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Comment by square_usual | Hacker News Reader

> 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."

> 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.

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Reddit leadership desperate to dump the pig on public markets, pulling out all the stops. Literally their only path forward is to find some other greater fool to hold the bags, regardless of what they have to say to make it happen.

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])

Locking comments on a website built on the commenting system. Something hilarious about that.

> 0 points (18% upvoted)

lol

Reddit could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat simply by purchasing Apollo and making it available as an official app. So many people would have paid a significant monthly fee for an ad-free, quality mobile reddit experience. But no, they had to go full-on maximalist destroy-all-intruders mode, and now they've got an unnecessary PR nightmare on their hands. From the perspective of fiduciary responsibility, reddit is completely deficient. What a bunch of idiots.

They didn't even need to do that. They could simply have changed the terms so that user-facing clients like apollo either need to show reddit ads, allowing no ads for users of reddit premium. They approve api users anyways, supposedly, so mod tools and the like could be exempt, and they could introduce higher cost efficient bulk export of comments for large scale generative AI machine learning use cases.

Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.

I agree with the rest of your point but

> 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.

How long do you think Reddit would have kept Apollo ad-free? That would cost them whatever Apollo cost and have the same result. The value proposition of Apollo is that Reddit doesn't own it. They already have a client. It sucks. Why would this be better?

Reddit already offers an ad-free experience for $50 a year with reddit premium. Throw in Apollo with that premium, and you start earning $50 a year from a bunch of users who were previously generating zero revenue through ad views.

Yes, that makes sense. But do you think Reddit would actually do that? Apollo has a better UX. Reddit has proven they don’t want to build a good UX. If they bought Apollo they would only ruin it.

Honestly this is the tipping point for me to just move on. Reddit is an ad-filled cesspool, with a morally bankrupt C-suite. Growing up I actually looked up to this guy. . . how pathetic and sad. Such a fall from grace, and for what?

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