Hacker News Reader

Comment by f0e4c2f7 | Hacker News Reader

Buy one (or all) of the popular reddit apps. Applo said they would sell for 10M (to reddit, but seems like they would come around on this too).

Rearchitect the app to point it at the new site instead of reddit.

Model it after Wikipedia's monetization. Never advertise, maybe some monetization through reddit gold style status things you can buy but mostly keep the lights on by begging for money a couple times a year.

Make it nonprofit like Wikimedia foundation.

Keep reddit's structure of subdirectories. Replace the UI with what the app looks like.

Keep costs low initially by having videos and images hosted off site, text only.

Hard to say if this would make enough money to keep the lights on but would be interesting to see it attempted.

View on HN

> Applo said they would sell for 10M

since this keeps being passed down as fact.

while it's clear that the apollo guy is a bit awkward, he did clarify in the recorded conversation, that this was intended as a joke. [0]

I read it as he was trying to point out sarcastically how ridiculous the numbers were.

[0] https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...

I don't understand that guy's argument. So Apollo is costing Reddit 10 million due to their API traffic and he wants Reddit to pay Apollo 10 mil to stop it? How is that better than cutting off their access which would cost reddit zero dollars?

I guess the cost of cutting them off cold turkey would be the backlash from the community.

I’d add: pay the moderators of larger communities and reach out to the existing Reddit mods to invite the new communities to the new platform.

Replicate the api and link structures.

If legal, copy the existing content.

Give existing users a migration path.

If you can't directly copy the existing content, build a parser to import user exports of their own content extracted from the Archive.org sets, and tombstone their old Karma counts as a badge.

Of course, you wouldn't be importing the info, the users would be doing it themselves.

> pay the moderators of larger communities

I think this would make moderation worse. As a volunteer function, people do it for love of their community. As a job, there’s no competition and even more shenanigans for controlling large communities.

I think the direction should be toward making moderation take less and less time so more people are willing to volunteer.

Amazing Reddit is risking everything with this API change when they could have paid $10 million for Apollo

Why buy Apollo when they have their own app? If they cut off Apollo's API access, users will have no choice but to use the official app.

Who wants to do this? I'm in!

I'm in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com