Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
theverge.com
theverge.com
But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher cost (2-3x) but over 20x is impossible. (2) That basic math was very conservative. The actually multiplier is much higher if you look at the calculations. It’s wild but it seems Christian is even willing to accept a 10x bump (albeit with a higher subscription cost).
Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint.
But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name.
Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.
Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...
Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur.
Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.
bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.
The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.
The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.
That's why I roll my eyes and gag in disgust a little when I hear Reddit management and their apologists somehow try to blame Christian for not negotiating in good faith. Even if that were true (which, to be clear, I don't believe it actually is, the opposite in fact), it just means that some other developer would step up if the pricing let them continue. The fact that every other app also shut down just proves that was the entire goal of these API pricing changes in the first place.
I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.
Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads.
Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way.
All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.
Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.
Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.
This of course means unsavory content like hate speech, blatant astroturfing, and conspiracy theories will flourish, scaring away big ad spenders. They will try to compensate for this by allowing more ads for online gambling and male enhancement pills.
IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the company. And to be clear - I'm actually someone who is sympathetic to Reddit's position, where a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them and the company is unprofitable.
I'm a very long-time Reddit user but I'm generally pretty meh about the various tempests-in-a-teapot psychodramas that emerge from there, and I remain generally cool to the popular uprising rhetoric - but Huffman's behavior is pretty egregious.
And this is why I don't really see this resolving peaceably - Huffman at this point seems personally aggrieved by Selig and one has to wonder if he's behaving in a capacity that maximizes the interests of his company vs. descending into a petty personal feud.
I may be grossly misinterpreting him here - but based on his disastrous AMA and his haughty proclamations it's not an unreasonable perception. More importantly, as a company that is 100% reliant on mass volunteer labor to even exist, the fact that this perception has been projected, reinforced, and not usefully countered in any way suggests disqualifying leadership inability.
And many subreddits have said they’ll be private indefinitely, not just 2 days.
How did you determine this?
It's a private, for-profit company in a capitalist society. It's gonna have to do some unpopular things sometimes. What raises questions about leadership isn't so much that they're doing these unpopular things, but that they're doing so very poorly.
Good PR and good community management is critical to a social media business, especially when said business is 100% reliant on an absolutely gargantuan amount of volunteer labor. Reddit's leadership has demonstrated not only a lack of ability here, but practically an impressive anti-ability on this front.
When old.reddit.com goes, that's the last time I use reddit at all.
See here: https://www.reddit.com/coins/
I will add that neither is it made by them. Community creation, curation, moderation, posting, discussing, styling, accessibility, usability is all done through volunteers and community members.
That "value generation" isn't 100% theirs to consume should be fair.
Huffman has had many terrible lapses in judgement over the years.
It has also always rubbed me the wrong way how Huffman re-writes history by saying he founded reddit with just Alexis Ohanian. There were three founders, and the third one that he always leaves out is Aaron Swartz.
But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.
> Rate limits for the free tier
> All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
For a hobby project you could maybe get away with scraping a GQL bearer token and issuing requests as if you were an official Reddit client. Or you could even request the HTML and scrape that. At the scale of these third party apps that approach just wouldn't work.
Has there been any App Store apps that go with this approach?
As long as Reddit provides some API accessible to a non-logged in user on the web, there’s going to be a way to scrape it. If you push that scraping into the start of the app then it’s be distributed without any clear way of blocking it.
You could even have the app fetch “how to” updates from a a central site rather than pushing app updates so you don’t have to wait for App Store approvals to get around scraping updates.
We could call the end user’s program for accessing the site a “user agent” as it acts on behalf of the user to fetch and display the content that the user wants to see, in the manner the user wants to see it.
It could be an open-ish format, then you could potentially support alternate sites like HN as well.
That would be such a nightmare between constantly changing UIs, A/B testing, and the fact that new reddit is a broken mess even when running in a normal browser where it's made to run.
Why not though? Seems really straightforward to serve ads over the API and enforce any display guidelines on third-party apps, since there are only a handful of significant apps anyway.
(It's been a while since I was in the middle of this, so stuff may have changed a bit. But in general...)
Ads are usually not served up by the application provider (Reddit). Instead, they embed URLs given to them by their customers (ad agencies). If the app is browser-based they'll wrap them in some javascript that also calls app provider endpoints and manages clicks on the ads. They do this for a few reasons: 1) There's a huge amount of overhead to the app provider if they try to manage and serve the customer's ad creatives. 2) There's a lot of hassle for the customer; they have to go through the app provider to make any changes to the ad media. 3) Nobody trusts anybody else; this way the customer knows exactly how many times their ad was shown (and if video possibly how long it rolled), and the app provider still knows how many times the ad was displayed vs. just offered to the end user's device, and what the click-throughs were.
The app provider could pass the customer URLs and the provider's wrapping endpoints to third-party apps. But they'd need to think good and hard about all possible fraud games, and would need to trust the third-party app to perform the complex dance properly. Examples:
1) what if the third-party messes up and doesn't call the click-through endpoint? Or sometimes does? Or calls it when they shouldn't? Click-through accounting is a huge deal with very large financial ramifications.
2) How do you enforce that the proper ads are shown in the proper context? If you control the app then you can sell above-the-fold vs. below-the-fold spots etc.
3) How do you control that the ads are actually shown when they should be? Not every link given will result in an impression (below-the-fold again).
4) Even if you completely trust the third-party app's motives, how do you monitor and debug the end-to-end flow?
5) How do you convince your advertisers that's everything is under control? A customer is probably going to have fewer warm-and-fuzzies with third-party impressions, and very well might discount their value.
This is the case for most sites, but not Reddit. Reddit rolled their own system, and if you look at their ads you'll see it's all coming through Reddit.
They absolutely could make ads part of the API that third party applications have to display.
There's a hundred things they could do if you assume they care about third-party applications, and don't specifically want to kill them.
I do think they want to kill them, actively, but even beyond that it's really clear they don't care.
It'd be easy to say "as a condition of getting this API key, you agree to display ad elements as they are served in the feed, and on click, open their associated URL in the system browser". All the ad-targeting is done server-side anyways, and attribution via unique links is easy.
Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics.
Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax.
Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say.
In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.
It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps.
They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.
And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.
The real reddit app doesn’t even have an option to block a particular ad account so when they serve you evangelical right wing ads all day you just have to swallow it.
This is the main reason why apps exist in the first place. They remove the user agency that browsers provide.
But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.
Imgur serves advertisements when you go to their page. But you don't get them through the API.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial
> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.
Calling an API and monetizing the front end it is fine. The money that Imgur loses from ads is made up in the API call monetization.
The Reddit APIs don't prohibit serving advertisements or any other form of monetization of the use of the APIs and mention it as something that your app would need to do.
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/data-api-terms
You will disclose in your App through a privacy policy how you collect, use, store, and disclose data collected from your App Users and other visitors, including, where applicable, that third parties (e.g., advertisers) may serve content or advertisements and collect information directly from your App Users and other visitors that may include the use of cookies. In addition, by using the Data APIs, Reddit may use submitted information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
It was about maximizing the value of the IPO by ensuring investors would be minimally aware of the failures of the app and new Reddit, by ensuring as few 3rd party products exist as comparatives to the first party offerings.
It could be argued to be part of a conspiracy to defraud investors by ensuring they were incapable of being fully informed....
If a 1.5 person app (Apollo) is handily beating Reddit's app... what on earth is the holdup? Either the eng team is wildly incompetent, or this is by executive choice.
Reddit's inability to deliver on mod tools despite a decade's worth of promises makes me think it's 40/60 wildly incompetent and needing firing vs exec choice.
Fine, I'll spell it out: The hard part of making a client is making a client that can retain the money-making portion of an application. It is trivial to charge a small amount for client functionality when the predominant cost is on someone else. The reason you need a lot of engineers building the Reddit client is that they have to deliver the ads, make sure the ads are viewed, and correctly reported as having been viewed. The whole thing.
If you don't have to worry about making money, you can make a front-end to anything quite easily. This is why most HN commenters frequently make the "what's so hard about the Uber app" mistake. The hard part isn't the app chrome. The hard part is making it make money.
Apollo is a better client. The comparison is Apollo vs the Reddit app, not Apollo vs Reddit as a whole.
We are talking about clients here.
EDIT: Oops, that’s per day! Your math is right, please ignore.
I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives:
* Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around.
* Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load.
* Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown.
The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.
Another example: Over a year ago, I decided to explore programming with Python. At work, we encountered the problem of our web-based software requiring users to download PDFs to read them. As a personal project, I set out to build a Python application that would generate individual image files for each page of the PDFs, providing both a preview image and a higher resolution version. I dedicated a few evenings and two Saturdays to the project, and after approximately two weeks, it was successfully completed. Additionally, I created a simple GUI using Vue.js, enabling file uploads and displaying the resulting images. An experienced Python developer could likely achieve the same task in just one or two hours, with an additional two hours for the frontend.
Months later, the company decided to embark on a similar project but with additional extended OCR (Optical Character Recognition), incorporating machine learning to extract structured data from the PDFs. Initially, the prototype aimed solely at uploading the PDFs, with the machine learning aspects simulated. Months were spent discussing, conceptualizing, refining, and revising before the implementation phase commenced. Over a year later (though I have since left the company, I remain in contact with current employees), the first prototype was completed. Users can upload PDFs, and the system generates images from individual pages. The frontend simulates a progress bar, as the microservices run in the background without a built-in monitoring system. One of the more experienced developers foresaw this issue from the start, but management hindered his efforts until he eventually resigned. To date, the machine learning component remains unimplemented.
My last example for now: I recall a situation where the best developer I know was hired by a large corporation as external support. Within a few weeks, he was assigned an easy standard task that any competent developer could handle with ease. Believing it to be a sample project for the standard onboarding process, he promptly and efficiently completed it in less than a week. When he delivered the finished result, his clients were astonished. They had planned this to be his sole project for the next six months and had expected it to take a significant amount of time.
In summary, it is not uncommon for companies to invest months of work and millions of dollars into projects that a reasonably skilled developer could accomplish in a day. Never underestimate the incompetence of some organizations.
Saying it was "smart but handled poorly" is an excuse. It was a series of dumb moves because they did not see the actions they needed to take and in what order and on what timeframe to not capsize.
It worked for Facebook. It worked for Google Chat. It's failing for Twitter, and for reddit, for the same reasons. They did it too quickly and without the finesse needed to prevent a revolt. Instead of cranking the pricing, they needed to do what Facebook and Google did -- slowly degrade the integration system until it was unusable, start restricting features, add features incompatible with third parties, etc, until the third parties all give up and the API dies a seemingly natural death. reddit just doesn't have the foresight or planning to pull off most plans, including nefarious ones.
But it didn't work for Gmail. Despite Google's best efforts, email still exists outside Google. If we want to avoid playing this Fark->Digg->Reddit game again, we need an open standard that doesn't rely on a single company, like email.
Microsoft used it like a scalpel and a hammer for decades.
They did not. They bought it and killed it. Their home-grown application is built from scratch.
If the reddit app was any good, the 3rd party ones wouldn't even exist. All their problems are because their users prefer to pay a 3rd party than to use the recommended, official app they keep pushing into them.
Instead of all this confusion, if they just made their app work on the high-latency that is common on mobile networks, they would get much better results. (No need to even make their video work.)
Examples or I don't believe that happens, maybe very rarely.
A more recent example in the UK would be the pensions cap which had the unintended effect of sending people into early retirement because it became uneconomical to continue working. This impacted especially doctors in the NHS and contributed to a labour shortage. The government finally corrected the folly 2 months ago.
The fact is rich people can afford to live wherever they like more than anyone else. There's no reason for them to leave if they don't want to. But if they do leave and they're famous sometimes they'll take the opportunity to score political points.
Thank you for your comprehensive list of links though!
Yes, because you asked for ‘an example’. As in you asked for ‘one’.
You’re determined to stick to your point of view, you’re entitled to do that of course. But why pretend you’re interested in a debate or discussion on the matter when you’re clearly not?
NO amount of this is going to be acceptable to the wealthy, but there's gonna be a threshold between resentful grumbling and panicked flight, and that threshold is not at zero. And the usefulness of a wealth tax kicks in WAY closer to zero than the panic flight threshold is.
If they're truly trying to run a paid API service then they have to actually support those customers (the apps) and they really weren't prepared to do that.
It is not how a pre-IPO company behaves
Incentives.
But I call bullshit. People training new AI models are using the API right now because it's free and easy, but as soon as that changes they will go back to good old fashioned web scraping.
Are you implying that a user is worth $0.125/mo to Reddit? Because that is laughably inaccurate. Mature platforms like Facebook extract up to $60 per user per quarter in advertising revenue from developed countries. Reddit itself made an estimated $500M+ from ads last year. ~$2.50/mo is already more than fair. Thinking that Reddit owes full data access to anyone for pennies is absurd.
Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut?
Mind you that price is just part of the problem - the 30-day to start charging, was just as bad. It's absurd and completely made to kill the 3PS. Maybe if they have maintained the price but gave time for apps to discuss/adapt/replan, they could have found other options.
I use reddit 80% on the web, 10% on iOS and 10% on Android. I’m not going to pay reddit that full $2.50 (plus app store cut) for 10% of my usage twice. I’m just going to stop using reddit on mobile and stick to the web.
The “pay for reddit premium and get ad-free reddit plus unrestricted third-party app use” model makes more sense for users, for third party apps, and for reddit.
Again the devs are willing to pay some multiplier on this.
$500 million per year / 430 million users = $1.16 per user per year
$1.16 / 12 months = $0.10 per user per month.
Alienating power user seems like the exact opposite.
Plus, I'd bet that third-party app users are far more likely to be mods and/or heavy content creators, which means that alienating them will have outsized negative effects on the engagement of the rest of the userbase.
From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit?
Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides didn't manage to work this out.
I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work. The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, all of those services just completely forbid things like Apollo. All these complaints are going to encourage companies to simply ban alternate apps rather than trying to price an API in the future.
Further switching to the reddit-model would require turning their back on free users with disabilities.
So while it is practical to shell out many of the principals behind the Apollo project in order to meet Reddit's IPO stat-padding requirements, the developer has chosen to shut down.
They’ve made it pretty clear they’re not really trying to keep apps. Several developers in the Huffman interview pointed out that they’ve reached out for months if not years to absolute silence in return.
Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work?
Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.
> I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work.
If they are genuinely trying to make this work, why did they only give 30 days notice for third party devs to figure this out? Seems to me their goal was to kill third party apps and that they have already succeeded.
> The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app.
Sure, but something being the norm doesn’t mean people like it. With reddit being how it was for so long and having a genuinely terrible default app, it’s no wonder they are getting flamed as much as they are. The way they have handled this on the PR side doesn’t help.
I think if reddit wanted this to actually work, the smart move would have been to allow users to pay for API access and use their token through the app of their choice. This would be more viable than the per-app basis they went with, which puts all the third party devs in an incredibly tough spot and effectively forced them all to shut down.
Then users who want "premium" could pay for whatever feature Reddit-side to allow an ad-free experience, or they could even partner with the third party apps to offer it for a cut of the fee.
(This is assuming Reddit is negotiating in good faith, though that seems to be in question.)
I understand the API that the 3rd party apps interact with is powered by the legacy platform. The same platform that powers old reddit.
It doesn't seem like reddit are updating that platform anymore (I haven't noticed any major changes to old reddit in years), and I really don't think it has the ability to serve the same ads that the new reddit platform does. It would take a major refactor to either replicate the full API over to the new platform or otherwise feed ads back to it.
BTW, this also raises questions about how much longer reddit will keep old reddit running. It really looks like they are planning to retire the old platform all-together.
Of course, this isn't about ads in and of themselves. It's about Reddit (and, to some degree, tech in general) having lost investor interest and Reddit being this close to bankruptcy, desperately hoping that these 3P clients will provide a stable cash infusion to keep the lights on. Ads alone aren't enough; at least not now with the financial hole they have dug for themselves.
Ultimately, Reddit is panicking and doesn't know where to get the money they need real soon. Their historic practice of another investment round isn't going to work this time. Likewise, slowly transitioning to a paid API, giving developers time adapt like Christian proposed, isn't going to work either as, at that pace, there won't be a Reddit by the time the transition is complete.
Perhaps, but they don't have much choice. If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt. May as well go big and go bankrupt only if that fails then not try and be guaranteed to go bankrupt.
Thing is, Apollo is on board to pay the big price, but Christian has exclaimed he needs more time to make the necessary changes to support it. Problem is that Reddit doesn't have that much time. Bankruptcy is still inevitable on his needed timeline. The power company doesn't care that you plan to make money sometime in the future when developers have had time to get around to making changes to their software. They want their money when they want it and if you can't make good then and there, that's it.
Remember, they're panicking. Their old model of finding new investment every time the plug was about to be pulled is dead and they weren't expecting that. They need legitimate cashflow now and don't know where else to find it on short notice.
Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.
I know reddit was never profitable, but I'm not convinced Reddit is so short on money that they can't last to 2024. They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load. From what I heard, Reddit employs 2000 workers and I can't imagine they need that many to keep the site operational (For reference, Twitter had ~4k employees pre-pandemic, and peaked at 7500 employees... I'm not convinced that Reddit's site complexity is a quarter of the largest site in the world, despite reddit having plenty of traffic as a top site itself).
Yes, that is addressed at the end. 'Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.'
You don't want to start there if you don't have to. If they can turn things around there is still the possibility of IPO. Current investors have made it clear that they want off the sinking ship. Only staving off bankruptcy by trimming the workforce to the bare minimum is not a good look for the sake of IPO, however. That is saved for the last ditch effort.
Of course (I was laid off last month, no dev wishes other devs to be laid off). But to open up my cynical side for a bit: I also don't sympathize with these huge companies taking advantage of (what EVERYONE knew was) a temporary boon in tech and growing off of low interest rates proportions that would not be needed in 2-3 years.
I as an individual saved aggressively for when that bubble inevitably popped and I'd very likely be laid off (fears which came true. Twice.). These companies instead decided to throw all bets in, and I can't exactly sympathize when the obvious future called their bluff. If Reddit didn't have a war chest to help wheather the storm with, I just see that as myopic at best and greedy at worst.
While perhaps there is an argument to be made that one can take advantage of another if there is information asymmetry, when you say that EVERYONE recognized the temporary nature of the engagement, to think that temporary hiring under that is taking advantage of a worker is quite silly. A worker needing a guarantee of x number of years of payment had every right to demand it be written into the contract.
> These companies instead decided to throw all bets in
Of course, so did the workers. They didn't have to leave their jobs flipping burgers. They chose to because they saw $$$ in the air. That same greed is no doubt, as before, why they didn't bother putting any conditions in the contract to protect themselves from the downturn you state they knew was coming. They took a chance – sometimes it worked out, other times it didn't. Such is the nature of risk.
To be frank: if you're at that level of negotiation in your contracting, you are either a business owner yourself, or are some of the best of the industry who probably isn't financially worried about a downturn. The latter doesn't have any benefit from chaining themselves to a company. I don't even think contracted workers are safe since many contracts were broken over this.
For the other 99.99% of hourly/salary workers in the US, trying to negotiate specific terms in an at-will state will only end with you being crossed off the hire list.
>They didn't have to leave their jobs flipping burgers.
Sure they did. They were laid off from there too:
https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/mcdonalds-lays-off-hundreds-cu...
I know you were being coy, but every sector of almost every industry is doing this. There is no safe place except for already being rich and not having to worry about years of salary.
Maybe you're not from the US, but it seems you don't understand how US employment works. I'll reiterate: the US is almost all "at will states". It gives freedom in that at any time an employee can walk away (well, almost any time. Funny how that works), but employers can also fire you for any reason unrelated to being a protected class (minority, pregnant, gay, etc.). There is never any safety net guaranteed in the US.
That's fine. You just said that anything else in the given scenario would have you being taken advantage of, so you would want the agreement to be rejected if they cannot commit to those terms.
Remember, this is, in the end, no different than the earlier suggestion that if all a company sees is a short-term hiring opportunity during a temporary boom that they should not hire at all. The long-term job you want doesn't exist either way. You haven't lost anything.
> I'll reiterate: the US is almost all "at will states".
Sure. And I'll reiterate that you can negotiate your own contractual terms. Yes, that does mean some people won't want to work with you, but that's okay because why would you want to work for someone that is taking advantage of you?
To recognize a bad deal upfront, accept it anyway, and then cry foul later is nonsensical.
When you browse on the 1P Reddit app you no longer have a curated feed. It's filled with suggestions ("because you visited /r/place-you-dont-sub-to before posts"). And on top of that, controlling whether the view is condensed or as expanded cards does not affect ads. So you'll get a giant "he gets us" jesus ad that takes up half the screen - and if you do something like report an ad, say it's not for you (in my case, I selected something like "it's offensive"), you'll still get the same giant ad.
The Reddit experience they want me to have is not the Reddit experience I'm used to from the 3P apps, and I think that's why they're trying to kill them off. People that want a curated list of forums and a few memes/gifs aren't driving engagement as much as they'd like, so they tried to clone TikTok. And it sucks, so I'm gone after June 30th.
One word: control.
Verification metrics for basic ads are things like: when was the ad shown, how much of the ad was visible, which parts (pixels and video timeline), what content was also visible while the ad was shown, clicks, bot/script/adblock detection, and whether the ad was on-target (age/gender/location of user).
Ideally, these metrics are also independently verified, so Reddit's tracking and the advertiser's own provided/preferred tracking (like DoubleClick Verification).
Typically the video player or ad renderer needs to be customized to collect these metrics and understand VPAID/VAST/VMAP/MRAID for how/when to show the ad and what tracking is needed. Plus support for mixing content and ad encoding formats.
It's basically an arms race to compete against Facebook/Google's ad serving and tracking capabilities and I'd say even most 1st party premium ad publishers with full time ad tech teams often have difficulty consistently passing verification convincingly enough. So it's understandable that Reddit has very low confidence in single developer apps being able to pass the ad verification bar, much less over API which isn't a well worn ad serving path.
The default is to not pay for an ad shown until the publisher can prove it was actually shown and independent verification matches. It's a lose-lose situation for the user and publisher to show an ad but not get paid for it (but the advertiser still benefits, so they'll make a good effort to find reasons to not pay).
Brand safety is also the highest priority for most advertisers. They don't want their ads shown next to content they disagree with. Which the publisher also has to prove they've done in a way that can be independently verified.
Some of these problems are very hard to solve with tech, and for these cases, the solution is often "just trust me". It's not uncommon to simply let advertisers have access to audit ad serving code. It's easy to trust a big entity like Google or Facebook or even Reddit, but it's very hard (and a lot of work) to trust random single dev apps (or even companies lead by untrustworthy figures like Twitter).
The bigger (unsolved) problem is: how do you prove your advertising actually worked? How do you convince a customer like Coke or McDonalds with massive advertising budgets and not immediate trackable sale/action that their money was well spent? So far the tech solution is to just provide a lot of data supporting that the ad was served exactly as the advertiser wanted.
People don't want to see ads because ads are intrusive. The solution to this problem that the ad industry sees is to make ads more intrusive. So it's kind of a positive feedback loop of user-hostile garbage forced upon them, and no wonder that people want to make ad-free experiences.
The "good" publishers will simply charge more per ad and do more hidden proof of trustworthiness, such as being more open to code audits/transparency, more user tolerable ad practices/product deisgn to minimize bad behavior/increase tolerability, or better ad targeting to simply demonstrate more effective conversions. Think Facebook (the tradeoff here is they know a lot more personal information about you to be able to do this).
Unfortunately, most ad publishers fall into the "bad" camp where they know they won't receive payout for some portion of their ads, so they increase the amount of ads shown to make up for the shrink or simply show lower paying ads that have more lenient verification requirements. This is more what Google does/encourages.
My experience is advertisers would love to show less ads with higher conversions, because it makes their lives way easier. But they can only buy what's offered, and there's a lot of cheap user hostile publishers desperate for ads (even most of the ad strategy suggestions in this thread are pushing for more ads) and very very few high quality ad publishers.
but reddit has burned so much good will that users aren't going to want to pay out of spite
I can only imagine what an app is like that was designed with no API limits whatsoever.
It's kind of amazing Reddit ever allowed this sort of no limits API usage - while at the same time Apollo charged their own users while enjoying zero infrastructure costs. What a steal.
The backend server push server is a bit more active at about 600 calls/hour/user.
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.
That 345 calls/day is again mentioned https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 but shortly afterwards ( https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 ) he describes the process for push notifications (10 days ago - this isn't just the 1.3 release from 5 years ago):
> I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us
He's making a lot more than 345 calls per day per user.
I think you're off.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
> On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day. If the app can operate with half the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?
(note: 53% less calls is about going from a 6 second window to a 10 second window)
Note also that 100k users is the user base at that time and 1.3 is when the subscription ($5/month) was added for push notifications. He noted that that would be something that he would have to pay to support for a server to do those requests. It is quite likely that the number of users who are signed up at $5/month for push notifications is less than the total user base.
Having dabbled with the API, if he is doing push notifications on a short time window, he's making a call with at least that frequency.
https://apolloapp.io/notifications-faq/
> Wait, why does it cost money? I already paid for Pro!
> Apollo Pro unlocks extra features and is a one-time fee, but Apollo Ultra includes a notification server that has ongoing monthly costs to me (the developer) to rent and maintain that add up and can't really be covered by the fee associated with Pro (especially when trying to keep Pro affordable at a few bucks). I'd love to give it away as part of Apollo Pro, but I don't want to potentially jeopardize the future of Apollo. As a result I also tried to keep the price very reasonable at under a dollar a month.
And yes, the price went up when you look at the current in app purchases that are displayed on the App Store page.
The Reddit admins have done nothing but lie and try to bend the truth and I would never trust their word after this debacle. Christian has far more credibility than the Reddit admins do at this point and their "well Apollo reduced usage by 50% one time with a 24 hour turnaround so that means their app sucks and surely they can do it again if they tried a little bit!" argument is, for lack of a better word, bullshit.
That isn't how software works, Reddit knows software doesn't work that way, and it's such a ridiculous conclusion to come to that I don't even know if it's a fallacy that has a name but the Reddit admins are definitely not arguing in good faith on this.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
The push notification server is described doing 8640 requests per day (1 call every 10 seconds) for each user.
An account can sign up multiple users ( https://apolloapp.io/notifications-faq/ )
> How many accounts/devices does this work with?
> There's no limit (but please be reasonable). If you have a main account and five alternate accounts, and an iPhone and two iPads, you can get notifications for all of those accounts on all of those devices for the same fee.
With 50k subscriptions that he needs to refund the floor on this is that he's doing 432M requests per day for the push notification server.
If that is one request every 6 seconds instead of 10 (as described in the 1.3 release) that is 720M requests per day for a floor.
The backend server for Apollo handling push notifications is doing something with some consistent load that is likely showing up on the same API key as the mobile client app is.
When the backend server and the mobile app are taken in aggregate, the description that Reddit sees about how many requests per day the API key for Apollo makes is in rough agreement with those floor numbers plus what one would expect a mobile human user the doing.
I suspect that with the outage that the push notification server was scaled back from 1 request every 6 seconds to 1 request every 10 seconds because the backoff for the push notification server was not working leading to an excess of calls and an increase in the server load and egress causing an increase in the amount the node was going to get billed at. I admit that is pure speculation.
From Reddit's point of view, they only see "this request was made with this API key in the header" and can't distinguish mobile app calls from push notification server calls. When they say "this is how many requests that Apollo is making" they are looking at that number. When Christian is saying "Apollo is making X calls per day on average" he is referring to the mobile app requests (which are more efficient than Reddit's mobile app) and not including other uses of the API key.
Most users come via Google or other ways to read some content. Only few participate actively. Earning less on those few users can be valuable overall.
This is Selig's estimate based on not much info. Numbers like "20x" are completely made up.
That would mean 13 billion dollars in expenses yearly.
Reddit C-level executives suggested Apollo was poorly optimized or something. I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. If that’s not the case then it’s clearly just another case of corporate greed and pumping the numbers for the IPO.
I really hope the blackout is sustained for longer than 2 days. People need a break from social media and their echo chambers. Plus only 2 days of decreased user activity is nothing to Reddit.
It will stay relevant for 1-2 news cycles. C-level executives brush it off to board as “turbulence”. Then it’s back to business of extracting as much value from the users
I am a bit skeptical that efficiency is part of the formula here. Reddit's running an entire company here, and I'm guessing that API call efficiency is only a small part of the cost (considering that they serve things that cost real money, like video).
The issue is that Apollo was doing 600 calls per hour per user to push notifications with a less than 10 second window between "when it hits your mailbox" to "when it shows up on your iDevice".
When that 600 calls per hour per user gets billed at $0.24/1k calls it gets very expensive.
If those calls were done to the main application (not showing ads) at the same rate that the official application does, it would represent several million dollars of lost advertising revenue.
On the other hand, it represents a fairly consistent load on the servers that doesn't generate any revenue that can misbehave quite badly when there is an outage and per user rate limit information isn't reported back to encourage the push notification server to throttle itself a bit.
> 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.
Yes, that's from 5 years ago. He repeats it 10 days ago in this video.
https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 (closer to the actual timestamp, that gives context https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 )
> I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us
Note the every 10 second call.
People are likely confusing the "app" with what is installed on the phone rather than the application being the entire system of front end and backend (likely using the same API client keys).
https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
Reddit had many years to listen to 3p devs and to it's own internal developers to improve their API. They/Leadership decided not to do so.
Christian would need to change the monthly subscription from $4.99 to probably $14.99 or $19.99 to handle that (and regular daily use and Apple's subscription - though if he wanted to manage the subscriptions through a 3rd party payment processor he could reduce the 30% to 15% for that).
The lack of that, while it sucks, doesn't change that there's a cost with the polling architecture.
Looking at the history of that line (thank you for pointing it out, I'd been trying to work from the notificationsWorker)
March 16, 2023: 10s to 60s
Nov 10, 2022: 5s to 10sIf he were to optimize his calls, he could get them down to under the new ratelimit, as the Relay for Reddit dev has. Once under the ratelimi, with no notifications, it's a total of $0.78/user/mo.
It's unreasonable for a company of any size. The entire storyline shows Reddit sabotaging the process. Which seems idiotic, because they're throwing away a vibrant ecosystem that is #1 in the world, and took a decade to organically grow.
A decent CEO would've made a good faith effort to monetize this rather than burn bridges.
This reeks of Reddit just not even wanting to do this at all. Call up the big devs so they can say "Oh well, we tried!" and the small devs that could afford the smaller-end costs just get ignored.
I don't like being that pessimist "fuck capitalism" sort of user but... between the high cost, low deadlines, and unanswered responses from devs, it's pretty clear what the true intent here is. And I don't think it was a due to a lack of competence. It was very carefully planned (maybe not the scale of the reaction, but overall planned).
---
And from other devs on the AMA, It's not like devs didn't know before the public announcement. One app developer mentioned trying for 3 months to get contact:
>I am the developer of a third party app (Now for Reddit) which has been happily using the API for 10 years. I don't want to close down and have been considering using the paid API. However, I have been trying to contact Reddit over the last 3 months and have been completely ignored.
>I have sent many emails (devapps@reddit.com) and have used the online contact form which reddit themselves have asked developers to use. Each and every time I hear nothing.
>What am I supposed to do? The deadline is approaching fast, my app will be rate limited by Reddit and it will stop working. Please, reply to developers who contact you.
>I feel completely powerless to do anything right now and I want to try and save the app I've been working on for the last 10 years.
>I know I'm not the only developer who is being ignored, it's extremely unfair and a horrible way to be treated.
(yes, as you can predict, this question did not get an answer despite being the 2ns or 3rd top comment)
Now for Reddit isn't the most popular app, but 500k downloads on android alone show this wasn't just some small toy. They give a deadline of almost two months but ignore 3 months of email support. They don't want 3rd party apps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
If he was able to pass through $1 a month to users and given a reasonable time to do so, Apollo would likely still be alive. Or better yet, require a $10-12 a year subscription on each Reddit user account, paid directly to Reddit, to use 3rd party apps.
The fact that it never crossed their mind that a half hearted attempt like allowing Premium members, who pay more every month than a free user generates in ad revenue, to continue using whatever apps they want might stymie some of the outrage show how out of touch the execs are. It still would be a bullshit solution, but making a developer like Christian pay for API requests while I was already paying Reddit ~$5/mo was stupid.
(Needless to say, I’m not longer subscribed to Premium)
The TL;DR on this whole situation is that Reddit quoted Apollo and other 3rd party apps their "fuck off" rate, and now Reddit is all like surprised Pikachu face that people who depend on those apps are, well... fucking off.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit...
Edit: $20M/year, not per month.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.
Sounds to me like that rate might be Imgur saying "we welcome your business," rather than "fuck off."
https://web.archive.org/web/20150320234625/https://api.imgur...
In 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191002234012/https://rapidapi....
I suspect its an older rate that he got and was able to lock in for a while.
The current rate is about $0.07/1000.
If $0.24/1000 is a "fuck off" rate, then Imgur is less than an order of magnitude more friendly to new developers. Imgur's price 4 years ago was $4k for 150M requests.
Reddits pricing is mostly in line with similar social network API pricing (Twitter is still an outlier).
That's the point. In business you don't say "no" you 'f#ck off' price instead. 20x is a f#ck off price. It's because they don't want 3rd clients to proliferate because of the business issues it creates BUT at 20x, if they agreed, it would benefit the balance sheet enough for the issue to go away.
API pricing/use is the excuse to lock down their content asap. They see a goldmine under their own feet that others are extracting value from and so far they have not.
This is all about LLMs and perceived value related to that.
It's users using the API, to contribute the content. If Reddit stopped to think it through, they'd realize content contributed by Apollo users is better for LLMs.
Finally, if it cost users to use the API, Reddit gets paid, apps compete on their own merits as they do today, and the pile miners pay for commercial harvesting of the content users paid reddit and the app builders to let them post.
It's hard to see why Reddit thinks their current approach is the cleverest.
Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses?
Looking at Reddit's now application programming interface pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents.
That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket).
With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit.
Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.
Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses?
Looking at Reddit's now API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.
Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents.
That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket).
With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit.
The Relay for Reddit dev breaks it down here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd...
Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.
More: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/com...
That 1% is an optional $1.49/mo. If it's a mandatory $2.99/mo you're looking at 10-20% easy. And he's printing cash.
The other issue was that 30 days notice is not even close to enough time to pivot in terms of business model. He mentioned he has significant operating costs already, due to paying for caching servers as well as part-time help. Not only does he already have to refund users who paid for year-long subscriptions, but he'd also have to turn around and ask them for almost double the money for the same service.
The fact that he's shuttering his business entirely (thus foregoing all potential profit) rather than "printing money" as you put it, makes me think he has a good reason to think his financial situation is a lot more untenable than your rough analysis would indicate.
Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community. Frankly, anyone who does business with any of these execs should see now that they can and will happily lie and mislead. I don't know how you come back from that.
99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them
its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff
I think this is the case for many things. And I imagine people will/are get wise to it. Elon Musk I think figured this out when he did what he did with Twitter. Some very online people really cared and made a lot of noise and the very online part of the media that cares made a lot of noise. But those people don't really matter and the media side has declining ratings year after year as they become more and more irrelevant.
I think the paper tigers are starting to be exposed and they had a good run for the last 10 years by being very online and making a lot of noise. But ultimately, their voices don't matter.
Advertising will come back. There’s anti-Twitter pressure campaigns and for economic reasons ad spend slowed. It’s all coming back.
He controls the worlds largest and most important megaphone. That’s priceless.
Yeah, because the bots and spam area largely out of control. There is significantly much more of it them used to be. And no, ads did not went down because of pressure campaigns, but because of serious mismanagement of ad accounts.
Having another income source really does not imply he does not care about a company where he is spending most of the time.
Reddit's triumph from the user perspective is that all of the content is driven by users, and those users are primarily made up of a small and passionate minority. The downfall of this fact from the business side is that Reddit as a company needs to appease those people because without their contributions, nobody would want to use the site.
How many of those users would notice if Reddit swapped in paid moderators for the largest subs?
Better now than during a roadshow.
I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.
The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place. You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares? If that's what people want and that's what people are upvoting then let it be. There's no reason to have editorial control over subreddits when the entire point of the subreddit is to have stupid conversations, memes, and jokes. If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?
Wasn't reporting handled by the mods?
> You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares?
Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care. It seems like you think Reddit was only for shitposting, that wasn't my experience. It was a collection of forums, each with their own norms.
Right, I mentioned that for r/AskHistorians and r/science. What about regional subreddits? Why in the world does a subreddit for Toronto need rules like no CN tower pictures, no questions, or no posts about crime? Why can't the only rule be the post has to do with the city?
Why do moderators want to go beyond moderating spam and insist on presenting us with a curated feed of what they feel like I should be consuming? Why can't they let upvotes, downvotes, and reports speak for themselves and use that information to make removal decisions?
Why are so many moderators of subreddits against public moderation logs?
The engaged users care about the topic of the sub and tend to interact with it directly, while the larger audience is subscribed but mostly upvotes things from their main feed without caring which sub it is from, or visiting the sub itself to see what all has been posted there.
I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”
So mods tend to be pulled in two directions by those two groups, and one is louder than the other so they tend to get their way.
Also known as the "all unmoderated subreddits eventually become /r/pics" problem. It's why a lot of major subs opted-out of being default when that was still a thing.
I've heard a lot of argumentation along those lines from users that seem to really not care what really made Reddit a special place on the Internet. To them, Reddit is another Instagram/TikTok/Facebook clone, and it seems that's a viewpoint the company is trying to support. It seems completely brain-dead in terms of understanding why the website got popular in the first place, but it seems there's a good number of "satisfied" users that want it that way.
Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted. You're not going to upvote things and then comment on the post to complain about how it's being upvoted.
It's the "engaged users" who create comment sections full of "who is upvoting this junk" because they don't understand the little circle of of people who make multiple "high quality" posts every day are the minority and the unwashed masses the moderators hate so much actually _DO_ want to see the reposts, memes, sunset pictures, and questions about the best place to find a burger because it's the one neutral topic people don't get into petty political fights over and comb through your comment history in an effort to dunk on you and defeat your point with an ad hominem.
Yes, that was the entire point of my comment.
This seems very naive, since afaik the mods also deal (thru 3rd party apps or extensions) with the large amount of spam that reddit gets. And, of course, who is going to deal with those reports?
I mean, sure, Reddit could close everything but the top 20 or 30 most popular subreddits, hire some offshored mods, and start the content moderation speedrun[1] anew. But, why? And how bad will it get before the IPO? Reddit has spent the past two decades washing their hands of any moderation tasks, as their first party mod tools show. Starting now, with a pissed off power user base, seems suicidal.
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[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.
Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.
> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?
Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.
A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.
But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.
That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.
Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.
Even if it magically could, someone needs to maintain the regex.
They invented work for themselves that doesn't even need to exist and can be solved with the voting system. Every rule change they've made seems to be in an effort to make themselves relevant and take on unnecessary work. This seems like a common theme with Reddit moderators - they give themselves more work to do that nobody is asking them to do in order to justify their existence.
"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"
These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.
That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.
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There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.
A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.
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> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.
I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.
Would you be able to provide examples of where you believe this to be the case?
Lots of posts the powerusers over the years have complained about and slowly got rid of are repetitive are things like pictures, questions, and touristy stuff. Those things were extremely popular and got lots of upvotes but a couple powerusers who browse new got tired of them, decided to troll every post they didn't like, and the end result was the mods caving to them and not allowing the posts anymore rather than moderating the bad users and letting the votes sort themselves out.
On top of that, in January they decided to make the rule to ban articles about crimes happening in the city unless it has a significant impact. They were going to run a user survey at the end of January to gauge its popularity. They decided not to and now rule 8 of r/Toronto is no posts about crime. Now r/Toronto is just a sanitized feed of .. pretty much nothing? I don't know what content gets posted anymore that isn't complaining about the Ford government or housing prices. It's pretty sad when we don't even get the news about what's happening in Toronto in r/Toronto anymore unless the mods feel like it's an important enough for the whole city to know about. Why do Reddit mods get to decide what's important to r/Toronto users? I don't believe the subreddit should "belong" to them just because they had first mover advantage and now they get to run a major city subreddit using whatever rules they want.
and no, it's not realistic to spin off your own subreddit and create a new one. It works with bigger places like Canada or Ontario, but Toronto is too small to support multiple city subreddits and you'll never be more popular than r/Toronto because that's naturally the place everyone is going to go to first.
The same question could be asked of Hacker News, which is run very much like a topically focused subreddit with rules, moderation, merging of duplicate topics, etc.
Well then it’s clear you understand the value of good moderation, even in a place like Hacker News which is not nearly as strict IMO as the subs you mentioned.
I get your examples of over moderation and of course there are plenty of examples of this. I just think you may be in danger of conflating good moderation, which is often invisible and doesn’t involve a lot of moderator posting and onerous rules, with the lack of need for moderation at all.
And, as a nice side benefit, maybe we'll finally get to prune the cabal of super-moderators that have been abusing their influence for over a decade now.
These aren't just cheeto junkie computer nerds, these people are invested. So this is a little like saying "just leave your girlfriend of 5 years" like a lot of emotion is involved. You want it to work. You want to be in the ideal state. You don't want to quit. You want them to change.
That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.
Reddit moderators are uniquely privileged when it comes to making their opinions heard on reddit. The shuttering of subreddits is sensational and splashy enough to get media attention, but in itself says little about how most reddit users feel. A moderator revolt is like a strike of middle managers, revolting against upper management. They can lock the doors and keep all the common workers out, but that isn't evidence that the common workers have much investment in the strike. I think this whole thing probably follows the 90-9-1 rule; the 9 are mods and powerusers flipping out against the 1, while the 90 are probably oblivious or simply indifferent.
The vocal dissenters certainly seem to be in the minority.
I was also surprised to see yesterday that this same large sub I made them in was blacked out. Virtue-signalling? Throwing a bone to volunteer co-mods in the sub? Against the API changes? Who knows. Big mess now. Tech people don't like change, but when they get mad, wheels start turning.
Like any activism that actually accomplishes anything, it must be sustained and involve real sacrifice to work. This is just "raising awareness," which I guess it has done, but it's easy enough for Reddit to just batten down the hatches and wait for it to blow over, which it will.
It's no different than when you hear about A march planned for this or that cause.
These polls have an insane selection bias though. The ones who feel strongly for the issue will be the ones commenting and voting.
It's why stickies/sidebars/etc. rarely work because most of the users simply don't care enough to view them.
Sure, but isn't it in the other direction? The users are most affected by the change are those using third-party apps, but you can't vote in polls in third-party apps.
On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children.
The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose.
Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.
On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.
And then there’s stuff like: mods will decide to “lock” threads they don’t like. There was a discussion on /r/Catholicism talking about an anti-Catholic group being invited, then uninvited, then reinvited to perform at a baseball game. After a few hours of discussion the mods “locked” this, meaning you couldn’t participate in it anymore.
It’s extremely annoying.
hah, my reference to the one large sub where the mods are widely hated was about my city's sub which from your description might be the same. Edit: In this case, I have some empathy for the mods though, since that sub faced invasions from people outside the city who hate it.
> On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.
Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news in the city about crime and banned posting stories about crime in January. It's now June and still a rule. You can only post a story about someone committing a crime or getting arrested if their crime had a city-wide impact.
There was a story about teenagers shooting fireworks off on a public bus around Victoria day this year and that post was allowed. People shat on the teenagers and said whatever they wanted about them. It got as nasty as you'd expect. The post announcing their arrest though? It turned out to be a group of POC and so the mods locked the comments within minutes because they anticipated "bad" comments and it was going to be too difficult to moderate.
The other annoying thing before that was a small group of powerusers getting annoyed with people asking too many easy-to-Google questions. So a few choice posters would always come in and make the same "I recommend House of Lancaster" (a strip club with a reputation) for every question that got asked. It didn't matter what the question was, there was at least 1 house of Lancaster suggestion. It turned into a meme, the moderators noticed people were hostile to newcomers, and rather than outlawing being hostile to people they banned questions!
It’s _extremely_ annoying.
My actual hope is that what comes out of this protest is that the majority of moderation is simply removed.
Forgive me for not shedding any tears because mods wont be able to stalk users using push shift anymore. The horror.
hah, I tried making this argument for months, no years, after the decision was made - that they were banning the wrong thing. It's trivial (and a built in Reddit feature) to automatically hide posts after you vote them (up or down - you have full control) and there's even the hide button to hide posts you don't want to vote on. It would have been so easy (and made nearly everyone happy) to have the rule to be against bad faith answering questions. To encourage people to downvote and ignore questions you they want to answer. If nobody is answering or voting for the questions then people will stop asking them.
Well powerusers didn't want questions period (and I think some friends of the mods already had control of the question subreddit) so they punted questions off to a different subreddit.
The mods definitely get some enjoyment through trolling people and making the experience on the city subreddit miserable - most of them are extremely active in a shitposting subreddit that was specifically made for making fun of users in the city subreddit. The powerusers that were involved in the bad behavior own the shitposing subreddit too. It's a small sort of r/drama or r/subredditdrama for a local subreddit. If you make the "right" comments in the city subreddit (i.e. dunk on the "right" people) you get invited to mod the shitposting subreddit.
What's really needed is a public moderator log outlining what gets removed. I wouldn't care about things being removed that much if I had an option to see it. I really hate that they can remove things that _someone_ found interesting about the city and I can't see it at all because of arbitrary rules the moderators made.
Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms.
Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected.
Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.
If people want to post sunsets and nobody is writing you emails to complain about it, then have at it. It's the voice of the people.
It seems to come down to that people need to debate on the same level. Some drunk bum is not going to walk out of a bar and into a classroom and debate a professor. But that's what happens on social media.
Reddit has tools to hide posts you personally don't want to see without affecting the entire subreddit with silly rules. If you browse new you should be aware of these things.
Most of the subs I'm in, the mods are thought of pretty highly or not at all.
If the last US Presidential election was held on Reddit, Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide. He obviously did not.
When Netflix announced it was cracking down on password sharing, Reddit declared that this would be the final nail in their coffin. Instead, subscriptions skyrocketed.
Reddit power users are angry at spez and claim that this will be the end of the site, but the average Reddit user has maybe heard about all of this, and mostly doesn't care.
That's why people do things like black outs and protests, so people can learn who people are and what is happening.
> probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans
That's information is associated with protests, so people can decide if they care.
I can actually understand how most wouldn't care about this. This change isn't that important to me except in that's it's another stepping stone on the death of the free and open web. Twitter API, Reddit API, real ID on Facebook, probably countless other things. What we expected to have in the 2010's is going fast.
> Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community
Were the calls ever posted? For the way Reddit has handled this and previous issues I definitely believe Christian over spez, but unless I missed something, right now everyone is just believing what Christian said, right?
Edit: I missed it, transcripts and recordings were posted to apollo sub. Thank you to everyone who replied with links
http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
The transcript is here: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
The recording itself was posted on Reddit in the apolloapp subreddit.
Yes. On Christians Reddit post about the shutdown. Transcripts and links to specific audio bits. Pretty easy to locate.
Christian: Oh, just give me $10 million and i'll be quiet.
Reddit: What?!? Did I hear you right?
Christian: Huh, oh I just mean the app is loudly using the api and i'll make that quiet.
Reddit: Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you to be asking us to pay you to go away.
And then Christian would go and spout off how "even reddit agreed that they misunderstood me on the call". It's so incredibly disingenuous of him.
If they still thought it was a shakedown, it would be honest for them to later say to their team that they thought it was a shakedown.
I don't know how much to trust Reddit, and the 30-days notice to showstopper API fees looks very bad. But I see a lot of people just repeating Tweet-sized soundbites, which leads to a dysfunctional and more easily manipulated society.
Christian's post: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
Audio clip: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
Devil's advocate still: the perception of a shakedown isn't necessarily dependent on mishearing something literally as "go quietly". What reason does Reddit have to pay $10M, rather than pay $0? Reddit leadership might even feel like it's a shakedown from their perspective, whether or not that's the intention or perception from some app developers.
Personally, were I involved, I would indeed be mentally tracking everyone's perspectives and honesty, since that matters a lot (e.g., a mutually better deal might be reached when you understand each other; or you might get a contract, but they might not honor it in good faith, or will screw you at renewal time).
But I think Internet pitchforks would do well to keep memetic talking points to the unambiguous (e.g., the proposed API licensing fees, the short time horizon, a party's claims of how that will affect them), and avoid paths that seem more like (ahem) "We did it, Reddit!" loose cannon character assassination.
1) Shut Apollo down: increase ad revenues, decrease server costs (if the claim that Apollo is inefficient is true)
2) Apollo pays $20M: increase api revenues
3) Pay Apollo $10M: decreased revenue, maintain high server costs.
I don't even understand how this kind of deal would make any sense to propose.
2) Yes, this is better for reddit but untenable for Apollo.
3) If you buy the app that makes your site SING, that everyone loves, then you keep all those users, and make money from them instead of losing them.
Also, don't forget that everything before an IPO is magnified. This has cost reddit perhaps hundreds of millions now in bad press and lowered valuation.
Christian is clearly thinking on his feet, so obviously he doesn't have a value proposition for reddit. All he is really doing is letting reddit know he might be open to it, the details could be negotiated later.
Reddit clearly has all the power here (Apollo is fully dependant on reddit), so they would have been able to negotiate it down. Maybe all the way to $1 million?
Anyway, reddit clearly weren't open to it, so it fell flat on it's face.
That means, if you pay 1 million now, it would be less than the cost to upkeep for 30 days and it would we a win win
It's all horse shit and they know it. I don't claim to know the reason, I can only speculate. But, what I do know after reading Christian's posts and listening to the phone call is that reddit, and Spez specifically, are being super shitty.
Reddit: You will now pay us $20 million per year or we’re shutting you down. You have 30 days notice. Apollo: If Apollo is really costing you $20 million per year, you could pay us $10 million to stop, and you’d come out way ahead! I’m half joking.
Reddit: Are you threatening us?!
Apollo: No, I was just jokingly making a point.
Reddit: “Oh, I misunderstood. I immediately apologize.”
Reddit (to mods publicly): This guy is threatening us!
=======
Wait, what?
Who’s threatening who????
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit (see controversies section)
It's like when a person complains that her husband looked at her phone, when by doing so he discovered she was cheating on him.* Where's the trust?
* Genders included for sentence readability, not to imply anything about women or men
They aren't mutually exclusive situations.
Coke and IBM were his preferred stocks for some years for these reasons.
Add to that the misrepresented communication with the Apollo dev in particular, I struggle to see how any of this is admissable from a platform or partner who is now in the business of selling access to their API at premium rates. Reddit has no intrinsic right to exist, and the fact that it can't turn a profit and that their product is now selling access to user-generated content that is being produced despite their shoddy engineering speaks volumes. If I was one of these devs (and it's hardly just the Apollo guy) I would not come back no matter what Reddit does. This sort of behaviour cannot be tolerated or made to be the new yardstick for VC sweethearts.
He entered into a contract with users assuming that his API costs would be 0. He can't change that contract and start charging another fee on top, and is obligated to continue to provide the service no matter what Reddit now decides to charge him.
So the solution is easy for any laywer to provide - just shut down the business.
I don't really agree with that take. He's already talked about what happens now, and it includes refunds for unused subscription time.
> I've been talking to my rep at Apple, and over the next few weeks my plan is to release something similar to what Tweetbot did (Paul has been incredibly helpful in all of this) where folks can decide if they want a pro-rated refund on any existing time left in their subscription as Apollo will not be able to afford to continue it, or they can decline the refund if they're feeling kind and have enjoyed their time with Apollo.
> For the curious, refunding all existing subscriptions by my estimates will cost me about $250,000.
For anyone curious about what he said on trying to run everything as a paid sub quickly:
> 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.
Take away 1. app store fees (30%) 2. income taxes 3. hosting costs 4. contracting costs (he employs at least one part time engineer) 5. design costs 6. health insurance + other payroll taxes, and you are left with a small percentage of that as net income.
Now add in the hours of his life he has presumably put into this app for the last 8+ years. I'm going to go ahead and guess that it was more than 40 hr/5 day weeks
If you consider his skills as a premier iOS/full stack developer, simply getting a job in big tech would be a wayyyy better option for him financially. Heck he could pocket $500K/yr at Google/Meta in straight salary without any of the associated fuss.
The rest of your math sounds about right.
tbh right now it feels like mods, and especially power-mods (who are moding several high traffic subs), are revolting. I actually enjoy this blackout because a lot of small subs became active refuge for people who doesn't really care about the whole drama. Honestly I'm curious how this will play out but I can see subs just "naturally" replacing themselves with new ones.
fyi 92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people https://imgur.com/a/rjE8YuW as discussed here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018. And it's probably got worse in the last 2 years.
The worm is turning and the top power-mods are going to get Caesar'd.
It's an obviously choreographed play and Reddit is going to win this one.
But I guess with the way things are going that may not be a problem to consider in the coming years.
Uff i ve been trying to find them , and also trying to make mine more active but it doesn't seem to be workign ...
I'm fine with not providing them with content or ad views anymore if they don't want to work with 3rd party developers.
Maybe I'll build myself a nice little HTML-scrapper app for Reddit instead.
There is a vocal amount of non-mods who are also participating.
Also "mods" are still users of reddit. When I'm an admin of a Facebook group, I'm still a 'facebook user'.
I suspect a vast majority of reddit users don't have a dog in this fight and just want to use the site.
That's the rub here compared to Twitter. It's not run by huge companies/content creators/personaliies providing news, but by users posting news or discussions. And if they leave, that does directly impact the content of the site, despite being a minority.
What's worse than pissing off the workers of your business is to piss off those who do all the work for free.
To speculate... I get the sense in part that Reddit hung the big apps out to dry for being publicly vocal and interacting with the press. Apollo probably was already lacking in sympathy with executives for being the reddit app getting air time at an Apple event. It would be petty if true but it is unfortunately no less then what I expect from Reddit.
Reddit came out looking dysfunctional[2] and sleazy throughout this. There was no good reason for this to blowup in the way it did.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/comments/145e9sk/...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
I've also decided, screw it, I'm taking an Amazon break as well (because they enable the above behavior, the world is worse because Amazon retail exists, CMV) -- boy, shopping for a particular thing is hard without them. Like, I decided to just order more Eneloop batteries, which stores local to me carry them? Goooooood luck finding that out (and I'm in the bay area). I'd love to shift my Amazon spend locally, but ended up ordering from B&H.
Rechargable batteries seemed to me to be a complete commodity at this point that they really aren't even worth researching. Anker is my go to for anything USB chargeable related and regular batteries have been totally fine using generic brands in my remotes. I've actually had more problems with brand-name no rechargeable batteries corroding in my remotes.
Eneloops seem to be the longest-lasting brand, I just pulled out an old eneloop that's been sitting for at least 8 years and it still had it's charge (!!). What I've been looking for is tests like Mooch does for 18650s but for AA/AAA: https://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/blog/links-to-all-21700-26...
I am fine ending my mindless scrolling, but I have realized how much I depend on niche reddit communities for good answers to specific questions now that I can't get to them and am struggling to find good results elsewhere.
aside from financial factors like shipping costs; there are some extremely niche products or small parts of products that would be basically impossible to find without Amazon or eBay.
e.g. I had a lint trap broken on my washing machine and I could search up the product by its serial number. No store (even the manufacturer itself) had the part a la carte, but I found some eBay listing and grabbed a replacement for some $15. Maybe I was ripped off, but I wager I could have browsed through every hobby store in town and not have found that part, or had have to try and compromise with a non-perfect substitute. Maybe some would offer to order it themselves but it'd be a week just to get an estimate. $15 is worth avoiding that hassle.
This blackout led me to click on r/popular and .... the horror! i remembered how juvenile reddit is, it s not good
Reddit was clearly not designed as a website that would last for more than 5 years. Now it's all coming to bite them, stagnant communities, powertrippy moderators, impossible to contain etc etc. I m going to need some popcorn going forward
As others have said, the real alternative to Reddit isn't a 1:1 replacement, it's other social media, it's Discord. It's doing anything else with your time.
I think people underestimate the amount of curated info/answers are in reddit subs.
Outside IT it's still prob my main method to research opinions and advice while filtering out all the Google crap.
For the sake of simplicity let's say that reddit makes $1.00 per user per month that uses their app. Currently they make no money on third party apps. All third party app devs seem fine paying a price to use the API as that is standard practice for different websites. It seems like Reddit could have just charged them 3.00 Per user per month, so they get a healthy margin off of the third party apps. They would actually be making money off of third party apps, and if everyone used the third party app over the native one, then they would be making 3x what they would with users using the native one.
3x seems like a healthy enough margin for me, and they win whether we use their app or not. Devs like Apollo would have a lot more options for monetizing it's users at 3x Reddit's price per user than at 20x. Everyone seems to win. Instead they went with the move that is obviously intended to kill third party apps, and face major backlash from its most devoted users in a self own. The path seems simple to me but maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.
It seems that the Reddit executive team has decided that killing third-party apps is in its best interest regardless of the probably-to-some-degree-expected backlash. I think Christian's and your conclusion, that Reddit intends for the new pricing to be prohibitive, which indicates that it "is obviously intended to kill third party apps," is fair.
That's not the way things work anymore. If they think they can charge $10 a user and get away with it they will, regardless of how unethical or deceitful they need to be. And it's not just Reddit, it's our entire world of business "leaders" that have adopted that attitude.
The problem is that you're looking at it from the perspective of what makes a good product, and view 3P apps as part of a good product. However, the only question getting asked by the executives, board members, investors, etc. is "what makes a ton of money?"
Bring back the product focused people IMO.
There’s some dollar amount (representing either an exchange of value or avoided losses) where a compromise is going to make sense for everyone, and I think we’re going to see that before 6/30. My naive guess is that reddit acquires Apollo and runs that as a standalone business, but otherwise maintains the eye-wateringly high pricing on API usage.
That said, the Apollo business is a melting ice cube at the moment. It’s quite possible that 6/30 rolls around and Christian shuts it down and all that value is lost, but it would be rational in the meantime for Christian and Reddit to find a way to share it. Just gotta figure out that split, and this whole thing turns into a win-win.
Got a source for that? He's made it clear that it's too late, and this can't be repaired. How can you trust someone that lied to make you look bad, and you have proof?
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/147a8xb/as_the_s...
All the community and Apollo has is the power to say “Reddit, if you don’t play nice, we’ll walk away”.
To call that a blackmail requires some mental gymnastics.
Can you explain what that could be? How can this one developer control the moderators and users of thousands of subreddits?
Could it be that people are choosing to support the Apollo dev, and Reddit has all the power to stop the blackout... by giving the people what they want?
He's a dev of a well liked application. That's all. He's not the head of some sort of shadowy cabal that decides when and how the blackout happens.
Certainly, he could send a public message and say "I'm happy now, please stop guys". But it's up to them to listen to that or not.
The Reddit users are literally using the only miniature tool to influence Reddit that is at their disposal: look elsewhere.
1.) alleviates all concerns of the other 3rd party apps 2.) alleviates bot concerns, moderator concerns, a11y concerns
3.) he has magic words that can whisk away the above
4.) that he has any leverage in the first place
It’s also bordering on willful ignorance to call that conversation blackmail.
Spez calling a kid’s awkward business negotiation a blackmail tactic, and appearing visibly threatened and agitated, immediately removed any credibility or respect I will ever hold for him or the Reddit executive team. His behavior made him look small and weak.
I am indifferent about their attempt to monetize, for what it’s worth. It’s inevitable, and third party clients won’t survive. I am more shocked at how it’s being handled.
I understand that Christian is in a really challenging place, but fighting with Spez in a public place is not the way to do it. It only encourages other developers to build a following that they attempt to leverage against Reddit.
Isn't that what the app developers and their users want?
“It only encourages other developers to build a following that they attempt to leverage against Reddit.”
This is a feature, not a bug. While Reddit has a substantial moat of momentum and content, the longer a strike goes on, the more users are incentivized to defect to Reddit clones (temporarily at first, but potentially the “new normal” as time goes on), and of course the apps can add support for these alternatives.
if you weren't aware; this occurred in response to Spez basically slandering him in calls with mods, saying that Apollo was trying to blackmail Reddit. This caused dozens of mods to contact him and question his integrity.
Spez shot first here. I don't think he wanted to be the ringleader of all this, but Spez's actions caused him to defend his very character, on top of all the other headaches of all these changes.
Not a chance. He embarrassed the CEO and most CEOs are the type of people that would rather run the company into the ground than do business with someone that upstaged them.
I'm not saying Apollo is important to Reddit's business, just that you aren't accounting for the hubris of C level executives.
Is this how Mastodon and Nostr expect things to work? If so, are there any "winning" websites where most Mastodon and Nostr users congregate?
For most users the back end philosophy is only there to serve the end result. For any given post or comment you need a simple website link you can share with friends; no thinking required.
*Bonus: if people feel like their views are being improperly censored they can, again, jump to a peer with different filtering standards.
Usenet was good as well.
I'm in a small-ish instance with a great admin/mod team who's values align with mine and who judiciously eject people with bad vibes. (mostly nazi's and transphobes)
I feel no need to share a social network with people who hate my friends for who they are so the whole proposition of uncensored content doesn't appeal to me at all.
Would someone really be interested in He Gets Us and Seeking Arrangements at the same time.
I'm also a bit confused as to why Reddit would target 3rd party apps like this. Most people, myself included don't bother with 3rd party apps. Unless the adds are going to get even worse soon...
It's kind of a funny protest - poor people who watch lots of ads protesting for the rights of rich people to enjoy an ad free experience.
They are trying to extract as much value before their IPO as possible.
30 days is not enough time for Christian (or any third party app fev) to build, test, and release a solution to collect payments on behalf of all his app's users for API access. Not to mention making things right with users who already payed for an extendes subscription for his app.
There are a few things Reddit could have done here.
1. Let third party app devs know about the upcoming change much earlier so they could prepare.
2. Extend the deadline.
3. Implement a BYOK system where users buy individual API keys directly from Reddit, then provide the keys to the third party apps for API access.
Instead Reddit lied to the devs about their API plans up until almost the last minute. Then they rolled out a plan they knew no major third party app could comply with in time. Then u/spez lied about Christian in a poor attempt to discredit him.
Reddit could have made their API work even at that huge price tag. But they didn't want to. They just wanted to drag everyone kicking and screaming to the official app.
To call it a "free lunch" is pretty disrespectful IMHO, Christian worked hard on Apollo and it blows away the official app. Reddit benefits from 3rd party apps. Period. They don't want to admit that and they might not benefit as much as from 1st party but those users interact, create content, moderate subs, and more. Reddit went from "no charge, use the API" to "pay us a LOT of money and you have <30 days" with zero wiggle room.
If the roles were reversed and there were multiple database backends that people could choose from and Apollo was the only available front-end, it would be Apollo that could demand money from Reddit.
It's a small subset of their moderator workforce. Most of them are, in solidarity I guess, continuing on as normal.
I feel like there's a chance that Reddit comes out from this proving that they're actually already moderating a bunch of content and volunteer mods have no leverage.
To substantiate this a bit, Microsoft already had a pre-existing relationship with Reddit since 2017 [1] to augment their capabilities with Bing and their “BI” tools. They could be leveraging that relationship to boost their investment in OpenAI.
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-microsoft-power-bi-bin...
Microsoft, for example, already do this for many of their Azure services. Thus, if you're a moderate user on the free plan, you get essentially a free ride.
This would have the same effect though, almost no one would use it, and that kills the business case for Apollo, and Apollo ceases to exist. Maybe an open source volunteer run client might limp on, but that's it.
It's also super easy to detect these sorts of things and just ban that usage.
They did ask for more time for the changes than the given 30 days, and Reddit refused.
That being said, I doubt anyone would use it. $1 per 1k requests is insane.
I'm not exactly sure what counts as an API call, but it has the potential to add up quickly. On initial load, new Reddit makes 209 network requests and old reddit makes 127. I doubt the API needs that many requests, but it's not a nested API. It likely requires a bunch of additional requests to grab accessory information.
It seems plausible that power users would end up easily running into $1 to $5 daily usage fees. Nobody is going to pay $30/month for Reddit plus an application fee.
Christian even said that if Reddit had given app developers longer -- maybe six months to a year -- it would have been tough to change the business model, but not impossible. With this timetable, he would have had to come up with something like $500k in 30 days just to cover immediate costs, which was obviously impossible.
Ah, thanks. I wasn't aware that Apollo was already a paid app. Clearly, I'm not a mobile user, much less familiar with the app as well. I browse Reddit mostly on the desktop, via RSS feed.
> 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.
> ...
> If the subscription price increase is above the thresholds, exceeds the annual limit, or occurs within territories where the law requires it, you must opt in before the price increase is applied. If you don't opt in to the new price, the subscription will not renew at the next billing period. You can subscribe again within the app or on the Manage Subscriptions page.
This would be, "I can no longer provide the service you bought, so I will refund you, cancel the subscription you have, and introduce a totally different subscription that accounts for the new upstream costs."
I would not expect Apollo to do this now after Reddit swung at Christian the way it did, but I'm curious to know if there was ever a semi-graceful way to handle it even on a short timeframe or if Christian was contractually boxed in.
edit: fixed very important typos
If that was done, the subscription would need a new approval for the price increase before it continued or the subscription could be canceled by the user (or automatically with the price increase) by Apple.
I would have estimated Reddit to be 100 people max, and even that seems high.
My employer has slightly fewer people, but we have dozens of clients with sites/apps far more complex than reddit. It just doesn't make sense.
The fact is, advertisements pay better than any amount their users or third-party developers would be willing to bear. This change appears to be more about maximizing that revenue stream (or making it more appealing to advertisers), rather creating a _new_ revenue stream in paid API access.
1. Do charge for API access. But be reasonable. Nobody is calling for free api access. Charge like 2-5x their cost of operation. Not 20x.
2. Serve ads to third party apps through the API. This is a no brainer. The fact that they aren't doing this speaks volumes about their true motives with this move.
Act like adults. Admit mistakes. Change policies. Rebuild trust through honest and prompt communications.
Consider that the users of third party apps may skew towards higher value since they were engaged enough to install an app.
They are asking for $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. Apollo averages ~345 calls per-user per-day (although some users are much higher), but Reddit claims that other apps are "more efficient" and only use about 100 calls/day.
If we assume 100 calls/day/user, then that's 36,500 calls/year/user, and a user is worth $0.12/year, so to break-even, reddit should be charging about $0.003 per 1,000 API calls, instead of $0.24.
Also, that number is so laughably low!
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
The mobile front end does about 345 calls/user/day
The push notification server does 8640 calls/user/day (one call every 10 seconds).
In https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 he describes how that works.
> I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us
> The push notification server does 8640 calls/user/day (one call every 10 seconds).
I've seen you parroting this around in every thread, and don't understand why.
First of all, none of the math checks out with your theory. But I'll break down why. Here[0] he says Apollo has over 100k DAUs (I noticed you've also stopped using that link...). He also says
> 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 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.
> If there's nothing that can be done, Apollo won't be able to offer push notifications unfortunately.
He has stated here[1] that API pricing would cost him "almost $2m per month."
So let's check the math.
345 + 8640 API calls / user / day = 8985 / user / day
8,985 API calls x 100,000 users = 898,500,000 / day
Using the absolute average month of 30.4375 days:
30.4375 x 898,500,000 = 27,348,093,750 req / month (@ 100k users)
Or in API pricing $6,563,542.50 / month, which is almost 3x as much as he said it would cost.
> Note that it does a request every 10 seconds for each user. At the API rate that would be about $0.25 every 3 hours (for each user) to support it.
They only do that for each user, that has paid for and has an active Apollo Ultra ($5/mo) subscription. That's going to remove a significant chunk of users.
If you want to verify any of this for yourself, the backend code is also now fully readable[2]. But it looks like from their backend code, they do a maximum of 100 users[3] every 5 seconds[4].
Additionally, that's Reddit just being stupid not them. Reddit offers no alternative way to get real-time notifications from their API, and with the paid API won't as well.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
[2]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend
[3]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
[4]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
He didn't do that - he set up a new subscription tier for the app to handle that. Not everyone in the 100k user base bought a subscription.
The 100k number was also from 5 years ago and is likely not accurate for today. The main value from that quote is as a description of how he was architecting the notification system then and the YouTube video is how showing that this is how he is still doing it.
Unfortunately, we're going from incomplete numbers that are being interpreted different provided by different entities. The best we can do is set floor and ceilings for the numbers. And I'll admit that my math may be off in places too.
What we can do is identify how much it would cost for one account with the push notification server request as part of the API cost (noting that one subscription may set up multiple accounts - see https://apolloapp.io/notifications-faq/ How many accounts/devices does this work with? ).
The estimate I have is that as the push notification server is written, it would cost about $2/day/account (8640 requests/day x $0.24 / 1000 requests).
$2M/month would suggest that he has about 33k users with push notifications. At about 1.5M monthly users that's 4% that signed up for a subscription.
That's a ceiling as I'm not counting the "how many requests per day come from an average user with the 900k daily active users claimed".
(Some data points)
* 2M monthly users https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-p...
* 50,000 people have a yearly subscription to Apollo https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/08/reddit-app-apollo...
* 1.5M monthly active, 900k daily active https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/31/popular-reddit-app-apollo-...
---
And yes, I will certainly agree that Reddit, lacking an event based notification system is an oversight in how their API was used.
The push notification server needs to be considered as part of the API load and it is really easy to get that number to grow.
If you scale back the notifications from 1 every 10 seconds to 1 every 5 minutes, it becomes a much more reasonable number with only 288 requests per day per user - which gets into very different numbers when dealing with a subscription.
Let's call it on average 600 request per day per user overall then, and you're at 18k/month/user and that's $5 of API use cost. Up the subscription from its current $4.99 to $9.99 and you've paid Apple's 30% (or 15% if more than a year) and Reddit's API costs and made a profit.
Except you're still making up fake numbers. He was giving an example, not quoting a dedicated solution.
I even linked to their server code in my previous comment where you can see they do batches of 100 users every 5 seconds. Unless they only have 200 users, then it will not ever be “1 every 10 seconds” like you keep claiming.
Does anyone believe that even with $60 million a year, they'd become profitable?
It had questions like how comfortable are you with the information on reddit etc. At first I thought it was because of the possible IPO but I did recently ask for my data so that might have been the trigger.
Closing down the API would align with the latter agenda; look up the whole pushshift camas saga for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
Reddit could easily change their terms in the future to prohibit.
From your link:
> By creating an app, you agree to Reddit's Developer Terms and Data Api Terms. You must also register to use the API [1].
Which takes you to a page that says:
> When you are ready, you must register [0] in order to use the Reddit API. Select “I’m a Developer” and “I want to register to use the Reddit API.”
[0] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/api#wiki_read_the_full_api_terms...
https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772
> I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us
Note that it does a request every 10 seconds for each user. At the API rate that would be about $0.25 every 3 hours (for each user) to support it.
> Well, it’s weird because prior to this, I almost always understood that Reddit as a company understood that they’re very community-focused, and they kind of didn’t do the bullshit corporate speak. And it was weird to kind of see this week, where they engaged in a lot more of that than I have historically ever seen them do. And it just went over… about as well as I thought it would.
I can't imagine anyone seeing this as a surprise given the way that reddit has been operating since at least before the redesign. They always make some corporate-PR-language post announcing unpopular changes, pretend to listen to everyone, then make the change anyway.
His latest experience seems to be pretty out of line given the longevity of their relationship.
"Naive"? Maybe, but I can cut him some slack.
He literally said "they kind of didn’t do the bullshit corporate speak." I've definitely been using reddit for 8+ years and I can tell you that's not true.
He could say all the things we are thinking, but given the CEO has a history of editing posts on Reddit critical of him, it seems like a bad strategy to have any hope of negotiating with them.
Well, if the shoe fits...
It was a surprise to him because (1) his relationship with them was based on Apollo, and (2) Reddit had previously placed him on the "friend" side of the frenemy line based on the community's love for Apollo and the engagement it drove.
Naive people don't record every phone call.
This is the most important thing. Obviously in interviews he says "Oh I think they're nice people, if they want to patch things up I'm ready", but judging from how all of this has played out I think it's obvious that he's somewhat savvy. He's coming off as the good guy in this fight all while reddit continues to burn any goodwill they have from a not insignificant portion of their user base.
Ad quality also doesn't help. Major network TV ads are generally higher quality both in terms of the product they're selling and the production quality, but I don't want to see the millionth ad for meal prep startup of the week or questionable unitasker dropshipped off Aliexpress.
1. browse topics 2. comment on topics 3. review your history of topics, like favorites, comment histories, etc.
So in an ideal world, you do that with no friction.
But inevitably, you need to introduce some friction in order to be profitable. be it ads, data mining (to sell to ad companies), or outright asking a user to pay to do the above features.
I don't know what route reddit will go, but it will inevitably need to introduce even more friction to be more profitable.
What percentage of posts are actually the creators themselves?
And is it not a fair trade? You're not paying anything to post a link and return the content creator gets massive exposure.
I could see this backfiring and spez preventing subreddits with a certain following from going private in the future.
Steve Hoffman, Reddit's CEO, has expressed outrage that Reddit's data was mined to train ChatGPT (and other LLMs) without any benefit to Reddit.
(I absolutely do not support their drastic measures, but it's useful to understand where it comes from)
And since both Sam Altman (OpenAI's CEO) and Steve Hoffman are from the Y Combinator gang (nervously looks around), I wouldn't even be surprised if there's some form of rivalry here.
Even if the pricing was reasonable, all communication with third party devs was through phone calls and pricing was discussed verbally. The RedReader app developer mentioned that he had to make rough calculations on paper to conclude that he'd have to pay close to a million dollars annually in fees[1]. There's no dashboard to show billing and API usage per client? How do they expect that will go when you're asking users to pay for your API? And especially in such a short time frame?
There's also the whole business of NSFW content on the API being not allowed for "law enforcement" reasons but reddit JUST recently pushed an update that allows uploading NSFW content on the website[2]. These moves make me feel that reddit might be trying to cash in on the porn and capture the OF market that's brewing within the site and keep it to their official apps and this might require age verification.
I'm not sure but it seems like the folks at reddit are actually floundering and not just making malicious moves. Their communication reeks of more than hostility. It seems to me more like desperation and a last ditch effort to do... something? Did their revenue numbers suddenly tank? Did they make some bad decisions and lost a lot of money? Did their ad buyers pull out suddenly? It's very possible we are watching the death throes of a website here
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/13ylk42/update_3...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13evueo/bringing_i...
Apparently most of their money is made off ads, and instead of working with 3p's, they thought it easiest to force more ads on users. So it's easier to turn off the API switch than to slowly integrate something with 3P's.
as for NSFW: that's an issue every company with NSFW content has struggled with. It's a paradox where it's very lucrative and companies want that money, but also a huge pain in the neck to compromise with in a legal sense. when you need to pay some employees full time to fight these fights, you have to start wondering if that cash cow is even worth it? When credit card companies start to deny you based on that, that answer becomes very clear.
All “subreddits” or communities are just phpBB or vBulletin forums of the past. Instead of “someinterestingtopic.com/forum” it’s now “Reddit.com/r/someinterestingtopic”
There’s some differences in organization but otherwise the same thing.
If even reddit itself is not profitable, how on earth can they plan an IPO at all?
Some people make jokes when they are stressed or anxious.
In both cases, when you are making threats, it’s reasonable for the other side to walk away.
I'm not sure where this thing about it being a "joke" came from. Reddit accused him of making too many requests (even though he was insanely below the threshold they themselves allotted), and he said he was willing to fit within whatever they wanted as a new threshold, or "keep the app quiet"
I'm guessing the Apollo founder here is trying to get bought out at this point, which is pretty smart.
If Reddit buys Apollo, there's zero chance they let it operate independently. Christian gets a nice payout and all his users leave for the next best option. If I'm reddit I don't think I see that as being worth the cost that the app's userbase might be on paper just based on API cost.
And yes I know, Reddit could have rolled their own ads in the API but... Literally no one does that. Reddit ads are already extremely cheap (read, worthless to advertisers) as it is. No one would trust an ad network that has no control over how it displays and tracks said apps. I run Adblock everywhere so I'm not particularly sad about ads being worthless, but it still matters for Reddit inc.
Now obviously apollo was well within its rights to profit from their app but you can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't expect to generate profit from another business unilaterally forever and be shocked that they won't allow it.
Now before someone calls me a shill, I will literally never use Reddit after the API change since for me Reddit is just Reddit Is Fun. Without it, the whole website is unusable. And I'm extremely critical of Reddit in general. But this is just weird, this is a business deal that has turned into some sort of martyrdom. As people have said countless times in other situations where people had issues with reddit; just use another platform.
(Or at least advocate for open source apps API access. For me the ideal solution would be apps with a bring your own API key model. And I really think there are two discussions that have been getting mixed up: commercial use for the API like Apollo's and general access for third parties. One I don't care about, the other is crucial to me using Reddit.)
The point is there's a middle ground to be had, but rather than negotiating for an outcome both sides can live with, Reddit is just choking third-party apps (many of which provide tooling for moderating at scale or enable accessibility) to death.
Again though, I'm sure there are nuances here. But this is just a business negotiation between two businesses in this specific case. I don't really care about what's feasible for Apollo as a business, what matters more is how non commercial usage is dealt with. For now, and correct me if I'm wrong, the API limits will still be generous for individual users (so mods, etc). They just have to generate their own key. Did I get that wrong?
Yes. You can't just insert your own API key into the app of your choice.
that's not saying much when Spez outright said reddit isn't profitable. Yes, a few devs working on an API scaper is cheaper than 2000 employees worldwide, for a company HQ'd in San Fransisco on top fo that (I still can't imagine what reddit needs with 2000 employees).
meanwhile I don't exactly think Spez is surviving paycheck to paycheck himself. If he's not already, he'll easily clear tends of millions of dollars of net worth when Reddit goes public. Or at least, that's what I would have said 4-5 months ago.
>you can't expect to generate profit from another business unilaterally forever and be shocked that they won't allow it.
on the flip side, I don't think Christian is suddenly broke either. Probably not "I can retire in prauge" levels of finances, but he's definitely made a lot of money.
But he's under no obligations to play ball with Reddit, especially when reddit is taking the ball home. I don't see this as him leeching off reddit when you take into account how many users his app brought to the business. Just like how you said RiF is your Reddit, I'm sure Apollo is others' reddit.
>As people have said countless times in other situations where people had issues with reddit; just use another platform.
I agree and am. But that's tangential to this article. Christian isn't exactly trying to kill reddit nor pitch his next Apollo app for the next big platform. He said his dream scenario is to wake up and see the API rates halved and he'll be happy and keep Apollo running. He clearly doesn't want reddit dead.
But as is: he seems more or less done.
I dislike the Reddit redesign and still use old.reddit.com, so I should be all in favor of free API access. However, there is almost nothing that could possibly get me to side with the mods, the people who have done more than anyone else to turn Reddit into the banal and censorious echo chamber that it is today.
In a war between Reddit and Reddit's mods, the Internet of actual open discussion wins.