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paulddraper

This is a quantitative disagreement. Not emacs vs vim. Straight numbers.

Reddit says the API will cost less than a $1/month per user. [1]

Apollo says the API will cost $2.50/month per user. [2]

Moreover, Apollo claims that Reddit itself makes only $0.12/month per user, therefore the API charges are absurd. [2]

What are the correct numbers? These are numbers, not opinions.

EDIT: One issue...I suspect that Apollo users are significantly more active than the average Reddit MAU. Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

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It all just blows my mind, because realistically none of these details even matter. It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want. They don't have anything to prove, they don't owe anything to anybody, not even an explanation. Ultimately they need to make a profit and they think this is the way towards that.

I just can't understand why they feel the need to keep publicly stating things that are either outright untrue or at least misleading. Just make an announcement to the effect of "this is the pricing, we have determined this is the best way to meet our financial goals" and shut the hell up. It's not hard!

The BS / gaslighting about precise numbers and the misrepresentation of what they've heard from developers is completely pointless.

> I just can't understand why they feel the need to keep publicly stating things that are either outright untrue or at least misleading

I can only think of one reason: they’re panicking.

> It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want.

While this is true, Reddit knows they are dependent on their users for their survival. That’s why they are panicking.

isn't everything depended upon their users for their survival?

Not to the extent that Reddit is, at least not in the same way. Other companies can exist and even thrive regardless of what users want by being necessary or legally mandated. Oil companies' users aren't their customers. Equifax doesn't care about how users feel. ADP, Geico, SAP, utilities, banks, etc. aren't the best companies for users, and many of their users dislike them, but it's generally not a threat to their profitability.

This is a somewhat cynical view, admittedly, but overall, many successful companies don't need to please "users" in the same way Reddit does. They obviously make some amount from advertisers, but they need users for advertisers to advertise too.

Most companies provide a service or product to their users, and their users pay for that. The company creates the value for which their users/customers pay.

With Reddit the majority of the value to users is not created by Reddit but by the users themselves. The only real value that Reddit provides is a platform, and it's a platform that would be fairly easy to replicate (from a technical point of view it's just a large scale CRUD app, nothing special, it's a solved problem).

The only real reason that users stick with Reddit is the network effect, but that is the biggest risk to their platform as well. If they manage to alienate enough of the most active part of their user base into moving to another platform, the same network effect with ensure the rest of them follows, taking all of the value that Reddit provides to their visitors with them, and as a result all of the value all those visitors provide to paying advertisers.

This is not as unlikely as you'd think, because only a small percentage of visitors to Reddit actively contribute.

You are quite wrong to think they are panicking. I can assure you they planned and anticipated for a backlash of this proportion. And also came to the conclusion this will be worth it.

That affords reddit inc. with quite a bit more competency than they deserve.

They have made a habit of fumbling and bumbling their way through things like this, and I don't think this is an exceptional circumstance.

they are in the business of community building, a bit directly but mostly indirectly through the various subreddit teams

thus they have a reputation as platform gods, and now they put up that reputation as bargaining chip, it's the classic "trust us, we care about you", and now it seems they really don't.

so now they owe an explanation to users, teams, and in general to anyone who they directly or indirectly hurt.

It’s because they have hired a bunch of people whose job is to do the PR.

Just like if you ask a surgeon for opinion his opinion will lean towards surgery, because that’s what he knows.

It's called PR

> It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want. They don't have anything to prove, they don't owe anything to anybody,

The only reason Reddit is worth anything is because its community produces content for free to it.

Reddit doesn't have to do anything, but it also doesn't have to be worth anything, either.

Given the blatant lies by the CEO towards the Apollo developer I don't believe a single word that they can't prove.

It’s truly incompetent management. Spotify gatekeeps all third party apps behind their premium subscription, they could charge $10 a month for Reddit Premium to give access to Apollo and they’d make out like bandits. Spez sounds like he has personal beef with Christian on the AMA, that’s Elon Musk level nonsense except replacing electric cars and space travel with a shitty web forum

THIS! Just make it so the third party apps only work for reddit gold users, or have limitations for non-gold users, and now they've converted a bunch of the apollo users into paying members. Instead they're lying and slandering people, getting caught, and doubling down.

I'm getting the impression that reddit isn't profitable not because of any fundamental issue, but because the leadership of the site have absolutely no idea what they're doing.

I have to wonder if this is just the same cross-society trend of employees seemingly checking out and doing the bare minimum, manifesting in the C-suite. One would think top management should be doing the work of coming up with several different monetization strategies, analyzing what different types of backlash they each might cause, how to market them, simulating revenue given various levels of attrition, etc. Instead it's like they (he?) have chosen a single course of action and are just going to force it through at all costs, and they're in charge so why isn't everyone just doing what they say damnit.

Best summary of the whole saga I've read so far.

He now blames[1] Apollo's author for saying other things in private and in public and "leaking" the phone call recording proving Huffman's lying, which - the developer mentioned at least twice - is legal in Canada where he lives.

Sucks that I don't have popcorn at hand.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

What are the odds that Spez replies to the response the Apollo dev left under that?

He could always covertly edit their comments if he's upset that people don't have the right opinions. It wouldn't be the first time.

What is this guy's issue? Why does he keep saying and doing pointless things that are self-destructive and risky to him and the business? How has reddit let this situation run so completely out of their control?

Divorcing entirely from the subject of the strategy change, the decision to execute it in this manner seems incomprehensible unless they truly do want to completely drive away as many of the users who even know about this change as possible. Maybe we are so ignorant of Reddit's real user metrics that they consider almost everyone reading that AMA to be a money drain.

He seems to be attempting to use a technique known as DARVO ("deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender") to smear the Apollo dev. This happens sometimes when people who know they've done something wrong are held accountable.

Something can be both legal and unprofessional at the same time.

Broadly speaking, if you don’t want the public to know you’re a liar, simply don’t lie. Otherwise, you have no one else to blame but yourself when the public is shown the person you are.

One could argue Huffman’s actions in this regard have been deeply unprofessional, as well as operating blatantly from a place of bad faith. Savvy negotiation is distinct from lying and pleading extortion.

> Moreover, Apollo claims that Reddit itself makes only $0.12/month per user. [2]

MAU are very different users compared to users making 200 reqs per day, and bring very different revenue.

Agreed. I think this is an issue in Apollo's math.

Enough to account for an order of magnitude? IDK

> Enough to account for an order of magnitude? IDK

reddit daily users (not MAU) are about 50m, which likely also don't generate 200res/d, and this difference is already order of magnitude.

Other "issue" from apollo side: he compares reddit API cost to his imgur API cost of $166 per 50m reqs, while forgetting that official imgur API costs $3k/50m.

> These are numbers, not opinions.

> Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.

Numbers can very much be an opinion if you pull them out of thin air.

Reddit says "typical app user" but Apollo claims that its users make more API requests than is typical for other apps, in part due to higher usage, and in part due to inefficiencies in how Apollo structures its queries.

Reddit may be making their claims based on an app that doesn't issue push notifications and thus doesn't need to poll their servers 24/7 for every user.

Christian's math assumes every MAU is worth the same. He took $600 million in revenue and divided it by 430 million MAU, to get to $0.12 per user.

In reality, the value of a MAU varies a ton by geography (and other factors).

For Meta, in 2023, US and Canada traffic is worth $48/yr, while developing world traffic is $3.35/yr. A ~15x difference.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

The typical Apollo user is probably much higher value than the average Reddit user, so the opportunity cost is higher as well.

Just a shot in the dark, but maybe reddit is only counting logged in users whereas you don't need to be logged in to use apollo?

If they're not logged in then there's no reason to hit the Reddit api on a per user basis.

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