouped.
Since Apollo is a paid app I think there's a more direct path to financial relevance than number of eyes in ads. :)
So far, there's been attempts to spin up new servers to mitigate issues on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml while others are looking to Kbin which also federates with Lemmy but uses separate software.
Spreading the controll of subreddits over multiple domains and communities is probably the only insurance against ending up in a situation like we are witnessing with Reddit now.
So excited to have all that time back to be honest.
Though my excitement about that does make it sound like I'm excited about Reddit's API changes... Social interactions are hard :/
I refuse to use their AWFUL first-party app.
This is straight-up villainy.
Account deleted, noted the slander as the reason.
I suspect we may see another round of forum expansion again as people want to carve out their own niche communities again. We might not see Usenet 3.0 for a bit while we let people expand then let a new site come along and consolidate.
Many OpenAI apps or services ask you to config your own key. Does this solves the API price problem?
Piss off those people and you don’t have a business anymore.
r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249958 - June 2023 (233 comments)
Sync will shut down on June 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248234 - June 2023 (88 comments)
Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246937 - June 2023 (73 comments)
Reddit is Fun will shut down on June 30th in response to Reddit API changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246398 - June 2023 (129 comments)
Reddit will exempt accessibility-focused apps from unpopular API pricing changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36238630 - June 2023 (115 comments)
Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285 - June 2023 (36 comments)
Reddit's Recently Announced API Changes, and the future of /r/blind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231016 - June 2023 (288 comments)
Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225583 - June 2023 (134 comments)
Reddit to lay off about 5% of its workforce - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36223466 - June 2023 (30 comments)
Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36218281 - June 2023 (100 comments)
Reddit Laying Off About 90 Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36218090 - June 2023 (56 comments)
Reddit permanently bans account of user advocating Lemmy migration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36215914 - June 2023 (298 comments)
Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36210805 - June 2023 (494 comments)
Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610 - June 2023 (230 comments)
iOS Reddit App Apollo's Developer Surprised by WWDC Callout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203277 - June 2023 (27 comments)
We're joining the Reddit blackout from June 12th to 14th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202277 - June 2023 (54 comments)
Ask HN: Reddit alternatives (that aren't Mastodon) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199403 - June 2023 (30 comments)
Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36196343 - June 2023 (213 comments)
Tell HN: My Reddit account was banned after adding my subs to the protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192312 - June 2023 (218 comments)
Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36187705 - June 2023 (172 comments)
Don't let Reddit kill 3rd party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179853 - June 2023 (260 comments)
How Reddit became the enemy [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36177876 - June 2023 (154 comments)
Update 3: Reddit effectively kills off third party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36170143 - June 2023 (23 comments)
Reddit sparks outrage after it demands app developer pay $20M/yr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166236 - June 2023 (76 comments)
Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 - June 2023 (416 comments)
Fidelity has cut Reddit valuation by 41% since 2021 investment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36157829 - June 2023 (85 comments)
Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36153565 - June 2023 (149 comments)
Teddit – An alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144211 - May 2023 (93 comments)
Historical code from reddit.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142971 - May 2023 (64 comments)
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 - May 2023 (1292 comments)
Reddit's API Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085422 - May 2023 (25 comments)
It’s work he has to do, otherwise those stories would overrun the front page. So the community finds it rewarding.
For the scale of Reddit as a company, it's likely a trivial deal; whereas the cross-pollination of ideas and UI/UX learnings could easily be worth more than the cost of collaborating.
Again, the insinuation was that if anything was actually costing them the absurd $20,000,000 per year for multiple years then they would have had equally absurd ways of dealing with it, like paying a ridiculous $10,000,000 for Apollo and still saving tens of millions of dollars, which would have made more sense to do than what they did (let it go for years). The most obvious interpretation of this is "So obviously it's not costing you that absurdly, and we all know it. Now stop jerking me around on this API price being 'reasonable'." not "And that's why I'm asking you to actually pay me $10,000,000 to go away".
This method of pointing out how absurd the API pricing is came from a user, prior to the call: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/... (the "/s" means sarcasm, in case you were thinking they were being serious as well).
> Also weird to release audio publicly based on hear-say, the Steve guy didn't accuse him publicly of anything.
It's not just private hearsay, the two quotes attributed to Steve are from the moderation call transcript which has been shared and verified.
> I'd be very careful to be on the phone with this Christian guy, because, I might also "miss" (did he mention it at any point to the other guy?) that he is recording the conversation.
I'd be worried about talking to someone who feels the need to be careful when they know the call is recorded.
> I'd be worried about talking to someone who feels the need to be careful when they know the call is recorded.
You'll do alright then in our nice little surveillance earth. Personally, I don't like to talk to people who record me without telling me so, no matter what I say.
And I don't like to talk to people uncomfortable with the idea I can verify what they said to me. Surveillance is one thing when it's a third party, but it's a completely different thing when it's the person you're already sharing the information with. In the former problems about who you intended to communicate with and a third party with more power than that initial two come into play, in the latter those don't exist (unless your goal is to publicly lie about the conversation and push the recording to be shared, as was done here, in which I have little sympathy for lamenting you can't rely on doing that with me). But yeah, not everyone agrees on this one. Even the law is highly varied in this regard.
What is legal or not has not much to do with what is morally right or not, as the law is supposed to be objective, and morals are always subjective. In my book, publishing an unauthorised recording like that touches rock bottom morally.
Why is the third-party app vendor (and not the users themselves) paying for these API calls?
1. Download Apollo
2. Go to Reddit.com
3. Open your user settings
4. Generate a client_id and client_secret
5. Paste that into these two places in Apollo
6. There you go
Sure it's not strictly to OAuth2, but it's going to work just fine, right?
> 5.2.2 Third-Party Sites/Services: If your app uses, accesses, monetizes access to, or displays content from a third-party service, ensure that you are specifically permitted to do so under the service’s terms of use. Authorization must be provided upon request
Yeah, I see it. You can’t provide proof for this.
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of trying to monetize a service that either a) isn't something people want to pay for, or b) monetizing it in a way that kills the spirit of the service. A common problem with the internet, sure, but also smacks of a complete lack of creativity on the part of the suits. If this were an issue of maintaining Reddit's longevity, they could find a way to have their cake and eat it too. No, this is a clear attempt to raise their value before their IPO, so that a few suits can jump ship when the value is at its highest, as we've seen time and time again. And they're too stupid to see that their efforts fly in the face of their obvious goal.
Reddit got popular for lots of reasons; a big one was that it was fun and still felt freewheeling in a way that the increasingly corporate internet wasn't. It was still anonymous (if you wanted it to be), weird, communal, much like the early internet that was seemingly disappearing before our eyes, and yet still decently mainstream albeit in a nerdy way.
Something changed when people started referring to it as "social media." I've always been confused by that label. It's "social," yes, and I guess it is indeed "media," but it's not "social media." It has little in common with Myspace or Facebook or Instagram. It has much more in common with internet forums, albeit with an IMO better interface (the tiered comments design is simple and brilliant, much easier to navigate and keep parallel conversations going than your standard in-line forum). We don't call forums "social media" -- that label is quite loaded and comes with a number of connotations.
But alas, they tried to monetize it via the same model that all other "social media" is monetized -- with ads, clamping down on the weird, etc.
This kills the Reddit. Remember Tumblr?
My prediction? Reddit is going to limp on, but as even more of shadow of its former self than it's already become. It will become the Facebook equivalent of this kind of "social media" -- a distinctly non-hip, safe, boring, corporate place, with an ever-aging user base. One day it will be sold for a comparatively measly fee to someone social media giant that doesn't even exist yet.
Those who long for the Reddit of old will go off to other places. I myself already spend most of my time on HN anyways -- it's basically everything I want from Reddit and none of what I don't. It's got the "old.reddit.com" interface, doesn't require a mobile app to use on a mobile browser, is information-dense, clean, fast. Content-wise HN and the tech-related subreddits I frequent have a huge amount of overlap both in terms of content and I presume users. For everything else...meh, I can take it or leave it. The hobby subreddits are great, the /r/all comment threads for huge events are great, but all that was the cherry on top, not the cake.
I'll probably just continue to mostly spend my time here, and check out, say, the various fediverse clones of Reddit. But just like Mastadon with Twitter, it'll be too fragmented to truly replace what everyone is jumping ship from.
It's sad, but I suppose this is the way of all things. It's new, it's fun, it matures, it's stable, then it decays. So it goes.
That was an epic description. Like a Stephen Gaghan take on most (commercial) social media mobile clients.
Christian should have had a lawyer sit next to him on that call.
But also, dude just raise your prices. I read the whole announcement and truly don't understand why Apollo can't be $20/year. I don't know anybody who attributes a meaningful difference to $10/year and $20/year. I'm not a user but if I was faced with that type of price change and some language around needing to adjust pricing because Reddit is now charging for API access, I'd not give it a second thought.
It really really seems weird to want to die on this hill when you don't need to. Maybe it is the harbinger of the end for Reddit and we're just overdue. But I see no reason the founder of a popular Reddit reader couldn't secure some temporary funding to weather the transition, or simply negotiate a longer lead time rather than spending all the time in talks and ugly back and forth.
You forgot to factor in other things.
Base API cost: $2.52/mo (0.00024/call @ 345req/day)
App Store Taxes / Fees: $1.08/mo (I doubt he qualifies for the reduced fees at this point)
Just adding the appstore tax makes this $43.20 a year. That doesn't factor in any servers he has to pay for (push notifications). The app dev fee $99 per year, not a huge amount but small parts add up. Add in the cost to pay his server engineer, or any profit for him to live off (likely less users, so has to be more $ per user) of while making the app and it probably goes to something like $60/yr.
He said a much more reasonable thing would be to cut the price in half and give a 3 month transition period to make it "feasible for more developers, myself included."
> However in a perfect world I think lowering the price by half and providing a three month transition period to the paid API would make the transition feasible for more developers, myself included. These concessions seem minor and reasonable in the face of the changes.
What that would likely mean is removing as many API calls as possible and removing features as a result. Which means fewer users would want to pay for it.
> I was just spitballing that doubling his revenue would mean he could manage the price Reddit is asking (since he said he could make due with half).
Also, as a tidbit. His current subscription pricing is $5/mo for ultra.
If we want to take that as his revenue for an ongoing subscription to double (since API access is going to be monthly), then the app would be $10/mo or $120/yr.
While I think there is a way to keep Apollo running in some form or another, I by no means blame them for going to this hill to let it die on. Waaaay too much work for far too little reward to have the burden of massive risk from dependency on Reddit's future whims lingering in the background.
Still looking for precedent on this at the national level, and of course International is another story. I could imagine (IANAL-YMMV) it being further complicated by where Apollo (the business) is legally domiciled.
“Unfortunately, it is not always easy to tell which law applies to a communication, especially a phone call. For example, if you and the person you are recording are in different states, then it is difficult to say in advance whether federal or state law applies, and if state law applies which of the two (or more) relevant state laws will control the situation. Therefore, if you record a phone call with participants in more than one state, it is best to play it safe and get the consent of all parties. However, when you and the person you are recording are both located in the same state, then you can rely with greater certainty on the law of that state. In some states, this will mean that you can record with the consent of one party to the communication. In others, you will still need to get everyone’s consent.”
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-c...
this makes no sense, these are STATE laws. if he is subject to jurisdiction of canada, then legally he is fine. that’s like florida saying they will go to CA and arrest people who have trans kids. they have no legal standing
Unless you are enough of an issue that the US uses its federal might to clobber you internationally. In that case, you are pretty universally fucked.
It does though.
> You are primarily beholden to the laws of the country you live in.
This is only true to the extent that “primarily” is distinctly different from “exclusively”; in practice, you are beholden to the laws of any sovereignty that chooses to enforce them against you and has a reach that extends to your person and/or property of interest, either territorially, or through agreements (either pre-existing and general or specific to your situation and ad hoc) with other sovereigns, or through the will and capacity to exert force extraterritorially.
Maybe it's unlikely or uncommon though.
You are free to use what ever you want, and that’s the point. This removes everything but the Reddit app.
- Half the time, clicking on a push notification takes me to the front page instead of the post that was interesting enough to click on. And then the notification is gone, and I can't get to said post easily at that point
- Sometimes, there's two articles that show up on the main screen that I want to read. I have to pick which one I want to read more, because there's a 50/50 shot that when I hit back, I will get a fully refreshed home page instead of being taken back to where it was.
- Overall it feels less natural to navigate through than the Reddit web interface, let alone the 'classic' (old.reddit.com) user interface.
- Probably not related to the design of the mobile app, but the hostile behavior of web reddit on mobile, constantly trying to force me into their subpar mobile app, is also irritating and painful.