A lot. I've watched both the keynote and also the Platforms State of the Union and not only did I hear it by name in the keynote, I've seen its icon in the background in both the keynote and the PSotU.
Don’t be. Sometimes businesses such as Reddit must make bad decisions so that new players emerge. That’s exactly how it’s been, and people jump to alternatives when such platforms start acting out.
One thing I've noted is that online forums have expanded and consolidated a few times over the decades. We saw expansion to start, back with BBSes, then consolidation to FidoNet, Usenet, and services like AOL. Web forums took us into expansion. Link aggregators and meme sites moved toward some consolidation. Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0.
I suspect we may see another round of forum expansion again as people want to carve out their own niche communities again. We might not see Usenet 3.0 for a bit while we let people expand then let a new site come along and consolidate.
I agree with your take, I think that the current state of traditional social media will further drive people into those new forums. I am an example of such a person.
A lesson to be learned. Do not build your entire business on someone else's API.
The outcome was unsurprising and it is unfortunate. But this is why third-party apps are always at a disadvantage. The same happened with Twitter and they made that clear and now so did Reddit.
Like I said before in [0]
"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."
Maybe for Reddit and Apollo case, this is alright & makes sense. But at the risk of sounding pedantic, don't generalize it.
Most of our commodity software is built & deployed by packages, APIs and frameworks we have very little control on. We just hope things don't break/change as drastically and we can modularize our projects as much as we could, to bear some shock or disruption. Unlikely anyone can build & maintain consumer grade softwares ab initio
The closer you are to the final customer the better is your chance to bill for the value you deliver (standing on a fragile cobbled together set of third party components). The short term rewards strongly favor relying on others. The business dynamic compounds this as it places a premium on first movers. Going against this dynamic must be carefully considered and only makes sense in isolated cases (where it is the winning move).
Disagree. (In the generalized sense) You cannot extricate yourself entirely and call it a winning move, unless your business is at a scale as large as Dropbox moving out from AWS ecosystem.
I still feel no matter how natively one tries to build products - they cannot build everything. You cannot create CI/CD, monitoring, frontend, containerization, and cloud services just for your software or service. Those depend on some platform API which you won't create just for your product. Short or long business value - unless one becomes a major player with several software engineering teams building a product ecosystem - other people's APIs and frameworks will be used. And that is perfectly fine. That is how good products should be -using nice building blocks. No need to reinvent the wheel everytime.
Or do, but have a contract in place that ensures longevity. Of course not applicable in this case, but just addressing the generality of the statement, "Do not build your entire business on someone else's API."
The tired “don’t build on someone else’s api” lesson doesn’t apply to this case because Apollo is specifically a method for accessing Reddit: Apollo wouldn’t exist without Reddit. The outcome here is sad, yes, but the author built a wildly successful app and made great money for close to a decade: a disappointing end does not discredit the journey.
(Ps. your obsession with citing yourself is one of the worst parts of reading HN)
Just imagine what'll happen when sideloading eventually makes its way to the US - the less-illegal sister of piracy, scraping, is going to make a huge resurgence.
Bad move from Reddit's end. Apollo is one of my most used apps because I absolutely refuse to use the official app. Just like the new Reddit experience on desktop version, the mobile app is just as terrible. Clunky, slow, not user friendly. No thanks.
This Is the corporate equivalent of "I can't give you money, but I'll pay you with in exposure on my socials". Reddit prefers to be paid in dollars, not with content. They likely have more than enough content from non-Apollo users.
Reddit's free APIs left a lot of uncaptured value on the table. This has become obvious by the sheer number of AI models trained on Reddit data. Free Reddit data goes into the machine, and piles of VC money comes out. Reddit wants in on it, but is unable to stop free API access without the consumer apps being collateral.
Their content is going to be porn bots and astroturfed product accounts. Maybe they want that as part of their enshittification process to extract as much value from the brand as possible during their quick death.
That doesn’t make sense. It’s not that Reddit the company wants to be paid in content, obviously. It’s that Reddit needs people to want to visit their website. Reddit gets paid for ads, but people don’t want to see ads, so Reddit needs to deliver content that people want so badly that they’re willing to see ads. Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all, unless they actually have a plan to get cheaper content (GPT ain’t gonna be it, sorry).
> That doesn’t make sense. It’s not that Reddit the company wants to be paid in content, obviously. It’s that Reddit needs people to want to visit their website
We're not disagreeing. The comment I was responding to was saying they are "paying" Reddit with content. As you noted, Reddit doesn't want that, instead, it's asking API users to pay real money so they can see the content without ads. That in itself is pretty reasonable I think - what may not be reasonable is how much Reddit is asking for.
> Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all
What's the breakdown of content producers on 3rd Party apps vs reddit.com and reddit apps? It is reasonable to assume this is a rational decision being made by Reddit after looking at the numbers and doing some projections.
Edit: removed references to ads from parent commenter paraphrasing
I have edited to remove references to ads. However, it's clear to me that you consider content to be the value you're providing to Reddit in exchange for your usage of the API.
The vast majority of an online community's content is produced by a small fraction of users. Most are just reading posts. Without user generated content Reddit has zero value. Reddit fighting its most active, invested users is not a smart move.
YouTube got away with lots of bad changes because many creators are getting paid to produce content and competing with YouTube is near impossible. But Reddit is one of many primarily text-based online communities and they are currently destroying the only things holding people on their platform. Aside from the userbase Reddit has no redeeming qualities that would make anyone hesitate to leave.
Is there a built-in assumption of incompetence at Reddit in your comment?
If you assume they know all what you said, and that they have dashboards showing breakdowns of submitters/commenters/voters by client, can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions? Even if you do not like the reason, do you think it may be rational?
The existence of this HN thread and the situation we are discussing is a very clear sign of Reddit's incompetence. Regardless of what their motivation was they have fucked up the execution in a big way.
> can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions?
IPO value. This entire scheme, is a last ditch attempt to maximise exit value for the founders. The actions all point in that direction, many fo which are borderline illegal.
Let's break it down. Reddit has had a metoric rise in the past 5 years, adding like 200 million mobile users to their official app. This started in 2018 when the first news of the IPO began. Reddit started heavily advertising.
They initially redesigned the web version, started giving a worse mobile experience and had a massive, intrusive banner that said "try the official app" on the mobile client. So we have a "friendlier" web experince and an aggresive app marketing push.
We now have more users than ever. Should we focus on efficiency, tools for mods etc? Nope, the entire product stack of reddit since 2019 has been releasing Monetasation tools. From badly hidden NFTs as profile pictures, to reddit awards paid with money, to ads hidden as actual content on the front page of the new web and mobile app.
So now we have record users, a new set of money making tools what else can we do to maximise exit value? We reduce 3rd party users, this way even if a fraction come to the app we still have new record user numbers. And we generate as much content as possible, preferably in areas that will be considered growth vectors in teh sale.
So reddit made a ridiculous API pricing plan, with 0 time to implement to essentially kill 3rd parties but not having to do it officially. Other less verifiable events that seem to be happening is that bots have increased, and some non english subs like the french and german communities are having new content generated by badly translating popular reddit posts with AI. This would benefit reddit as more content (even if by bots) is a higher exit price and communities that do not speak english using reddit more would also be seen as a positive by whoever would buy reddit. This is not attributable to reddit, bt if it was, it is straight up fraud. However the timing of the bot activity increasing and the non english subs seeing increased activity directly benefits the IPO plan therefore it is worth mentioning.
In other words, the charitable explanation is that this is the last hurrah in a 5 year plan to make the owners of reddit rich before they off load a website full of bots and angry users to whoever is silly enough to think they can fix this mess.
Most of the content on reddit is created by power users who are more likely to use 3rd party tools. Most people who use the official app only consume content.
No, but power users are disproportionately to be invested enough to use third-party clients. Further, many power users play key roles as moderators. Community moderators on Reddit rely extensively on API access to enable the moderation tools that Reddit never really built.
I don’t think that is as much an issue as all of the potential issues that would be dragged up by discussing any of the questionable or explicitly illegal content hosted on Reddit. The first time anyone ever saw a Reddit mod was seeing an adult man argue it was ok for him to moderate a subreddit consisting solely pictures of underage girls titled jailbait.
Others are saying "power users", but... I agree with you. It is just an assumption that the "power users" make the product better, although a reasonable one. However, Reddit was pretty awesome, arguably much better, before there were semi-professional power users and moderators.
That's the thing, to use an overused adage: it's a feature not a bug. They want these people gone. They calculated their contributions and decided it won't hurt, or hurt badly enough, for them to care. They'll all make millions on the IPO, step away, and sell. None of this makes a difference to that master plan. The sooner everyone accepts this the less time will get wasted on trying to convince Reddit this is a mistake. It's not a bug.
Reddit is a shell of what it was when I started on the platform 14+ years ago.
The opportunity to stand out from other enshittified platforms. But I guess now we need to find a new thing for VCs to fund for us. Maybe an app that pretends to use AI to create memes or something.
It’s an ads business, so the game is always “giving away a huge number of requests for free to monetize an extremely tiny portion of those requests.” So as soon as bean counters look at the books, it’s easy to be tempted to just identify cohorts of those requests that are unlikely to convert and cut off those users.
It takes someone who is more than just a bean counter to realize that maybe, just maybe, the only reason people are interested in those free requests in the first place is because of the communities on Reddit that bring all the actual value.
And who knows, maybe one day everyone will realize that the “free social media monetized by ads” business just totally sucks and can only ever lead to situations like this.
The 3rd party apps don't have ads which is surely a gigantic part of why they're being banned. I would guess that most Apollo users literally provide zero revenue as they use adblock on desktop and most people never actually give reddit any money. The only argument for their value add is that they're contributing which makes other users likely to join but I suspect reddit has reason to believe they're too adducted to stop even when the app they use is banned,.
>Abundantly. Unlike other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter who pay their moderators as employees, Reddit relies on volunteers to do the hard work for free. I completely understand that when tools they take to do their volunteer, important job are taken away, there is anger and frustration there. While I haven't personally mobilized anyone to participate in the blackout out of fear of retaliation from Reddit, the last thing I want is for that to feel like I don't support the folks speaking up. I wholeheartedly do.
>It's been a horrible week, and the kindness Redditors and moderators and communities have shown Apollo and other third-party apps has genuinely made it much more bearable and I am genuinely so appreciative.
>I am, admittedly, doubtful Reddit wants to listen to folks anymore so I don't see it having an effect.
It's moves like these that will create the alternative to Reddit. It was this style of anti-consumer moves that killed Digg. History is repeating itself.
The previous controversies have been stuff that it's pretty easy to not care about. This time, it's actually affecting a fair number of people. We'll have to see if this time is different.
Previous controversies include the subreddit dedicated to jailbait and on multiple occasions protecting abusers and pedophiles.
While you might be right, super fucked up if their users care more about third party apps being killed than their long past acceptance of child exploitation.
You need enough power users to sustain interest, post content, and launch it.
The goal shouldn’t be to replace Reddit as it exists today, because if you go down that route you are doomed to repeat their mistakes of constant growth at the cost of everything else.
Most Reddit alternatives were founded on the basis of defending "free speech" in direct reaction to Reddit banning places like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/The_Donald. Their userbase predictably filled up quickly with shameless bigots and generated correspondingly bigoted content.
I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.
Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.
This. The main issue is there doesn't seem to be a natural alternative like reddit was to digg (since, as you say, the ones that have popped up so far are often quickly filled with people toxic enough to get banned from reddit). So I think any transition will be a lot messier.
Apollo is such an incredibly high quality app — in fact, it’s so good that I haven’t had it installed on my phone in a couple of years because when I have it I spend way too much time on Reddit.
The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.
I agree. I'm not a mobile dev but I am a software dev and I'm continually impressed by how good an app Apollo is. It's one of the apps I use that seem like they should be the standard for quality.
Might be a pretty big legal argument if he just copied Reddit backend functionality. Would probably have to redesign the front end from the ground up as well to make it clear it’s not just a rip off.
I don't remember the specific case at the moment, but a few years back I think Oracle was suing Google (or some mix of big companies) about Google replicating the Java api but with a complete from-scratch backend reimplementation. Google wasn't using private Oracle source code, just building a replacement that used the publicly published api. Google won the case, and it I remember right that established public api's as non copyright or something. Again, not a lawyer and someone else probably has the details better than I do.
But reddit is so much more than an API… and I can’t imagine anyone wants to deal with the user-generated-content hell of actually hosting that kind of platform.
Technically possible, but not really feasible due to the way Reddit is set up and people who signed up for the app agreed to. It would be a gigantic mess, and I reckon he's not interested in creating a new social platform/link aggregate which is why he would rather refund the ~$250k.
This never struck me as a realistic option. The Apollo user base is orders of magnitude less than Reddit, and, even though Apollo is an incredible iOS app, the primary benefit of a large social network like Reddit is the social network.
I always enthusiastically recommended it to my friends telling them it felt more like a native first-party Apple app than any actual native first-party Apple app.
Totally agree. In fact, it was so good it allowed me to enjoy Reddit far more than I could have without it. And spend far more time on Reddit than I would have. Killing Apollo kills my desire to use Reddit.
I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.
Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recording his calls with them for over a year (legally I might add). Reddit has 0 wiggle room here.
EDIT: Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value? I feel like this is going to significantly reshape Reddit as moderators of large subreddits will be furious and quit if not destroy entire subreddits. Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...
EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
Other social media companies seem far less ethical to me. Facebook still has tons of employees even though they treat users much worse than reddit. In the end reddit is a business that exists to make money. They were never going to let third party apps that undercut ad revenue exist forever.
You'd think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app.
Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they're the one's submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform.
With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the number of actual visiters to the site will also go down. Thus lowering potential revenue.
The quality of Reddit comments has never been particularly high. Sure there are quality posts, but like other social media most posts are essentially spam and those that aren’t inaccurate/hyperbolic or just memes.
Once upon a time you could go to Reddit and skip the link because the top comment both summarized the article and gave poignant relevant commentary. Often times from someone that had professional knowledge in that field.
The problem is their revenue per user is garbage compared to other sites. Facebook is sitting at $70 per user/year. More users who don't bring revenue doesn't actually help the company. I think they should focus more on getting their ad platform to make a reasonable CPM, but I assume they've been trying and for whatever reason just can't make it happen. Maybe forcing users onto the official app is how they plan to boost the ad numbers?
> Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?
I hate Reddit, Reddit Admins, Reddit Mods, etc more than most people. Especially how they love to gaslight you and subtly screw you over/sabotage you, as we saw with their attacks on the_donald.
BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.
It would be impossible for me to disagree more. Editing someone's comments to put your own words in their mouth is despicable. Basically, he impersonated those users and put them on record as saying something they'd never said. It's like the text version of a deep fake recording.
I don't disagree with this take, I just disagree with your implied evaluation of how important that is. Who cares if he put some usernames on record as saying something they never said?
I know that you do, and you have your reasons, but...well, I don't. I think people are taking reddit commenting way too seriously if heads need to roll over a comment edit.
I almost can't believe you're serious here, but I'll reply sincerely.
Suppose dang edited your post to say "I like to get drunk at work", and there it is for the world to see. You never said that, but anyone looking at Hacker News would see:
"qup 10 minutes ago: I like to get drunk at work."
No, that's absolutely not OK! Now, consider that spez could just as easily edit some old Reddit comments someone wrote years ago to say something horrendous. Do you often go back to verify that all your old comments are unchanged? I certainly don't.
I have no way of knowing exactly which comments spez edited, or how significantly he changed them. And honestly, the not knowing is simply inexcusable. All we know is that he has tampered with the production database, not how often or how much.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is a Latin maxim meaning "false in one thing, false in everything". At common law, it is the legal principle that a witness who testifies falsely about one matter is not credible to testify about any matter.
I think there are two distinct things getting mixed up.
Should he have been able to? No, that's a concerning setup for the reasons you say.
How bad is what he actually did, from what we actually know? For about an hour, comments that said "fuck spez" after he banned the pizzagate sub were changed to "fuck $the_donald_mod_name".
I just don't find that a big deal. It's not like editing your comment to say you drink at work.
Again, all we know is that he has lied about what users have said in comments. We just don't know to what degree. For me, not knowing that is completely unacceptable.
If he only made those changes and solemnly vowed never to do it again, fine, shouldn't have done it but whatever. But who besides him can say for sure?
> Again, all we know is that he has lied about what users have said in comments
You mean changing fuck spez to fuck $mod?
> We just don't know to what degree
Well I'm not sure what auditing they have, and I know there's public databases of all Reddit comments. It's been a while and I'm not aware of other claims.
My point was more that you two were arguing at crossroads. You seemed more concerned about what could have happened, and they were talking about what has evidence.
The problem is that it is impossible to prove he has never done that other times. He played his hand that he is willing to put words in other people's mouths basically just for entertainment, so why should we believe he hasn't done it in much more important cases?
Again that's one of the two things being discussed. My main point was that there were two things being discussed rather than one.
> He played his hand that he is willing to put words in other people's mouths basically just for entertainment, so why should we believe he hasn't done it in much more important cases?
I find this logic a bit backwards. Willing to do something when the stakes and impact are low to annoy someone trolling you is very different from changing comments in important situations.
I'm serious. Who doesn't like to get drunk at work? I do (it's only happened once, but it's one of my best memories).
Dang can edit my comments. (He does have to edit comments sometimes, I'm sure, but for reasons you approve of.) I would find it annoying. Until this comment thread, though, I'm not sure I would have considered that dang would get fired for it.
I don't think I nor anyone should be held accountable at work for comments made on Hacker News. If I lost my job over dang editing my post, I would think I worked for a really shit company and nobody went to bat for me. Basically, I would continue believing the interaction on the forum was totally unimportant, and I would be dumbfounded by the idiocy of my manager for elevating it to that a fireable offense, particularly after I let them know I did not make that comment.
FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.
What situation do you think dang would need to edit a comment that a deletion wouldn't work?
HN isn't partnering with the CIA to catch some Russian spy by modifying a comment so that the drop is in a monitored location. He's just going to delete the comment if it contains something it shouldn't.
A ton of people deal with all kinds of shitty problems at work, and the answer to most of them isn't to petition to fire some random dude that nobody in the situation has ever met who works for some other uninvolved company. The answer is to fix the shitty internal process that lets powers-that-be stalk and fire people for social media posts.
Bringing it back to real life: I don't fire my people for what they say on the internet.
Before: I have no evidence that spez tampers with anyone's reddit comments in production
After: I have evidence that spez tampered with ONE reddit comment in production.
The new status quo does not increase the likelyhood of "I have evidence that spez may be inexplicably tampering with old reddit comments habitually" being more true.
And thinking that it does shows a poor understanding of human behaviour and nature, especially under stressful emotional circumstances.
> Suppose dang edited your post to say "I like to get drunk at work"
You're generalizing the action described in the article to something that feels very different to me. Yes, his actions fall under "editing comments"; yes, your hypothetical falls under "editing comments"; yes, I think that his actions make him more likely to do something like your hypothetical; no, I don't think that we should treat his actions like your hypothetical because they are different.
> Reddit CEO Steve Huffman today admitted that he had edited Reddit user comments that criticized and insulted him, wielding his power to anonymously change references to his own username, and replace them with moderators of the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald.
> Huffman — who posts on the site as "spez" — admitted to the transgression after being called out by users of r/the_donald, saying he was inspired to edit the comments after a spate of insults emanating from the pro-Trump subreddit. "I messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," Huffman said, indicating that the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults.
This is a short-sighted argument. A list of who cares:
* Any media reporting on what’s happening within Reddit. Remember when WSB was all over the news cycles? Picture that but with some malicious mod/admin setting somebody up to take the fall for equities fraud.
* Any person or entity with legal or fincial muscle looking to protect their reputation or product. You don’t want Wizards of the Coast sending the Pinkertons to your door because they think you’re selling stolen goods.
* Anyone who values their own reputation in the internet. Imagine being an aspiring politician and having somebody insert racial slurs into your historical posts.
The issue isn’t somebody being petty, it’s that there is potential for systemic abuse of power and trust.
Dude have you see some of the shit that happens to people over stuff they wrote on reddit n years ago?
This isn't the old days when everything on the internet was in good fun. For a lot of people these days, internet unironically srs bsns. And a lot of those people think it's okay to harass folks over their passing thoughts on the internet.
Imagine having to testify in court that you didn't actually say the things that the other attorney found in your social media posts, knowing that you really didn't say them but also knowing that no one's going to believe you. "Oh, sure you were hacked. _eye roll_"
I think that while the trolling wasn't egregious, the issue was that words were being put in their mouths, which undermines trust. It's a whole other level of manipulation compared to even just impersonating someone.
Their manipulation of votes and what was allowed to be on /all is pretty well documented. After a certain point, the_donald and several other right-of-center subs were disallowed entirely to appear on the meta lists.
Honestly? Good. So many of the right wing subs were absolute breeding grounds for content violations regarding hate speech, and the sub mods turned a blind eye. It was plainly obvious they were blatantly bad actors on the site long before they got quarantined and banned.
The original sub was nothing special rule wise in my opinion. Did you ever visit their spinoff own site? It was psychotic in comparison. Kicking them off Reddit was a mistake for society at large.
I mean yes that's my opinion, but it's important to look at possible neutral interpretations.
I don't think there is a neutral interpretation better than "the_donald was a lot of trouble for reddit as a business and social network, because they caused hostility, even by their existence, and it's not reddit's business to make humans less tribal, so why continue supporting them? Especially after they were clearly brigaiding and manipulating front page content. This front page manipulation was different from what the reddit owners wanted to be on the front page, which for the most part is benign and fun stuff that's easy to monetize."
There was this ongoing war of attrition by Reddit admins on the_donald (and on a lot of other subs, including their big cash cow WallStreetBets)
The admins always had some new rules and some specific ways they had to be enforced, and were always happy to heap ever-increasing punishments on the subreddits capriciously
Oh, you can't say "Retard" any more, if we find any more examples of this prohibited hate speech your subreddit is going to be actioned against. Also we banned half of your most active moderators for wrongthink. We'll continue banning moderators and levying punishments until the situation is rectified.
Whatever it was reddit claimed they did, they couldn't have done because they had already moved to a different site about four months before reddit "kicked them off". The subreddit had been locked the whole time.
How can you hate those groups but not hate the_donald where mods were also a disaster?! They absolutely love to gaslight you in general. Shouldn't a good faith response to a post in the_donald not be immediately removed and OP banned? The mods would never let any non-hyperventilated group think through. It's the same with r/conspiracy back then where I happily took my ban for calling out the worst mod I've ever encountered who would again ban good faith discussion for arbitrary reasons. r/politics mods are also horrible, to add some balance. I'm banned there too.
I hated the_donald plenty, mostly because they banned people for no reason or for stupid reasons. Which is the exact same offense that Reddit at large committed, but at least the_donald people were upfront about it.
I think we're on the same page overall here, just that I never put any faith in the sanctity of Reddit's database
They sure as fuck were not! Even to this day, /Conservative still claims the moral high ground bastion of free speech and balance while banning you for any slight question of the narrative being encouraged. Importantly, this is VERBATIM what they claim /politics does.
the_donald made it very clear that they were a subreddit trying to mimic a Trump campaign rally. You could even be a conservative, mildly critical of Trump's policy and still get banned. It never claimed to be unbiased and proudly proclaimed the opposite.
On the other hand, we expect some level of fairness and professionalism from Reddit and its administrators.
My memory on this is murky, although do I recall correctly that his reply to criticism of the production db comment edit amounted to something like “it was just a prank bro”?
It seems to me that some people have no regard for the law, the ethics, the morals, etc.. If it benefits them to break it, they will do it, as long as they know they will face no or minimal consequences if caught.
They would even feel good about it because they have managed to obtain an unfair advantage and get away with it.
This seems like an even more egregious act, it's like attempted character assassination of a developer beloved by the community. This app got shouted out in WWDC and Spez's decision shortly after is to concoct an alternate reality where Christian is a villain and present it as fact, and then get caught almost immediately.
It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.
Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.
Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.
I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.
What does this look like in practice? Reddit devs extend their ad platform into the API and then make a mandatory design guideline, which they require with whatever app has x API demand level?
I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
> What does this look like in practice? Reddit devs extend their ad platform into the API and then make a mandatory design guideline, which they require with whatever app has x userbase?
Pretty much. Long tail of tiny-userbase clients probably doesn't matter that much, I suspect a small number of apps that can reasonably be spot-checked if it complies is the vast majority of traffic.
> I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
No reason third-party apps couldn't be allowed to be ad-free for premium users too. (or if the API is explicitly pushing "show ad URL X to user in this context" the API can take care of adjusting that)
Regardless of how simple the business case for this change is or is not, Steve's choice to egregiously lie about his conversation with Christian is a completely unnecessary and frankly daft risk to take. It's bullying, and he was almost immediately caught out as a liar.
I cannot understand how anyone in his team with a sturdy ethical compass could look him in the eye after seeing that post, especially if they were party to the original conversation. I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate leader get caught in such a high profile absolute falsehood, especially directed at a single individual.
If this reflects the company's culture I have no idea how it can succeed as a public firm. How will Steve deal with criticism from public investors? What is he not willing to lie about?
The thread linked at the top of this page covers the accusations made by Steve directed at Christian and includes the call recordings Steve was apparently unaware of completely contradicting those accusations.
Additionally, someone else in the comments here linked the text of a post[0] made in /r/partnercommunities with similar accusations to what's quoted in TFA.
> Why charge?
> It’s very expensive to run – it takes millions of dollars to effectively subsidize other people’s businesses / apps.
> It’s an extraordinary amount of data, and these are for-profit businesses built on our data for free.
This is rich. The entire for-profit Reddit business is based on people contributing data for free, subsidizing their for-profit business. These guys couldn’t be any more clueless.
I remember a long while back someone on HN characterized the Reddit leadership team as like a regular driver who's dropped into the seat of a formula 1 car halfway through a race, in the lead. Tons of momentum but the person at the controls can't keep from steering it into the wall.
It hasn't stopped them from becoming personally wealthy and "powerful" in whatever world they live in. If you keep being told not to touch the hot stove, but not touching the hot stove doesn't burn you, not only will you NOT learn to not touch the stove, but you will learn to not listen to people who tell you not to do other things.
We owe it to the world to make sure touching the stove DOES burn you, otherwise it's just DARE all over again.
Were Christian's conversations actually with Steve? Or were they with another employee, and then Steve mischaracterised them? It mentioned that an employee denied Christian access to Steve.
I don't use the app and I don't have any great attachment to Reddit, but I wondered if Reddit screwed themselves a bit here by not having a clearer link between the two parties. If either the Reddit employees involved or Steve entered the fray with any sort of bias/grievance, they likely misinterpreted the developer's comments.
Reddit is terrible at everything but getting a massive user base in the early 2010s, which it has coasted on since. They could have had a phenomenal IPO in 2021, but with the current market conditions they don’t really have a hook (no AI involvement).
Their best case scenario is really Twitter’s case, where they go public, have middling performance, and then get bought out by a billionaire after annoying them with bad moderation decisions lmao
Is that a matter of fact? How do you know it isn't higher? Also consider that it's not just advertising, it is also about funneling users to new products Reddit may want to develop
You can see how that number is derived in the post. It's based on very optimistic projections from data that reddit has previously released about their revenue, and very pessimistic projections of their user growth. If reddit somehow has massively increased the value they can get from each user compared to that I think the burden of proof is on them for that.
From TFA, $0.12 is an optimistic calculation taking better-than-best revenue divided by a pessimistic user count. We can double that again if you're expecting a late-stage product like reddit to launch a new highly monetizable feature soon, and it's still quite far away.
I think the $0.12 figure that was calculated on the post may have been too low.
Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.
Yeah, I'd expect a lot of power users on the 3rd party clients are generating a lot of the content and doing free moderation that produces the product they can get the masses to use via the website/ official app.
> Reddit will be worse for lurkers if Apollo users disappear
Within the realm of folks who are willing to pay for a Reddit skin, imagine that very few of them will just give up the site once their skin is gone.
More likely is that someone comes in and makes a similar app and charges more for it. Power users and professional users will pay, and most of them will gladly pay a premium.
Not gonna lie… I think op said he charged $10 a year. I raised my eyebrows… that should probably be the bottom option of a three-tier monthly price matrix.
I think someone should buy this app and just price it properly based on value add. Im not sure what the various user profiles of Apollo are, but my guess is that there are a few profiles that can be profitably monetized even with the new Reddit API charges. Imho, Reddit is being shortsighted, but they do have a unique and large community.
> I'm so annoyed with three-tier monthly price matrices. It's honestly a red flag for me at this point.
On an aesthetic level, I agree with you. For some business, it’s just not needed.
That said…
As someone who has optimized pricing matrixes many times, I will just say that it works incredibly well. Also, for the whatever number people (like you? sort of like me?) who drop out due to “red flags”, there are legions more who allow their behavior to be shaped in an incredibly profitable way.
It was already a calculation with massively generous values — come on, hardware serving easily cache-able data is dirt cheap, especially when quite a lot of that is just text. And there is data from Christian about the average daily API calls an Apollo user makes, so no need to guess.
As other's have pointed out, they probably think AI will pay them more than even ads. Or, since they want to IPO and cash out, they are betting, with the current hype around "AI", that public markets will value AI high enough to value "possible" data sources of AI highly.
This is likely an indication of their internal targets for ARPU over the next months as they start aggressively monetizing and push to IPO.
For reference, approximate global ARPU if converted to monthly for other social networks in 2022: Pinterest: ~$0.5, Snap: ~$1, Twitter: ~$1.6, FB: ~$3.3
This says the IPO roadshow will say Reddit has potential somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, which feels like the right sales pitch to me.
Can’t Reddit just have a tiered API: one pricing for ad-free API and another for ad-supported? Surely a system could be put in place to ensure compliance.
I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.
This gets repeated a lot, with the assumption that they're refusing to pay at all, but in the very original post they highlight how they do pay for API usage elsewhere (Imgur) already and therefore have no problem adding Reddit to that at a reasonable cost.
I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:
1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API
2. Developers don't want to pay that much
3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly
4. Developers push back and announce app closures
If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.
> They think their data is worth $X to AI and think that AI will pay that much.
which is absurd... the entirety of reddit has already been scraped before. the marginal utility of this today onward feed of data is a lot less than they think it is.
in the moderator subreddit, the admins have stated several times that non-commercial access will remain free, and have skirted replying to direct questions, from what I can tell.
u/spez (reddit ceo) is doing a ama tomorrow.
>Hi Mods,
We’re providing a follow-up on the last API update we made to make sure our mods, developers, and users have clarity on changes we are (and aren’t) making.
API Free Access
This exists and continues to be available.
If usage is legal, non-commercial, and helps our mods, we won’t stand in your way. Moderators will continue to have access to their communities via the API - including sexually explicit content across Reddit. Moderators will be able to see sexually-explicit content even on subreddits they don't directly moderate.
We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API. We will support legal and non-commercial tools like Toolbox, Context Mod, Remind Me, and anti-spam detection bots. And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.
Developers can continue non-commercial usage of the API, free of charge within stated rates. Reddit is also covering hosting for apps via the Developer Platform, which uses the Data API.
Have you looked at the rate limits? They changed it from 60 calls per user per client ID to 100 calls per minute per client ID. Nothing is getting built with limits that low
in TFA paying a price isn't a problem. The insanely high price isn't necessarily even a dealbreaker (Apollo is a paid app already, though it'll be a steep as hell increase). The issue is he (and everyone else) had 30 days notice between the new pricing and the pricing going into force, which is not enough to actually adapt to the changes without going deeply into the read in the meantime (for example, much of Apollo's users are on a yearly plan).
Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).
If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.
I'm a little surprised reddit would not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.
This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.
Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.
You are missing the fact that these social media sites are 100% dependent on freely provided user-generated content. Third party apps were quite likely necessary for Reddit’s success so far. It’s much more complex than what you make it sound like.
You make them sound like freeloaders, when in reality they provide value to the community by committing significant time contributing to Reddit through posts, comments, original content, and volunteer moderation.
Reddit is worthless without community contributions, and Reddit is very clearly telling the community (both users and developers) that they aren't valuable and should go find somewhere else to spend their time.
Except the way Reddit works increasing the volume of users, even if they aren't seeing ads, provides the entirety of the value of the site that the users who are seeing ads come to see.
This 100% reeks of business people who don't even care to understand what Reddit is coming in and seeing the raw metrics of "% of users who aren't seeing ads" and the "lost" revenue.
Why would it be limited to social media companies? Have companies like Airbnb done anything to show YC companies are more or less just as bad (once they are big of course)
The smart move for the Apollo devs might be to create a back end of their own. There's no reason why their app needs to work only with Reddit, is there? Quite a few users would migrate to a new forum just to keep using the app.
> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?
> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.
> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.
What kind of obligation is Reddit under to allow Apollo to continue? They’ve made a decision they think (rightly or wrongly) is in the long-term interests of the company.
How long will Reddit survive if they don’t do this? I have no idea. But I do know the CEO has to deliver more than happy users.
Putting aside why Reddit's behaviour is objectionable. Reddit did this in a way that will cost them money and harm both their reputation and quality.
Had they set out a reasonable timeline for the new prices, they would have had a new revenue stream. Instead they killed it and at the same time created an incentive for some of their most active users to leave.
>yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit
This is *literally* what is expected of someone running a company with intitutional investors - anything other than this and investors are not interested.
What more proof do we need that there is nothing more important to a small group of humans that own all the money, than them getting more money?
> I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this.
What is the employee culture like it Reddit?
I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite.
Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions based on personal relationships, rather than anything else.
I've known a couple of people who previously worked at Reddit and I can't imagine they'd quit over something like this. I think most employees don't feel any personal responsibility or sense of control for the situation and are happy to get paid a comfortable salary.
> Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder?
Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
I don't know how monthly subscriptions work, but yearly subscription refunds are pro-rated.
> I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing
I'm not, at least not for apps like this that need consistent revenue to support regular maintenance and/or server costs in an era where customers balk when an app costs more than a few dollars. To achieve this you end up balancing whether or not to serve ads, hope you can just grow enough new users forever, charge for major updates, charge a subscription, or beg for tips. While there are some exceptions, you can probably tell that ads or subscriptions are generally winning this nowadays.
One-time purchases are a tricky thing, since you've realisitcally now precluded ever charging for a major update. This is great for them, and might be for you if you've gotten your math right, but if you haven't (or it changes) then you're stuck. And, for better or for worse, they tend to be the loudest users.
Marco Arment talks about this balance in general on an episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast a couple weeks ago when discussing how Casey (another host) should price an app he's writing. For context if folks aren't aware, Marco created Overcast, which is a popular 3rd party iOS podcast app. The discussion spans a couple episodes but I the post-show of [Episode 535](https://atp.fm/535) captures the gist.
I generally agree with this type of analysis regarding for-profit ventures, but as a lifetime purchaser, I’m not going to try to get a refund here. I got my money’s worth out of Apollo, and Christian is handling this like a steely-eyed capitalist. He’s not asking the community to bail him out from his business decisions or Reddit taking things in a different direction, and I respect that a lot.
Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.
Did people really sell services that necessarily depended on a third party's services without some contractual safeguard in their terms in case the third party changed how they operate? There's always a risk in building your offering on top of someone else's and plenty of attempts to do that in that past didn't work out so surely any lawyer who works in this field should have seen that one coming?
Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?
Yes, they did. And yes, like you, it should have been obvious to everyone involved.
Yet for some reason, the Twitter client devs (who had happily shifted all their users to a subscription-only model) all of a sudden realized that they had sold a bunch of one year subs they had sold were going to be useless as soon as Twitter turned off the API and, more pertinent to their pocketbooks, all those customers would be entitled to request and receive a refund through the App Store for their now non-functional app. The devs started whining to their customers about being “small businesses” and having the food snatched out of their families’ mouths and why would anyone be so cruel as to seek a refund?
Christian is showing a hell of a lot more integrity and toughness than the Twitter client authors.
> A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.
The "Pro" tier was a one-off payment at one point in time, but at some point this switched to a monthly subscription. Previous owners were grandfathered in.
Reddit is stupid, and the whole situation is bad, but shouldn't the man behind the biggest app for the biggest forum in the world, in the lucrative ios ecosystem have made himself wealthy enough so that 250k is close to nothing?
Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space?
If he isn't "10+ million"-wealthy that's extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.
I think you may be overestimating how much money there is in this space. People don't want to pay for things if they can avoid it. The biggest app for the biggest forum in the world apparently had 50k paying users. The author was complaining about the cost of icons, which to me suggests that he is not terribly wealthy.
But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:
* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.
* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"
> Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0
Because according to Reddit, the problem with Apollo is the opportunity cost of Reddit not being able to monetize its users.
Acquiring Apollo is user acquisition. Destroying the app does not necessarily mean that all those users will now start using Reddit's official app and become monetizable, they might just quit Reddit entirely. By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.
> By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.
After what Reddit did to Alien Blue I don't know how many Apollo users would be too keen on playing that game again. I personally have no confidence that a Reddit owned Apollo would retain what makes the current app great.
It has 50k users paying yearly. There's supposedly more users paying monthly, and yet more that got the "lifetime" deal. I'm part of the later category.
250k is just the cost of refund of subscriptions. There is further costs related to new business model and all the risk associated with a continued work relationship with a partner that just done you dirty. He can pay the refund, he understands it as not worth it and decided to not delay the inevitable and close shop. The thought is that it will not be profitable and any service offered after 30 days will only benefit reddit at his expense. It's the right call.
> A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
That's practically the definition of tortious interference.
"The most common form of [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance."
If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."
I believe his point is that since the creator of Apollo was in frequent conversations with Reddit, who apparently told him they weren’t planning big changes to the API anytime soon, that then making it impossible for him to deliver the app by instead charging an exorbitant amount (very shortly after telling him there wouldn’t be changes), then that would qualify as forcing him to break the contract with his users. On the other hand, you could argue that since the promise was “lifetime,” this put to much up in the air (vs. like 5 years or something). On the other other hand, you could argue that there is an implied possibility that the app could shut down, given that Reddit itself could for example close down and make it impossible to deliver, which I think courts would plausibly accept as a sufficient delivery of services. Anyways, to the original point, I’m not sure what a court would find, but hopefully now at least the comparison he’s drawing is clear.
No, it's not the definition of tortious interference.
Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs, which Reddit was not under a legal obligation to continue providing at historical rates that Apollo had based its entire product around, despite long-standing advice not to do so.
> Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs,
"I didn't refuse to transport your goods, I just said it would cost a billion dollars per pound to do it and you couldn't afford it" is not the gotcha that you think it is. The law is technical but it's enforced by humans.
It's straightforward: Apollo and Reddit have a longstanding business relationship, via these APIs that Reddit has provided for a long time at zero cost. Reddit generally no longer wants third parties to use the API, so they are increasing the price to a level that they know will cause everyone to balk (other third-party clients are closing up too) so that they can direct that traffic to their own native client and first-party sites, while knowing that Apollo has these long-standing business relationships of their own that are built on this relationship with Reddit.
In short, reddit is deliberately taking action to sabotage and cause economic harm to a business partner by changing aspects of the relationship that make it impossible for the partner to fulfill their contracts to third parties, so that Reddit can direct that business to themselves instead.
That is an improper taking under tortious interference, and the rest of the tests (intent actual economic loss - not just refunds but future income, etc) are trivially satisfied here.
I know people are libertarians here but the right to swing your fist ends at someone else's face, and legally speaking if you take actions that you know will result in a business partner being forced to sustain economic losses due to your improper breaking of your business relationship with them, you are generally liable for that damage you cause to the partner. That is the basic concept of tortious interference, you're paying for the damage you caused to your business partner. Swing your fist and hit someone's face and you get to pay for the surgery.
(IANAL and Reddit's lawyers would obviously say their conduct is proper, but, generally this is the type of situation where people can unexpectedly get themselves into legitimate legal trouble based on actions they think are perfectly legitimate. And generally they may have been legitimate if you didn't have this prior relationship, that changes things! It's different to not build an API at all, vs having the API be free and have third parties start selling clients and then to stop doing the API.)
(As a sibling comment notes, estoppel is another - if you promise something to someone, even a verbal promise, and they take a financially detrimental action on the expectation that you will follow through on your side of the promise and you don't, then you are generally liable for the financial harm you have caused them too. Libertarianism doesn't mean you can wiggle out of contracts, even verbal ones.)
Apollo and Reddit do not appear to be business partners. Nor does Apollo seem to have any contractual agreement with Reddit, outside of the API usage agreement.
The API terms were lasted updated May 25, 2016. These include this language:
> a. Fees. Reddit reserves the right to charge fees for future use or access to the Reddit APIs, rates to be determined in Reddit’s sole discretion.
I assume these are the terms that Apollo are bound to. If that's the case, I don't see how you can support your claim. Reddit is using it's contractual right.
> Apollo and Reddit do not appear to be business partners. Nor does Apollo seem to have any contractual agreement with Reddit, outside of the API usage agreement.
Sorry, I am confused what you are arguing here. If you think a usage agreement is binding they are certainly business partners. They may still be business partners or generally covered by tortious interference even if they do not have an explicit contract either.
This is quite a wide legal net by design - it is a "swing your fist and hit someone and their lawyers may have something to say about it" area of law, of course it's a wide net. You really don't even have to have an explicit contract.
I'm not a libertarian, I'm a lawyer, and I'm looking at this from the legal perspective.
Reddit's Data API TOS has always allowed it the right to start charging for access. That it chose not to do so until recently was its prerogative. That it chooses to do so now, is also it's prerogative.
This is not a unfair taking, since Reddit isn't taking anything from Christian, they are simply no longer freely providing something.
This is not an issue of estoppel, since Reddit never promised to make their API free forever. And Reddit gave him due notice, as required by their TOS, of changes that would take effect...several months after notice was given of the changes...
This is not tortious inteference, since Apollo could have continued to provide Reddit services to their customers, though this might have required Christian to change his business model.
This is not slander, since on the call Christian clearly suggests to Reddit to give him $10 million and he'll go away and not make a fuss about things.
It's irrelevant that they have a "prior relationship" since that means nothing in this context, since Christian did not have a binding contractual relationship that entitled Christian to perpetual free access to the Reddit Data API.
You should read the article. Christian recorded calls during which said that no increase was under consideration and that any change was "at least a year away".
I did read the article. And I listened to the recording. As a businessperson, Christian should know that the salespersons statements were not a binding promise, since there was no mutual consideration and those statements were not reflected in the actual written agreement he would have signed.
As I said, I'm looking at this from the legal perspective, not the emotional perspective.
> This is not tortious inteference, since Apollo could have continued to provide Reddit services to their customers, though this might have required Christian to change his business model.
So, this is the one thing I'm not sure I entirely agree with. While it's true that Apollo could have changed its business model, they only had 30 days to migrate users to a new business model, including some users that are on a yearly model.
Furthermore, Reddit had previously stated to Christian that the timeline was flexible, and that they'd be open to extending it. They then walked back on that promise, leaving Apollo scrambling to move all their existing users to the new model in very limited time. And that's after telling christian multiple time earlier in the year that no change to the pricing policy was being considered for at least the year to come.
There's essentially no solution for Christian here. They don't have the money to pay for the usage of their existing 50k yearly that won't migrate for up to 12 months.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd be very surprised if a case couldn't be made with this behavior.
Not that it'd ever go to court anyways - it'd be a huge time and money sink with unclear outcomes. Better to focus on the next steps.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd be very surprised if a case couldn't be made with this behavior.
I am a lawyer. I can say, with 100% certainty, that this case would never make it to trial. It's unlikely that Christian would even make it to discovery, as based on the facts stated, by Christian himself, even viewed in the light most favorable to Christian, he does not have any colorable legal claims.
The act that is alleged to be tortious interference has to be improper for it to actually potentially be tortious interference (see farther down on the page you quoted).
There's nothing obviously improper about a site replacing a free API with a paid API even if it causes problems for those who relied on the API being free.
I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?
> Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."
> "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
"We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps."
I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...
Reddit had an easy way out for the issue of 3rd party apps not showing ads, they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients, so they could have made the API exclusive to users with a subscription. People would have been upset, but not this upset.
Honestly, I think they would have had a sizeable amount of people paying for the subscription.
Now, even if they backtrack on this later on in a few months or years, they burned the good will, so I doubt developers are going invest the time to make a good Reddit client after this.
It also opened the door for a more premium non-Reddit app that charges monthly and directly competes with Reddit. From everything I've seen so far there might be enough of the existing Reddit community who are upset enough with the recent direction to make that leap viable and if the reported figures are accurate then the finances might also work if enough people jump ship to establish a new community.
Yes, but much like the "exodus" from Twitter, and others over the years - they all fail to reach critical mass. There's a very real early-mover effect, the likes of which have prevented Mastodon and even Truth from gaining huge ground.
Truth, being perhaps the most interesting, because the main personality behind it sort of compelled it to be semi-well-known simply because of media coverage. The other attempts do not share that effect, however.
They all fail to reach critical mass until someone does. That's always been the history of social networks. Once sites like Myspace and LiveJournal were everywhere. The next generation mostly went on Facebook and Facebook snapped up Instagram. Now a younger generation is on sites like TikTok. Digg and Slashdot are still going but they didn't stop Reddit becoming huge or more specialised sites with overlapping demographics (like HN for example) from building their own communities.
You're right that early movers have some advantage but it's a big world and the Next Big Thing doesn't have to win the whole market on day one - only enough of it to plant seeds that can grow over time.
> they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients
Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.
So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
He addresses that in the post. He only has 30 days to accommodate the price increase. What is he supposed to do about his current clients that already paid for the year? Take a huge financial loss until his updated pricing catches up? He asked for more time, they said no.
I'd be similarly judgemental if Christian had been the only one to behave like this. But when you look at the field, everyone was taken by surprise by the prices. Pretty much all the major apps are closing. Were all developers hopelessly naive? All of them? I find that hard to believe.
The OP didn't even bother to read the conversation. This was announced in April, but Reddit did not provide prices. It only assured this won't be as expensive as Twitter API access, and the drama started once it actually did.
He made those decisions based on information he'd received from Reddit. His mistake was believing they were acting in good faith (rather than being lying scumbags).
> Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.
> So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
If you read the post, it's not just about the willingness of users to pay. It's also about the existing obligations (prepaid subscriptions), the timeline of the changes, and the amount of work that would be required on his end to adapt to the new changes within the next three weeks.
None of that would be an issue with the proposed solution of Reddit charging the users directly.
He has to flush the existing subscriptions no matter what. It's done. He has said he can afford it.
He could fire up a new system with appropriate pricing as soon as he can manage. All customers, if they want to come back, are then forced into the new system at new pricing levels. Maybe this takes a month or two or three. He's not losing money in the mean time and can re-open at something resembling a profitable stance when he can do so.
Yes, it sucks. But there's a path here if he wants to go for it. I don't blame him for throwing in the towel. He's tired of getting yanked around. I would be very hesitant to keep throwing good time(money) after bad.
As someone who spends way too much time on reddit and would be their prime target audience: i have no idea why I'd sign up for reddit premium. Not a single feature i care about.
Reddit premium subscriber here — I use it because it hides ads, I get a lot of value from Reddit (and want to make that sustainable, if possible), and Premium gives me stickers I can award to comments occasionally in addition to upvotes.
Sibling comment already addresses it. But to add, I’d happily pay and I want to pay $5 or more to Reddit. But not everyone is like that. Reddit cornered third party apps into a single subscription model with very little time to adapt. I think Apollo could have accommodated these changes over 6 months. Reddit could have also added an ad based tier. Instead they forced a huge price hike with less than a month to react to it.
I may consider 6$ per month if the money goes to app maintainer, content creators, moderators and good commentators. But 3$ to Reddit for providing an api, a few bytes db space is simply too much.
He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app. Now he's put into a position to support those customers at $2.50/month. (He estimates their server cost is $0.10 per month.) That's an instant $125,000 per month out of his own pocket that he can't recoup from existing customers for at least the next 6 months.
Over the course of 2023, he'll have to pay Reddit $1 million MORE than he has made from the app this year.
Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps. That's fine. That's their right. But it's certainly not the app developer's fault that he's forced to quit.
> Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps
This sentiment is obviously false. Reddit doesn't want to support third-party apps at Reddit's own expense. That is reasonable.
> He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app
And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.
But like.. He asked if they had any plans to change it. And they said no. I can't imagine the hoop you're expecting him to jump through - get a seat on their board covertly?
> He also had way more than 30 day's notice and chose not to do anything until the last moment.
> He has had several months to prepare for a new billing model - but chose to do nothing.
I like how you keep on refusing to read the article, but claiming things from it that are straight up untrue.
Reddit announced less than two months ago that there would be pricing changes. But not what those prices would be. Even the loosest possible interpretation of the words "notice" and "several" barely covers that.
Explicitly:
> On April 18th, Reddit announced changes that would be coming to the API, namely that the API is moving to a paid model for third-party apps. Shortly thereafter we received phone calls, however the price (the key element in an announcement to move to a paid API) was notably missing, with the intent to follow up with it in 2-4 weeks.
And at the time, there was absolutely no indication that the prices would be this high.
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
Literally the most cursory of reading of the first few paragraphs of the OP would have given you this information.
If you aren't going to bother to read it (that's your prerogative), then don't bother making easily provably false assertions as if they were facts, either.
> This is subjective. He's basically saying he's willing to pay an amount that fit into his old, not well thought out business model, and it's up to Reddit to pay for the rest.
That's not what he said. He said that it's not feasible to transfer from the current pricing with 30 days notice.
That choice is entirely on Reddit, the situation did not demand such a short notice period. They could have smoothed it out but chose not to.
I find it strange to push the blame onto someone who was assured by Reddit of their intention to charge a reasonable price, and to work with 3rd parties on a flexible timeline for the introduction of the charges.
The worst I can say about the Apollo developer is that he believed Reddit were acting in good faith. Reddit on the other hand look like incompetent arseholes.
> And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.
Christian has already shared his correspondence on Reddit with this. He pretty clearly sought and received regular assurances that when and if Reddit moved their API to a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost and with a flexible timeline to accommodate third party apps.
After telling him no such big moves were happening in 2023 they changed their mind, set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
> a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost
What does this even mean? "Reasonable" is subjective - and from Reddit's perspective, I'd bet they believe the fees are reasonable.
It's on the business operator to mitigate risk. Apollo didn't do that - and is now throwing in the towel instead of charging their customer's more.
> set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
> Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
Just stop.
You’ve been told multiple times, by multiple people, that this was not the case.
You’ve been provided the timeline, which you refuse to acknowledge.
You very well know that he was not provided the pricing until 8 days ago.
At this point, you continuing to say this is just being disingenuous and talking in bad faith.
What, exactly, are you getting out of this? Is unreasonably placing the blame on a single developer your way of getting your rocks off?
Are we reading the same information? There is not one thing I've said that is not in the linked post, or any of the previous posts regarding this topic.
You may want to believe and be sympathetic toward Apollo - fine.
That doesn't change the circumstances nor realities. Apollo screwed up, and is now throwing in the towel. It's really hard to be sympathetic towards a business operator that's made a series of bad choices and now is playing the victim card and shutting down.
You have constantly pushed a reframed timeline that isn’t actually indicative of reality. You have been told multiple times why. You have ignored multiple different things that Reddit has done in an effort to shift the blame entirely onto the Apollo dev.
You’re the only one who is finding it hard, and your constant push to shift the blame off of a massive corporation and onto a developer is frankly weird.
Re-evaluate your life choices if you truly believe this, but it’s clear you are the extreme minority here.
Says the person who has been told multiple times to stop making things up and incorrectly reframing the facts by multiple different people. The projection is strong with this one.
> This may go down in history as a case-study in how not to operate an internet business.
It certainly will, but not Apollo’s handling as you so desperately want, for whatever reason.
Reddit fucked up, are probably going to lose a chunk of their most active users and volunteer moderators, and will probably materially damage their IPO as a result of this.
You seem to be one of very few people who refuse to even remotely consider this idea.
I know people keep floating this idea of paying for reddit, and that's somewhat hilarious to me.
There is no chance I'm paying for a "service" where power-mods will ban you for disagreeing with their radical politics, where most of the subreddits are actively taken over by similar power mods who push their radical ideologies, and where any attempts to evade this stuff and simply use the website can get you permanently banned from the service.
Imagine spotify, but if you listen to the wrong songs, you get banned from other random artists, and if you try to work around this you just get banned outright from spotify.
Aren't they effectively just offloading this whole question onto the apps? For the sake of argument, let's say what they are charging for the API is about 80% per-user of what they make for users who use the official app (and therefore see ads). I have no idea what the actual numbers are, this is just theoretical.
In that case, app developers have several options:
* start showing users ads, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit
* start charging a monthly fee for the app, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit
* some combination of these two (e.g. pay a subscription for ad-free use)
Sure, Reddit could make this easier for app developers, but isn't it all basically the same thing at the end of the day? Reddit wants (or needs? I have no idea what their financials look like) to make a certain amount of money per-user or per page view. Apps take home ~100% of their profits currently, and make Reddit ~nothing. So Reddit is pricing in a profit rate into API access.
I mean, just to look at Apollo, they have 166K ratings on the Apple App Store, and surely far more users than that. Reddit wants $20M a year from them. That's high, maybe too high, but how does it compare to the value of (say) a million users a year on the official Reddit app? If Apollo switched to a subscription model on which they charged $1 a month to users, would they be able to pay Reddit's API fees? (Assuming those API fees would drop by at least 50% after non-paying users quit using Apollo.)
Nearly every element of your comment is blatantly wrong, some directly addressed by the post this comment thread is discussing.
- Reddit is charging the equivalent of 20x its published revenue per user for the API.
- The new API agreements ban the display of any advertising by API users. (Apollo did not show ads, but other third-party clients did, and Reddit claims the low quality of ads was harming Reddit by association.)
- Charging $5/month would be break-even given the API pricing, and only for new customers. Apollo would still have to serve earlier subscribers at a huge loss. API fees would certainly not “drop by 50%” — the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users, so the average API usage per customer would _increase_.
I say pretty clearly that I'm talking about purely theoretical numbers. The underlying fact is that the status quo is probably unsustainable for Reddit. It's hard to be "blatantly wrong" about a series of hypotheticals, IMO.
There's a lot of strange stuff happening in your comment. On the one hand, let's take for granted that Reddit is charging 20x its revenue per average user for the API. But that's just the average user; as you yourself point out "the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users". Surely they are worth much more to Reddit than the average, extremely casual user?
The underlying problem explained in the post is that the author pre-sold access to Reddit through an app to users, while this access was actually conditioned on the continuing availability of access to the Reddit API. No doubt this does put the author in an uncomfortable position! Given that the current plan is to shut down the app anyway, surely cancelling active subscriptions should also be on the table? Subscribers are going to lose access to Reddit through Apollo either way! So realistically, what we're talking about here is whether $5/month is a reasonable price point for power users. My answer is... maybe?
I think my instinct is to say that this is all ultimately the place where negotiations are supposed to happen. Reddit needs to go from making zero dollars off the API to making something. Is what they want to charge too high? Probably so. But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
> But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
Is that the case? Every reaction I have seen has been to the magnitude of the price, which is much, much, much more than what Reddit makes off of users
Isn't that why Apollo said they'd sell the company for $10M to Reddit if they wanted to take it over? If it costs Reddit $20M/year, surely they could make more than $10M/year if they took it over themselves.
Exactly. In fact, Spotify works exactly like this: you can use any third-party client you like, so long as you have a Spotify Premium paid subscription. If you have a free account, you need to use the official clients with ads.
I wonder if Reddit ever considered and calculated options like showing ads, selling reddit gold and merchandise through partner apps. Maybe it could be coined into win-win-win but ended as it is.
Because I'm not so sure that it's true. Reddit isn't massively profitable but it also doesn't have to lose a ton of money. IIRC they were able to run a much tighter ship and operate off of just Reddit Gold and ads for at least a decade before they started this recent hypergrowth phase
13 years ago, when I worked part time for them, it was about 5 people, with support being provided by Condé Nast peeps. This was right during the middle of the Digg v4 exodus to reddit. I remember when reddit got its billionth pageview month
because they're going public, saying "we're broke, please invest" isn't going to work for them — at this point everything they do is to more or less prop up the value until everyone can cash out
There's a step before this. They're losing a lot of money because the choices they made to take investment to earn more money. They could've gone the route of wikipedia. They could've stayed extremely lean. They took $1.3 BILLION in funding, minimum. They have 500-1000 employees.
Its greed that they got here. They made choices, and then as a consequence of those choices they made choices that are significantly reducing the value they provide to their users. Its enshittification, its killing the golden goose, its destroying a public good for the benefit of investors who don't care about anything other than making a return.
The worst part is the investors don't care about anything other than making the numbers look good in the short term so they can dump their investment onto other investors. Its like all of corporate america decided to watch The Wire and go "Oh see how they're pumping up the numbers to make them look good for the mayor, but not actually solving crime? THAT should be our business plan!". Providing value is a side effect of making money, on the false equivalence that making money means you're providing value, so therefore making more money means you're providing more value.
Yeah. The wikipedia approach to an online platform seems ideal.
Wikipedia is pretty fantastic. Signal is pretty great. I'm pretty happy with NPR. Archive.org makes me happy.
Appeal to people with money (the professional class) and then beg.
I feel like the next great social media platform will result from a rich person disillusioned by reddit (a Bryan Acton type) creating a platform resistant to "next quarters profit"-ism.
The fees aren't small, they also forbid 3rd party apps to show their own ads and will be blocking NSFW subreddits from API (none of those things apply to their mobile app).
So ultimately they want 3rd party to use subscription model to ultimately get worse experience.
It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.
I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is really beyond the pale.
From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?
And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good.
Edit: not to mention Christian's full-time job has just been ended by this policy change. How especially and thoughtlessly cruel to now also make him out to be an extortionist liar, and for nothing really.
At this point, I'm just glad Apollo's author will be able to get some indemnification (and cover his refunds) with the likely lawsuit that will come from this lie.
I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small
I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
And I can guarantee that there are approximately five people using Reddit via a browser on mobile. Mobile means the app, to a precision of two or three significant digits.
I'd wager that most Reddit users these days, casual or not, are only dimly aware that the platform even exists as a website. Or at least a large plurality.
According to [1], Reddit has 52 million daily active users (and 430 monthly users), while according to [2] the Reddit app has 17 million daily active users. Both numbers are from 2021. So only about a third of DAUs would be using the Reddit app. Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side.
> Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side overall.
Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless
Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.
I’m not sure what Reddit’s rationale is here. Third-party app users are less than 1% (can’t find the link where I read this). The most plausible explanation is that they want to get rid of a potential future threat, because I don’t believe that current third-party usage constitutes any substantial loss. Otherwise buying out Apollo as mentioned in TFA should have been an easy decision.
Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?
Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.
As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.
We’ve got lots of web devs and startup space folks on this site, I guess somebody must know how to look this sort of thing up?
I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.
In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.
I'd wager you're completely wrong. Reddit at this point gets a ton of traffic from search. Remember the old 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users are just browsing cat pictures and are eyeball fodder for ads.
As one of the five, I didn't believe this so went trying to determine more realistic numbers.
Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?
I am one of the five. I use the Reddit website on iOS Safari and have for years. I only read one subreddit, so my usage pattern may be different than a normal reddit user. The only thing that annoys me is the ever persistent ‘website or app’ modal dialogue but I’m used to it now.
I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.
old.reddit is starting to come apart at the seams, tho. (maybe it's because r/subs don't keep the style sheets up to date or something? i dunno) in many cases you can't up or downvote, there's no search button, there's no sidebar with the flair and the rules/mods, etc.
I used "style sheet" in a generic sense, rather than to mean CSS (I remember Microsoft (Multitool) Word v1.0) and I was referring to the layout of a subreddit home page which I've never played with but I'm aware the moderators have some control over.
I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to
This is false. I only browse reddit in the browser version on my phone. It annoys you all the time to install their app, but you can read and post perfectly fine.
Your rebuttal is false and the parent is accurate. Reddit will throw up a full screen interstitial on most popular subreddits preventing even viewing and redirect you to download the app. This is on the mobile (not old.reddit desktop-only) site. Their UX is shite and full of dark patterns.
If you log in, the mobile site is perfectly usable. You might also have to set a preference as well (like the old.reddit preference). It has been so many years of using it this way I don't remember.
You can on old.reddit.com. Their redesign was so unpopular with users they agreed to keep supporting the old design which doesn't nag you into downloading the app.
Yeah I've used reddit daily for over a decade. I just use a mobile browser. I tried a couple apps a few years back, but just when back to mobile browser after a few weeks.
So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to concoct a fantasy story where the Apollo developer is an evil villain that is so unbelievable and verifiably unbelievable it doesn't last six hours before blowing up in his face?
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat
2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App
A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit
3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper
You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.
Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.
And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.
Theranos was doing shady shit and ripping off investors. That's illegal. Bad press didn't shut them down. Criminal investigations shut them down and the CEO is now actually in jail.
Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good
Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
I agree but I think the more damning thing about this update is the slander. Maybe it still doesn't come down to a case, but letting it get this close to begin with is absurd, even for a CEO that got into a piss fight with his users.
> if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to...
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
> may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media.
The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.
The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.
This breathless take that capitalists aren’t propagandists taking advantage of every step and spreading FUD at every other is shockingly naive. The CEO of Reddit is trying to punish this guy for overstepping because capital naturally positions itself at the top and bullies all threats it perceives
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
> It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders
It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.
plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:
If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.
you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)
voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.
Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
I never asked for them to be paid. I'm saying that reddit can exist due to their generosity, and that these people use third party tools and the API to do this. That's being taken away.
I obviously don’t believe in capitalist philosophy but you’re joking if you think the market doesn’t consider ad-free users as a drain regardless of reality.
Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
I non-obviously do believe in the capitalist reality underpinning the universe (it's value-add all the way down) but you’re smoking if you think the market doesn't recognize ad-free users are relatively cost-less compared to their positive network externalities.
that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error.
If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.
But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.
The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.
So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.
> Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.
It is when you're about to restate what I've said...
> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term
Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?
> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?
> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either
> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO
> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people
Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"
It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.
Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. The valuable asset is the community. Beyond recovering enough money to pay for servers and some core staff, everything else is parasitic.
> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO
My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.
I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.
It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.
In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.
To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.
If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
All of these 3rd social media clients really are “freeloaders” though, I don’t get what’s so controversial about shutting them down. If I made my own Netflix client that bypasses their revenue stream, and implemented my own revenue stream on top of it, would anybody be upset or surprised if it was shut down?
The users don’t belong to Apollo. Reddit provides a service to Reddit users, Apollo freeloads on that service, cuts off Reddit’s revenue stream, and replaces it with its own. Why would anybody think that Reddit has some obligation to allow this, or that Apollo has some right to do it?
Nobody thinks that, not even the Apollo author, which is why the problem is not that Reddit is charging for access to the APIs, but that they are charging far more than the amount they’re losing.
That's the thing, because of Huffman's instability and childish behavior in previous years, his words have no meaning here.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
It doesn’t matter if the “nerds” are outnumbered. Lurkers outnumber actual content creators by insane multiples, yet everyone knows that the content creators are the ones that keep people coming back.
What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.
Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.
Comments are content too and often more insightful. Moderators for all the bashing some deservedly get are key to keep content creators happy. Each forum is a small organization. The sum of the heads of these orgs. and the identities of users is what makes Reddit valuable. We are however entering an age where identity becomes more portable so mess with all the leads of your teams at your own peril.
The problem is, a very very very large portion of the mods are using third party apps. If the mods go away (because their tools don't work anymore), reddit will have a very big problem on their hands.
Yes people are missing the point here. I'm in Australia and I know when I check reddit groups moderated in other countries they are full of hate - like 4chan when the mods are asleep. I've seen an unmoderated reddit even just for a few hours, the site will be destroyed if people give up their unpaid voluntary work. They need the tools because it's not their fulltime job.
Based on many of the mods' behavior, that might actually be a big win for users. Their persecution and abuse of users makes Reddit the cesspool that it is.
After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."
> "Dumb question, but why is OS or browser support necessary? Couldn't an HTML canvas element and some JS that can parse the file format display any kind of image that you might want?"
Sometimes posts get downvotes "in the noise"; I've had some of my posts go to -1 or even -2 before jumping to >30. It happens; people have axes to grind, think you're stupid for asking a question, etc. and by chance sometimes they cluster just after you posted. Don't assign too much value to it; it's very rare that I see a normal on-topic question like that downvoted.
That is one of the exact things I'm talking about. Mass banning from subs you don't even participate in, or that could not have been related to whatever you're being persecuted for.
I'm sure there are plenty of bad ones. But I haven't participated in groups where those have been a problem.
I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.
Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.
This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.
You're welcome, and it's ok - I get how hard it is to remember these things and also how easily it can seem like we've banned an account for a bad or unfair reason. If you (or anyone) have that impression again in the future, you're welcome to ask. In a few cases there are details we can't disclose, but in most cases we're working with information that's public (like comment histories) and can tell you why we banned an account. You might not disagree with the reason and that's fine, but I'd rather that people disagree with the actual reason and not an incorrect one.
> So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company [...]
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
And this belief is based on what exactly? If you think critically about this, it stands to reason that the impact should not be small if it's worth it to Reddit to get people off of 3rd party mobile apps and put eyes on ads in the first party app.
If they didn't want to support 3rd party apps, then that's a decision they are allowed to make. It sounds to me as if that's the decision they want to make but don't have the moral fortitude to make out right. Instead, they've tried to make the API unappealing for someone to want to use. In the end, it is the same result. So just because they are putting a very high price tag does not mean that's the actual cost/worth, but just a number they put out to scare people away.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
Uhh, I'm pretty sure that you and me and anyone on this site are extremely far from a representative sample of Reddit's userbase these days. It is a fact that their traffic is primarily from their official (and shitty) mobile app.
You're neglecting the tools and bots that use the API, which are heavily utilized by most mod teams. One of the pillars of reddit is unpaid moderators, and if the tools that make that job doable on the scale of reddit stop working, then you will see a mass exodus of those unpaid moderators. That means the death of most of the big, well moderated communities like AskHistorians, AskScience, AITA, etc.
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
Reddit has expectations of what moderators are to do, and has expectations of what they are not to do, and will remove them from roles if they fail to meet those expectations. That set of expectations would make them employees if compensated.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
Reddit moderators do not directly deal with DMCA takedown requests. If Reddit is presented with one, they will take the offending post down directly. Moderators can be suspended or removed, however, if they encourage rule-breaking behaviour in a subreddit (such as by soliciting content that results in DMCA takedowns).
The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.
To be clear, that’s people paying a monthly subscription fee for an app that is free and has several premium one time IAP unlocks.
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
> I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
Only if you believe that all users are equal, but just like free to play games that have whales Reddit has power users that create most of the content and are typically the mods that work for free. They are going to be the most impacted by the API cost changes, and if they leave Reddit will not work.
So have I only used the official apps, and I believe most users are in the same bucket.
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
There are some amazingly good alternatives. I personally use Boost which presents threads in a much more readable manner and allows you to easily swap between different contexts. Before they disappear it might be good to give some alternatives a try and see just how terrible the native app experience is compared to what it could be.
> the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
The thing is, I think a lot of moderators use third-party apps.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
Traffic is really a bad way to look at it, Traffic exisits because there is content to view
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
>I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
the (passive) consumers may use the native interfaces, but the power users - especially the mods - use 3rd party apps. the bigger subs are pretty much unmoddable without them.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
I think you’re wrong - the audience that Reddit was built on is paying attention to this, and it’s going to have a lot of knock on effects. People who have been around for a while. Hell, I was one of the people that moved from Digg to Reddit in 2009 and I’m barely in my thirties.
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
Then why raise the API rates if it so "insignificant"? Short sighted GREED.
See the Studios opening up their own streaming services to choke out NetFlix and observe how that is playing out even for DISNEY+.
I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
I've seen this argument in other places and it makes an error in assuming all users are equal in what they bring. It's common in MMO communities - why do the devs spend so much time working on high end raids enjoyed by only 1% of the player base? For Reddit, I would assume mobile users are more motivated - motivated enough to install an app at least - and probably contribute more UGC to the site. Not to mention unpaid moderators.
Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, & there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome & Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API.
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
> Yet another thing is that two-day boycotts … don’t … work. It’s “we’re going out of town for a weekend”, except at scale. It just shows Reddit that some moderation teams will participate in a power-flex protest that is a result of some folks angry that Reddit is no longer their golden goose, no longer laying golden eggs for them.
My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.
To clarify, I'm not opining personally on reddit's API changes at all in my comment. I'm pointing out that regardless of anyone's opinion of the API changes, Steve's behavior is just egregious, ridiculous, and cruel.
You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.
The AI “gold rush” has already left the station, yyeeeaarrsss ago. The people who are going to monetize it are the people for whom the threshold of entry to the data sets is an insignificant threshold even at tens of thousands of dollars a year - and they’re the same entities already owning rights to datasets. And don’t need Reddit’s.
They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream.
For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO)
the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business.
If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc.
In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams.
To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.
A Reddit moderator and Reddit user coordinated temporary blackout of various subreddits to protest changes made by Reddit that impact Reddit moderators and users makes perfect sense and may end up being effective in achieving it's goal.
A coordinated blackout on Reddit to protest the new Ugandan anti lgbt legislation wouldn't make as much sense or be as effective. There are regularly posts voted to the front page of reddit about these new laws and other human rights issues and what you might be able to do to help if interested.
These different issues don't have to be in competition and aren't analogous to each other.
>This is Pride month. The anti-LGBTQ legislation going up around the US has a precedent in post-Weimar Germany. The people promoting these blackouts over “Reddit is ending abuse of their API” sure aren’t protesting hatred and legalized harassment. This should be a month where people are politically organizing on Reddit to defeat hatred. This convenient dead-cat-issue now has stolen all the protest oxygen.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand, and to be frank, I get enough LGBTQ propaganda firehosed at me every other which way, thank you very much.
After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.
---
I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat.
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat.
---
I’m curious what the threat here is. Is the implication that they can pay 10 Million and he shuts down the app quiet or he shuts the app down revealing the cost of the API?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but reddit is trying to do an IPO soon and this guy is projecting a lot of uncertainty about their business. He's offering to stop that if he gets paid off.
(for the record, I almost feel like he's in the right to do so. Still weird how this is being presented)
He jokingly offered that the whole situation can easily be solved — he shuts down/sells his app for half of the “lost” money reddit would make were Apollo’s users using the official app. Win-win for both sides. The other side of the phone call misinterpreted a “quiet down” expression, which was used for the API calls from Apollo servers (serving which costs Reddit money).
It's not extortion -- the whole point of the joke is that the pricing is so ridiculous that it would be a massive discount to Reddit if they just bought his app for $10 million.
The implication is they buy the app and do what they like with it.
The alternative is that he has no choice but to shut down the app, given that they've announced what the price will be 30 days before it's introduction. Even if he'd said nothing there would have been a shitstorm; the timing would be obvious.
Reasonable notice of the price increase would have given 3rd party developers time to monetise and meet the new costs. A more reasonable price could have been borne by 3rd party apps with very little fuss. Making API access a premium Reddit feature would have put even more money in Reddit's pocket. Buying out the 3rd party apps would have been unpopular but would give Reddit the appearance of being less incompetent, underhanded, and duplicitous.
Instead, Reddit made literally the worst possible choice in this situation: alienating their users and the moderators that do most of the work on the platform.
> It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.
And it’s even more amazing when people think they are smarter “than the average” and go the exact opposite way just because, failing a proper evaluation.
The call wasn't with Steve, and it was clear to me listening that he wasn't making a threat at all. He was talking about the API chatter, it was obvious to me.
Same, while it's blatantly clear that Reddit is trying to kill 3rd party apps, I don't get the sentiment that this is being misrepresented at all. The audio gives me a very strong "would be a shame if someone would stir up trouble, $10M can make it all disappear" vibe, just as how the CEO interpreted it.
It’s absolutely not that, not from a hundred miles. The guy was jokingly telling that if the free usage of reddit’s apis cost them $20million bucks in a year, than for half of that he can “quit down” the API calls by shutting down the app, letting the users back to the main site where they could generate that opportunity cost.
I think that interpretation is incorrect and based on Christian's attitude towards the whole thing. More likely it's projection on the part of Reddit's CEO.
In the most charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he spoke in a way that was misinterpreted, conclusively clarified it at the end of the call, both parties shared an apology for the misunderstanding, and then Steve made public comments of the original misinterpretation only (with an editorialized paraphrase).
In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.
I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.
Great charitable interpretations! I wish you had done this impartially for both parties, but no worries! Now, let's look at the situation realistically. Let's say that instead of Steve's side asking for clarifications, he had agreed to pay Christian $10M when he said "I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We're good. That's mostly a joke." Would Christian then say, "Oh no, I was merely making a joke," or would he accept the offer?
And do you think if Steve had made this offer, would we have even heard a second of this recording?
I mean, come on guys. He literally said "I can make it easy on you," named a price, and then clarified that he was mostly joking.
edit: Thank you for catching that! I've now changed "Steve" with "Steve's side."
You are misinterpreting the whole situation. The price/selling is not even the “misunderstandable” part — there is no evil in telling a company that they could earn back half of their “lost” opportunity cost by buying out Christian’s app. It was quite clearly a joke (that didn’t land), but what exactly is evil about that, besides possibly Apollo’s community’s hurt feelings?
The misinterpretation came from the ‘quieting down’ expression, which referred to the API usage (I think quite obviously).
>I wish you had done this impartially for both parties
instead of your thought experiment, I'd request you just pose your impartial take on the most charitable view for Steve and explain why in that view it was a reasonable act of good leadership for him to make these comments. Otherwise I don't think we're really talking about the same thing.
You've quoted the transcript elsewhere for people to "decide for themselves" and I'm not sure how you could be convinced we all did in fact read it and already did, and just don't agree with you.
Well, I don't agree with myself too anymore! I stand correct, and I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.
Hey, for what it's worth I think it was valuable to take a critical look at the situation and where the real wrongdoing vs internet outrage snowball lies. And I think with this outcome I've experienced a civil and rewarding discussion of alternating viewpoints that is delightfully un-reddit!
I actually think the most charitable position doesn't require either one to have any negative intentions. This is quite possibly a very simple explanation: It is possible to apologize in the face of feeling threatened, even if you are not in fact under any threat, and then later reconcile one's feelings of being threatened in a space where they feel safer.
There's a common error where, because one believes they have been aggressed upon, they can behave as if they actually have been aggrieved without actually examining realistic positions of actual evidence. I've seen this sort of thing happen in a variety of circumstances. Whether or not the Apollo developer intended to threaten or not doesn't actually change the behavior of the person who took whatever was said as a threat, and acting in a reconciliatory manner when one feels threatened is actually a very reasonable thing to do.
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call...
You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.
If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.
And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.
Right, but the original statement that was meant to be the "threat" was "If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months." where the wording lines up with "...it's quite loud in terms of its API usage".
From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."
That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.
I think, for one, it is important to note that Christian doesn't say "go quiet". He said "quiet down", and those carry different interpretable implications regardless of context (the latter having much less potential implied threat imo).
Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.
I strongly disagree. First of all, in normal situations, you can't "threaten" a billion dollar company as an individual. The power balance there is so asymmetrical that any logical person's first thought shouldn't be "the individual has threatened the billion dollar company". Sure there might be exceptions, whistle blowing, etc. but overwhelmingly, this rule holds.
It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.
The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.
To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.
I believe what's happening here is that Reddit leadership feels like they've been threatened, and are acting accordingly without seriously considering the actual power imbalance. People under privilege rarely, if ever, actually consider their relative power when disagreeing with people in less power than them and have exaggerated responses when people in less power than them try to gain any leverage, such as an app developer trying to negotiate with the platform the app runs on. You can also observe this when people get very upset about $perceived_thing_that_people_less_well_off_than_them_get. I'd list exact examples but I fear I'd distract with people getting angry, lol.
> But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API.
They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.
>Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually,
At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.
It's the same as people always saying "The winners write the history" while most of what the public took as gospel about Nazi Germany came from the very people who ran it, like autobiographies and memoirs from literal Nazi military higher ups.
The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.
> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
I listened to the audio as well. Can you please explain how you think Spez interpreted the threat?
He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media? Slander him? Break his legs? Murder him?
>He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media?
Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
Except thats not at all what he said. The noise referred to the amount of API "noise" he generates. Which reddit likes to pretend is costing them millions.
It’s 140% clear from both the audio and the transcript that this whole buyout thing is a failed to land joke. And it is not even a problematic thing! Why would offering to sell their own app be a negative? The negative, threat part is from a misunderstood expression of “quiet down”, which was meant about the API calls.
But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!
I haven't listened to the audio recording per se but that was my understanding, too, by reading this guy's written description of what happened.
Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
> That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
Days afterward, spez got on a conference call and falsely claimed that Christian was blackmailing him. An employee of Reddit itself affirmed that he said it in a summary of the call they posted to a (private) sub of high-level moderators, replicated here:
I am not a native speaker but I first read the transcript and then listened to the audio. It sounds like a Good Fellas dialogue. To my non-businesses ears you don't propose a $10m deal for things to go quietly, even in terms of API usage. It makes no sense. I don't see where's the leverage in that unless quiet refer to "no fuss from me" because Reddit could legally just close the API without paying the dev. If Reddit were to give even a dollar to the dev for Apolo to slowly go away and with the promise the dev wouldn't make a fuss about it that would be extortion right ?
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
To me, as a native speaker, it sounds like it was a serious offer but he didn't know how else to bring it up. Which I don't blame him. And I think he knew what the Reddit community response was going to be like and he sure as hell worded his original post that started this off really well to make sure the reddit community went nuts.
For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.
I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.
>It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie
Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response
This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)
> reasonably sized and loud portion of the community
He also spearheaded entirely killing off reasonably sized and loud portions of the community - love them or hate them, r/The_Donald was a massive, advertisable bloc of users.
What are you talking about? It was a large, vibrant, and rapidly growing community of Trump supporters. Funnest subreddit around before it was banned on completely laughable charge of targeting police. Spez did that.
Turns out a large majority of Americans are uneducated white men that tend to right side political ideals.... and for good or bad Reddit decided not to deal with them.
Turns out a large majority of Americans are uneducated white men that tend to right side political ideals
Uh, no. Turns out that there's a noticeable percentage of Americans who are white men for whom education is apparently not relevant, but they're far from a majority - they're just obnoxiously loud and in your face.
And I'm not going to say that they're dumb, but it's undeniable that approximately half of people in the USA are of below-average intelligence.
Reminds me of a scary quote I read somewhere (I'll put it in terms of my country):
Think of the average Mexican, the most average you can picture. Now think that half of the population is WORSE than that (in terms of education, culture and "dont give a shit about you")
Its frankly scary to realize the situation of at least half of the world.
Hot take: A high school diploma is no longer enough to be considered "Educated" and should rather be considered a bare minimum to do the most basic things in life.
A year of high school history about how the south actually were totally the good guys with slavery and it wasn't that bad has turned out to not be the wonderful enlightenment we should strive for.
"Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?"
I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.
> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.
I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.
I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.
>I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.
Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that.
I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with.
likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.
> Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value?
Not against a private company, no. Reddit is still owned by Conde-Nast, I believe. What to do with it is up to them.
Also in general *employees* don't bring shareholder lawsuits. Even if you own significant stock, getting fired for suing your boss is usually a losing proposition.
They can definitely be nerfed. Go private and no one gets invited. They can also block any new content except if on a post approved list, which could be as few as the mods. Each in effect would kill a sub.
Folks - if you want Apollo to survive, go make it known you are willing to pay $5 a month for access.
I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.
It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?
How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn't seem possible.
Did you read the thread? It includes a section about increasing the cost and how it wouldn't really do much.
> Why not just increase the price of Apollo?
> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.
> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.
> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
Apollo made business decisions, that turned out to be very short sighted. Apollo sold access to someone else's system, for next to nothing, and now is caught having to pay for that access like any reasonable business would expect.
We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.
Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.
This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.
The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you.
Nobody really cares about your opinion on him or a monthly subscription; he explicitly said it's not going to happen and at the end of the day that's his decision to make, not yours.
He doesn't even need to give a reason for shutting down. It's his personal project to manage and he's the only one who's ever worked on it.
It's also clear you haven't read the article, because he explicitly calls out a bunch of criticisms you have of him directly.
> Isn't this your fault for building a service reliant on someone else?
> To a certain extent, yes. However, I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I've made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."
> Another portion of the call:
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023. Me: "Fair enough." Reddit: "And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way."
> Your initial post in April sounded quite optimistic. Are you dumb?
> In hindsight, kinda yeah. Many of the other developers and folks I talked to were much less optimistic than I was, but I legitimately had great interactions with Reddit for many years prior to last week (they were kind, communicative, gave me heads up of changes), so when they said they were aiming to have pricing that would be fair and based in reality, I honestly believed them. That was foolish of me in hindsight, and maybe could have had a different outcome if I was more aggressive in the beginning. Sorry. /canadian
> (And to be clear, they did indeed say this. They used the word "substantive" and I wanted to make sure we had the same definition of something "having a firm basis in reality and therefore important, meaningful, or considerable")
> > Reddit: "That's exactly right. And I think, thankfully, the word is exactly the right one. It's going to have a firm basis in reality. I also just looked it up. We're going to try to be as transparent as we can."
Reading this with 15 years of corporate experience the developer was at best naive. In corporate speak Reddit is completely consistent in their actions and words. It's a crappy situation and I'm sure the developer is a great person and I agree Reddit did them dirty but also that's how these things work. You don't take dependencies on third parties without a lawyer and a contract.
> There's not gonna be any change on it.
Nobody can make this promise, those are just words to make you feel good.
> There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
Plans can be made quickly. Action can be taken without a plan. What is the guarantee on lead time?
> And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way.
Define improvement. Improved for who?
> It's going to have a firm basis in reality.
I have no doubt that Reddit based the API pricing on them making money on it. We can debate if they got it right.
> We're going to try to be as transparent as we can.
Try is a weasel word, this sentence is meaningless. Zero transparency can be provided and still meet the standard of being "as transparent as possible". "Try" here even gives them the opportunity to be less transparent than possible. The Glomar defense ("We can neither confirm nor deny") is "as transparent as possible" and actually meets a higher standard than Reddit promised here because the CIA didn't just "try", they successfully provided the most possible transparency (almost none).
I'm just going to leave this first sentence from my comment here; it very much applies to you as well.
> I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you.
Y'all need to find a better hobby. As per his own words, he also clearly realizes that in hindsight he should have been more pessimistic. But that's all moot now. The past is in the past. Pointing it out is not going to do anything.
I'm not harping on the developer. I'm using this opportunity to explain how communication with corporations can be confusing. The developer clearly knows they made mistakes and is doing the best they can. They did a great job of tracking the conversations and keeping the receipts, which is important in these situations, but isn't enough to save the app.
> We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them.
Reddit could simply treat them reasonably and things would be fine. There's no need for favoritism, they just need to stop being actively harmful. And part of that is the fees (they're not reasonable).
I have real sympathy for the developer of Apollo; at the same time it was such a huge and obvious risk to stake your entire business on the whims of another that I find it difficult to be 100% sympathetic.
It's like, I know this funded company that's doing a lot of work using intel SGX, if intel kill it, about 80 people lose the jobs and several million in VC goes up in smoke. It's insane to me that people are building businesses that can be killed by 3rd parties that they have no hope of influencing, and have no contracts with.
Another chapter of the internet drama concludes, I suppose. I wish them all the best and I'll be curious to see if reddit survives.
it was such a huge and obvious risk to stake your entire business on the whims of another
How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? Or a business having to renew their contract with the power company?
First being Reddit wouldn't have suddenly needed to stop supporting 3rd party apps for free - apps that only cost Reddit money and generate no income. If the API made Reddit money, instead of costing them money, there would be no need for a sudden change. The "suddenness" of this change is due, in no small part, to the cost of supporting basically free-loading 3rd party apps that consume resources but offer nothing in exchange.
Secondly, Apollo would have formed a business model that supported paying for API access, be it monthly subscriptions, freemium, etc. The current model of pay-once-use-forever is simply unsustainable (on an obvious level) - and the $12.99 annual subscription equally so. The Apollo model, as it was, required free API access.
Even if Apollo had been paying for API access all along, and Reddit decided to suddenly hike the prices - Apollo would have been in a better position to raise their own prices accordingly, and would have had a userbase more accepting of paying.
Paying for API access also compels the business to be more efficient in their calls. As it was, there was little-to-no incentive to operate large content caching on your own servers/services, etc. I have seen, but do not know their credibility, that Apollo was not very efficient in it's API calls and essentially hammered the API far more than was necessary. If you're not paying for it, why would you bother designing a more efficient system?
The API fees were inevitable. More are coming - be sure of that, as corporations tighten their figurative belts and look for ways to stop bleeding money.
The new thread, with the backend dump indicates it polled reddit every 6 seconds per user for new messages.
Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications...
$12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low.
$12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.
Specifically, the $12.99/year model is floating a ton of free users, in addition to paying for server resource usage. None of that $12.99 currently was allocated to paying Reddit, and we know Apollo calculated an approximate cost of $2.50 per user per month with the new API fees.
This $2.50 fee seems to align costs with what we can reasonably expect Reddit to earn per user on their platform. Reddit prices Premium membership at $5.99 monthly, which among other benefits removes all ads. $5.99 likely indicates a $2-3 profit when all ads are removed but user engagement remains constant.
The typical mildly engaged Reddit users probably easily spends an hour a day looking at ads via the app - so while the math may be fuzzy, it seems like Reddit possibly based their API pricing off something like this.
At a minimum, that is $2.50 x 12 = $30 of cost annually per user. This means all users need to pay Apollo $30 a year to break even on just Reddit fees, or some subset of users needs to pay a lot more than $30 a year to float a bunch of free users. Apollo has other expenses too (labor, servers, etc.).
Even if the API fees were reduced 80% down to $0.50 per user per month, that's still $6 annually per user - and Apollo has a lot of free users.
All of this is to say, the $12.99/year membership for Apollo was never going to work with any API fees.
Apollo seemed willing to make $12.99/year mandatory, pay some to Reddit, and cut the free users. That would have worked if Reddit started charging fees that were in line with either imgur's prices or their existing revenue numbers or a small multiple of them. Which is a range between 50 cents a year and 6 dollars a year.
I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.
These things are different though, we must admit. Imgur used to be much bigger, but today hardly pulls the same audience volume that Reddit or Twitter do, for instance. I don't think Imgur could get away with API pricing like Twitter is, and Reddit will soon be.
> I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.
Given the number of ads you see while browsing via the official app, I would peg it around $2 per user per month (which mostly aligns with my previous statements and estimates, as well as with API pricing), for someone that uses Reddit for 1-2 hours daily. I suspect, without evidence and can be wrong, that 1-2 hours daily is typical for a mildly engaged Reddit user.
Apollo doesn't need to drop free users - they need to get revenue from them. If not directly, then via ads. Although that seems antithetical to what Apollo was trying to create... but reality has come knocking.
> To ensure developers have the tools and information they need to continue to use Reddit safely, protect our users’ privacy and security, and adhere to local regulations, we’re making updates to the ways some can access the Reddit Data API:
> We are introducing a new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.
How, exactly, would you expect someone to change their pricing model when they don’t know what the prices would be?
The prices themselves were announced May 30th. I guess if you’re feeling generous, that would be 32 days notice.
He had notice there would be a change and was explicitly told:
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
There is absolutely no actionable information there, and everything they said indicated that it wouldn’t be an unreasonable change.
They were supposed to have all of the billing framework figured out for monthly subscription model. The exact pricing could have been a variable set when the changes pushed into production.
30 days is ample notice to Apollo's users.
Apollo has had since April to figure out how to make a monthly subscription work, on a technical level. Now... having done nothing smart in the meantime, are left with very little time to make the changes. That is 100% on Apollo.
You shift the blame like there’s no tomorrow. At this point you either work for them, or are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to defend them. That’s the only reasonable explanation for why you’d be pushing the blame so hard.
Even if he had a full system set up in a month and a half (a fairly tight deadline), 32 days is an unreasonably short amount of time to make any sort of material change to your terms, let alone raising the cost exorbitantly.
Hilariously, your first comment wishes people would pledge to pay for Apollo. How we got from there to… this bullshit is beyond me. At least it only took a few hours to show your true colors.
Just because you don't agree with something doesn't make it not true.
Your "32 days" timeline you keep going on about is false no matter what way you look at it.
Apollo has known since April API pricing was coming, and there was no way their existing "pay once, use it forever" or even the $12.99 per year model was going to be sustainable - particularly given how many free users they float monthly.
Not knowing the exact fee in advance is completely irrelevant. The infrastructure needed to be built to support a monthly subscription model, freemium models, or whatever they needed to do to pivot and remain in business.
100% of the reason people use Apollo is because of the data and community Reddit has built. Apollo basically leached off that data, and made a profit while doing so. Any sound business operator would understand and plan for risks that endanger their business. Apollo failed to take action in a timely manner, and failed to mitigate risks to it's business.
Now they're being asked to pay for the API access that makes Apollo's business possible - and even if the API fees were 1/4 of the proposed amount, Apollo was going to need to change their model. That is the point you, and many others seem to be missing - Apollo was not going to survive paying anything for API access - Apollo had no plan.
I cannot make it any more clear - Apollo failed to plan for, and mitigate risks and failed to take corrective actions in time to save their business.
Apollo was run like a hobby side-project - not a business.
> Apollo was run like a hobby side-project - not a business.
Not everything has to be run like a business, you understand that right? You’re acting like this is a big when it’s a feature.
This is a project run by a single person. And has been, since its creation. On purpose. You clearly don’t like that for whatever idiotic reason and your entire premise hinges on the fact that you think every single project in the world needs to be run like a perfect megacorp. Guess what? The world doesn’t work like that.
The rest of your BS has already been debunked. Multiple times. By multiple people. You restating it continues to be just that, regardless how many times you insist on it.
If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your obvious shilling for no discernible reason.
> Not everything has to be run like a business, you understand that right?
Sure, that is reasonable. But then the victim card cannot be played when the business fails to act accordingly, no?
> The rest of your BS has already been debunked
Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.
> If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job.
Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.
> But then the victim card cannot be played when the business fails to act accordingly, no?
What business?
It’s not a fucking business. Stop insisting it is. We literally just went over this.
> Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.
The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death, and that multiple people have pointed out your straight up lies should tell you plenty about who is dealing in “alternative facts”.
> Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.
Yeah that hasn’t seemed to work with you for the past half day, so I don’t understand why you would expect people to keep trying when you clearly don’t bother with things like “taking things to heart”, “having a discussion in good faith”… or really “reading”.
Next time, stick to actual facts and don’t pretend everything is a business that needs to be maximally efficient.
> It’s not a fucking business. Stop insisting it is.
Apollo was/is a business, handles hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and has a huge customer base. We cannot make up definitions and then insist others agree.
> We literally just went over this.
You mean, you did. Sorry to not play into your fantasy universe - out here in the real world, shouting something louder doesn't make it true.
> The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death
You make the mistake of placing stock in whatever button people click on a website - usually based on emotion, but not always. Either way, Internet Points are not real...
You may not like the facts - but that's why they are facts. They do not change even if you hate them. Calm down, re-read the original posts, and then we can discuss things more civilly.
Apparently Apollo has paid subscriptions as a way to finance it.
He would have to turn off the functionality if there is no subscription in order to avoid spending too much for API calls.
Currently this subscription is described as:
> second is Apollo Ultra, the highest tier, which includes everything in Apollo Pro plus additional features. Apollo Ultra is a subscription offering of $1.49 USD per month (or $12.99/year, or a lifetime unlock option is offered in the app) and is a subscription due to options within it having ongoing monthly costs to me, the developer.
The approach would be to do a subscription price change for Apollo Ultra from $1.49/month to $10/month (or whatever the math works out to be - I'm using $10 as an example).
> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.
Everyone who is subscribed would get an alert and no payment would go through.
However, the code is already there to work as a subscription app.
> My last thing I wanted to address, and I might be burying the lede a bit here, is some of misleading, or downright inaccurate and untruthful claims that the admins have made in regards to these changes..
> > Apollo could reduce their cost by 3.5x if they were as efficient as these other 3P apps.
> So I have not dug into Apollo specifically as I didn't have an iOS rooted device handy. BUT, my guess as to the "increased calls" is due to them more frequently checking if a user has messages, and/or less caching of comment sections and more re-pulling them for the latest on navigation. Could Apollo not check for messages as frequently? Sure.. Reddit is Fun used to check for messages on any refresh it seems, and they sometime somewhat recently seem to have changed that and for game day threads which I frequently use it for, I often miss responses to my comments for a very long time because it seems to only do it now every so often.
> ...
> Edit: it was brought to my attention that Apollo does push notifications for messages even when you aren't using the app. This is almost certainly the main discrepancy between it and other apps API usage. And it could have been a back end change then related to the polling for those notifications that caused a reduction in API calls
> 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...
There is nothing foolish about all of this. The developer saw an opportunity based on the platform's free access, and built a business on it. Wise decision. Then the platform is no longer free, so the original business case no longer exists, and they decide to shut down. Another wise decision.
It would be a cheap shot for me to just say "you didn't read the post, did you?" but he does explain it.
Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say.
Sometimes, in the real world, and especially with business - you must swallow your pride to survive another day.
Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.
HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.
No, no you don't. In business relationships are critical. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably one of the people you don't want to do business with. There's a name for people who will do anything for money and those are usually one off transactions. You've had a month of everyone telling this guy he's dumb to trust a 3rd party with your platform and now the 2cynical4u people are saying shut up and be a whore.
I can understand that position in this case but really the idea of passing the cost along to provide a high quality experience seems nice. Like imagine a third party YouTube client where you pay the UI developer to make a UI that doesn't urinate in your breakfast cereal. You get a better experience and they show you the YouTube catalog. Now imagine the same app has access to HBO and Disney and Netflix. I could see paying a premium for that because it separates the platform's incentives from the UI incentives, which removes the dark pattern incentives like promoting the platform's own content.
> I'd much rather fund a decentralized competitor to Reddit
Right - and in 10 years everyone will still be using Reddit, Apollo will just be a distant memory, and nobody will give any thought to the API pricing model.
I can't change the world, but I can control my individual actions. I'll be deleting my Reddit account by the end of the month. Reddit is basically unusable for me from all their default surfaces:
1. Mobile website has large banners to download the app.
2. Mobile app is confusing as shit and tries to mimic TikTok
3. Desktop browsing experience is probably one of the worst apps. I've been using old.reddit and RES to keep it somewhat useable.
Or, this will be Reddit's Digg moment, and the masses will move on from an increasingly user-hostile platform, onto the next new shiny thing, for another cycle.
The post details how yearly subscriptions is one of the major issues, not monthly ones. There is already an update to monthly prices from 1.99 to 5.99, but the people on the yearly subscription locked in 0.99 or something like that.
The 30 day window was not enough time to rectify that and would cost him 50k in the first month to cover the diff. The author suggested he needed at least 3 months to implement changes and switch at least some portion of yearly subscribers to a higher price.
Do you know what happens when you pay blackmail or protection money? It keeps happening, and at more cost each iteration.
If they came out with a reasonable set of conditions to do API access, people would be a lot less upset. But they didn't. And those API fees are guaranteed to go only up, up, and further up.
I'm aware it's a private company. Employees have been issued stock options and/or RSUs as part of their compensation package for years now which would make them shareholders.
> Employees have been issued stock options and/or RSUs as part of their compensation package for years now which would make them shareholders.
Well, no, options don't make them shareholders unless they're exercised. RSUs don't make them shareholders at all, because they're not actually stock (they're stock units).
Reddit's cap table is probably a mess at this point, so I imagine that some current employees are also shareholders, but I don't know if all are, and RSUs don't make them shareholders.
> What? As the grandparent implied, when RSUs vest, they turn into shares of stock, which makes the employee a shareholder.
Most RSUs for private companies (especially those issued by companies as old as Reddit) are double trigger, not single trigger. They don't turn into stock at vesting because that would be a taxable event. They turn into stock after the second trigger, which is a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition).
That money is pennies to reddit. Apollo was around long before the official app and established a majority mobile userbase which you could argue helped build reddit into what it is today. I guarantee you it 100% made reddit more money than it made the developer of the app. Reddit is the bad guy for slandering him and gaslighting their users at every turn, yes.
I was using RiF myself. Reddit is unusable for me without a 3rd party up as their interface is a clusterfuck. I can't complain, I was spending too much time there anyway and it's easy to cut off now.
It is not surprising to me that a product intended for social drama (news) aggregation has basically been steeped in drama its whole life.
Like, I can't remember a time that there _hasn't_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that's for sure.
> I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this.
I'm sure a few will but, I can't name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it's just a job and pays money. And pays well.
Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.
This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.
Their willingness to exempt screen reader / accessibility capable or accessibility focused third party apps from API pricing is good faith IMO.
So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats & Reddit getting the approaches covered, & this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content & in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.
But it has generated enough bad PR and user bleeding to significantly push competitors, which eventually will financially hurt Reddit - or possibly even kill it.
An old-school investor would be fuming right now, but VCs only care about IPOs and they probably blessed this strategy already.
Christian (the maker of Apollo) is from Norway, and if the recordings was done in Norway it’s legal as far as I know.
Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.
It might be legal from Canada's perspective, but that doesn't necessarily mean legal action couldn't be taken in the US. Is there something specific to the law on recording phone calls that makes this not a problem?
How do you launch a lawsuit in your own country against a person that lives, works, and operates in and is a citizen of another country? That would be truly bizarre.
You can sue anyone for anything anywhere, but I cannot imagine the Canadian police being interested in a citizen doing something lawful in Canada if the California (or wherever) cops call to complain be broke a Californian law.
And I can even less imagine a civil action demanding damages or court actions in Canada for doing something legal there. It would be like a Saudi company suing a US driving school that teaches women.
I don't think there's a there there as far as liability or worry. IANAL, of course.
You need an API key to access the reddit API. There's no MITM, it's just that requests made through Apollo are tracked to Apollo. And Apollo will be charged for those requests.
The “free” limits are per-app, not per-user. Any API call using Apollo’s OAuth client_id and client_secret is attributed to Apollo’s limits and then API usage, whether it comes directly from a user’s device or through another server.
Reddit has never provided access to its ads to third-parties, and now third-party apps are banned from showing any advertising at all.
Consider reading TFA. The dev in question was actively lied to by reddit about the availability of the API, and DID have a plan for this scenario, just not one that could be executed in the unreasonably short time frame of the API changes.
Agree with the commenter above, I encourage you to read the original post we are commenting on. All of the calls were recorded and transcribed.
You are right that there is no agreement of course, but the way they're treating the dev sounds, in the most charitable explanation, extremely disorganized and a bit rude.
Realistically this is the right time for the large subreddits to move onto a different platform. The moderators and the community ultimately have the power here, not Reddit. And in the sense that those communities are just forums, good old PHPbb could be the answer.
>I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.
Subreddits are run by volunteer moderators and are entirely at the whim of reddit. If any substantial subreddit tried to shut down or go dark permanently reddit would just remove the moderators responsible.
Reddit has been mired in controversy since day one. It is also regularly touted on HN as THE ONLY trustworthy place on the web to find, for example, honest product reviews; where Google, Amazon, Yelp, Wirecutter etc are hopelessly corrupted. I'm not buying that a brief fit of bad PR will hurt them; and in the meantime Reddit thinks there's 20m of revenue on the table they will recapture when the app goes away.
This has been my Reddit app for ages. I've paid for the Pro version a long time ago. Sad to this go.
I'm not throwing in the towel like most people are, but I will just relegate myself to viewing it only in a desktop browser. We'll see how long old.reddit.com lasts after this
Turned out there was a post, "pinned by moderators", at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.
I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.
I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.
Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!
>I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.
It's my understanding that Apollo users make up a fraction of a percent of active users. Reddit almost certainly doesn't care. Fact is they've taken in over a billion in funding and aren't really returning a profit, charging for API access starts moving them in the right direction though.
> EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
Why would he lose his job? Realistically, it's a smart business move to monetise their users. It's Reddit, them being pissy about having to pay is part of the course. There is a reason they're the lowest valued social media users.
>EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
What would he have a claim for? He wasn't paying for the API. He could pay for the API and continue to operate. You can't sue someone because they stopped letting you use their services for free. You sure can't sue a business for asking your for-profit company to pay expenses.
Realistically, these app users would have made tens if not hundreds of thousands a month if they just added subscription model to their app and only had paying customers. These apps could still exist and be extremely profitable for a one-man apps.
Simple maths $5 a month subscription $2.50 to reddit $1.50 to apple and $1 to the app developer. Say 10% of their users convert which seems very reasonable considering the reception a price increase to $6.99 seem to get on the Apollo subreddit. That would have been $100,000 a month profit. But instead, they shut it down.
I mean, Tortious interference can apply when a service which could reasonably have been expected to charge reasonable amounts suddenly increases their prices for no reason, if it prevents a third party from being able to fulfill a contract. I have no idea if one of this is one of those cases though, I wouldn't expect so but IANAL.
Reddit lawyers would show other social networks such as Twitter and Imgur offical pricing charging more. That would make it a reasonable amount. And there is a reason, they're unprofitable. It really annoys me that people say the price is unreasonable when it's so low that a $5 a month subscription covers it and makes profit.
I am astounded that Steve Huffman would do this. There was the incident ~7 years ago where he silently edited a post that criticized him, but I thought he would have learned from that, and this is so much worse.
Why would he have learned from something that didn't punish him in the slightest? That edit, ellen pao, that time they tried to hire someone who I think was a known pedophile or something... None of it has stopped reddit from bringing cash and clout to the people in charge, and none of it has prevented them from getting to the point where they will most likely walk away after the IPO with plenty of millions of dollars each.
This is the inevitable outcome of a human who has never been told no or punished for their misdeeds. This is what it looks like for a spoiled child to run a company.
> could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook
Tech employees are somewhat notorious for not enforcing their shareholder rights. Most companies, for example, ignore their books & records requirements under Delaware law, or force private sales to occur at terms favourable to management and the Board’s friends.
> voting rights are retained by the founders or someone else
Voting rights are relatively irrelevant for minority holders. It's all the other rights, granted by contract and more importantly law, that tech employees can be generally regarded on to not exercise (or bullied into not exercising by management).
> Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter
Is there a running list of subs (over a certain high number of subscribers, to keep it focused) that aren't in the blackout list? That would be interesting to see. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, at least while the API is still free...
I paid for the app years ago - it was $5 or so and I don't expect to get anything back. That's just how the game works.
I know he also had some sort of monthly subscription - it seemed quite absurd for whatever additional trivial features it provided, but then again there apparently was some sort of Apollo fanboy group who got a lot of excitement out of new app logos, which seemed to be the main updates in the last few years, even at the expense of serious bugs that lingered for months.
I'd assume those subscriptions would just stop being charged going forward. So again, who is getting $250k in refunds?
Furthermore, if he is refunding that much money, I wonder what kind of revenue and profits he was pulling in? I had kind of assumed he was making a very good living (deservedly - it was a good app) - maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but now I'm wondering if he was making a order of magnitude more than that...
> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
> Wow. Because my memory is that you didn't take it as a threat, and you even apologized profusely when you admitted you misheard it.
Reddit leadership desperate to dump the pig on public markets, pulling out all the stops. Literally their only path forward is to find some other greater fool to hold the bags, regardless of what they have to say to make it happen.
Edit: Maybe keep an eye on what they say to catch them performing material securities fraud? Wayback early, wayback often!
Reddit could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat simply by purchasing Apollo and making it available as an official app. So many people would have paid a significant monthly fee for an ad-free, quality mobile reddit experience. But no, they had to go full-on maximalist destroy-all-intruders mode, and now they've got an unnecessary PR nightmare on their hands. From the perspective of fiduciary responsibility, reddit is completely deficient. What a bunch of idiots.
How long do you think Reddit would have kept Apollo ad-free? That would cost them whatever Apollo cost and have the same result. The value proposition of Apollo is that Reddit doesn't own it. They already have a client. It sucks. Why would this be better?
Reddit already offers an ad-free experience for $50 a year with reddit premium. Throw in Apollo with that premium, and you start earning $50 a year from a bunch of users who were previously generating zero revenue through ad views.
Yes, that makes sense. But do you think Reddit would actually do that? Apollo has a better UX. Reddit has proven they don’t want to build a good UX. If they bought Apollo they would only ruin it.
They didn't even need to do that. They could simply have changed the terms so that user-facing clients like apollo either need to show reddit ads, allowing no ads for users of reddit premium. They approve api users anyways, supposedly, so mod tools and the like could be exempt, and they could introduce higher cost efficient bulk export of comments for large scale generative AI machine learning use cases.
Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.
I've always thought about this too but I've heard this is a non starter for advertising companies, most companies want to know exactly where their ads are being served before putting money on the table.
Honestly this is the tipping point for me to just move on. Reddit is an ad-filled cesspool, with a morally bankrupt C-suite. Growing up I actually looked up to this guy. . . how pathetic and sad. Such a fall from grace, and for what?
But HN doesn't have communities. We need something that gives you lightweight bulletin boards (because that's what reddit replaced). I love HN, but it's really just a subreddit with its own website.
Seems like things are currently migrating towards smaller, more closed communities. Things like Discord servers, any of the various services that popped up when Twitter went bad, invite-only chats on any of the various chat services, even web forums are still hanging around. Honestly can't say I'm sad about this transition, I tend to think smaller communities are healthier.
You mean Lemmy in general? Lemmy.ml is just one of many Lemmy servers. Though there's some discussion coming up on how things are going in Lemmy regarding anything surrounding any criticism of China or Russia.
So far, there's been attempts to spin up new servers to mitigate issues on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml while others are looking to Kbin which also federates with Lemmy but uses separate software.
No, but great third party apps for Mastodon definitely keep me using Mastodon more than I was with the official app. I'm sure it's a similar story for many others.
The Apollo app had much better performance than the official Reddit app. However, the design of the app was amateurish and hideous to look at. The official Reddit app is actually designed by designers and it shows.
The Reddit website frequently resets itself back to the feed page when I'm scrolling up/down through posts. That amount of clueless disruption during routine use is a deal breaker for me. Goodbye Reddit.
That’s an opinion that I’m not really sure matters for the conversation at hand. It’s not about if Apollo is good, it’s about how Apollo is being treated.
You are free to use what ever you want, and that’s the point. This removes everything but the Reddit app.
The official Reddit app, at least on Android, is a buggy mess from a UX experience.
- Half the time, clicking on a push notification takes me to the front page instead of the post that was interesting enough to click on. And then the notification is gone, and I can't get to said post easily at that point
- Sometimes, there's two articles that show up on the main screen that I want to read. I have to pick which one I want to read more, because there's a 50/50 shot that when I hit back, I will get a fully refreshed home page instead of being taken back to where it was.
- Overall it feels less natural to navigate through than the Reddit web interface, let alone the 'classic' (old.reddit.com) user interface.
- Probably not related to the design of the mobile app, but the hostile behavior of web reddit on mobile, constantly trying to force me into their subpar mobile app, is also irritating and painful.
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.
Unless there is another job offering with similar compensation/benefits/etc. I'm not sure most employees will be able to do anything. "Leaders" and bold-faced lies are a duo as old as time. Macroeconomic conditions have many chained to their shitty bosses.
Hmm, I think I trust that my CEO isn’t lying to me. It’s just that he isn’t ultimately in control. If he says something and the board changes their minds the day after, he’s stuck.
He’s also got a pretty sweet panic bunker, guns, food, and fuel supplies stashed away so when the division and panic he directly benefits from comes to a flash point he can ride it out safely.
That’s a private sub, but boy I’d love to see that bloodbath of a comment section after Christian released the call recordings.
It is always remarkable to see what an absolute bankruptcy of ethics some corporate leaders are burdened with, and a relief to see the consequences hit them in the face.
>It’s an extraordinary amount of data, and these are for-profit businesses built on our data for free.
No spez you utter cunt. The data is not yours. It's my posts on your website. Your own fucking terms say I grant you a right to copy it, not that it's fucking yours.
I rarely appreciate profanity on HN but in this case I appreciate the candid language. The politeness of the corporate speak BS on the other hand is devastating.
> We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrow
Even funnier to me, there's a not even thinly veiled threat right below it.
>Blackout
> We respect your right to protest – that’s part of democracy.
>This situation is a bit different, with some mods leading the charge, some users pressuring mods. We’re trying to work through all of the unique situations.
>Big picture: We are tolerant, but also a duty to keep Reddit online.
>If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue. That’s a loss for everyone.
AKA: If you protest we will remove you from the mod team for that sub, and force the sub back to public.
Yeah, IIRC r/pics (a "default sub" back when that was still a concept) tried to do a blackout but came back on with similar accusations that the admins intervened.
To be honest it sounded like that to me too. It's very hard to differentiate between some honest clumsy phrasing and fishing for a payout, and the "clarification" doesn't help with that since it could also be an excuse to save face.
Maybe with text snippets, but I don't see how somebody can listen to the conversation and come away with the idea that the dev was blackmailing anyone.
in both the text snippet and the audio it sounds to me like 2 people politely pretending that the offer wasn't made. Notice how the CEO basically immediately cuts off the call after the "clarification"
Okay but what does this even mean in terms of API usage? Why would Reddit buying Apollo "quiet down" its API usage? I accept I may just be missing something here but I don't understand this.
Having just listened, I can understand that misinterpretation!
I can buy that Selig's words may have been intended, at some level, as a jokey hypothetical to draw a point into contrast. That is, he meant it as (fleshed-out sympathetic rewording): "If this really is just about a $20M drain to you, it'd be a dead-simple & efficient solution to pay $10M to make me go away quietly forever. But of course I wouldn't ask for that & you wouldn't do it, thus this isn't really just about solving your $20M/year cost center, but other mutually-agreeable futures."
But Selig's actual wording in the clip is exactly how people coyly/semi-deniably imply that they be handed various kinds of "go-away" or "hush" money. (That includes arrangements that might not technically be "blackmail" as a legal definition, but feel like vernacular 'blackmail' to laypeople or business-negotiators.)
Selig's opening words, of this audio clip, absolutely sound like an actionable offer "pay me this specific cash amount & your troubles – both technical/competitive & in terms of any ruckus I can raise in public – go away." I mean, here's Selig's exact words:
"Uh, hey, I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20M a year, you cut me a check for $10M, and we can both skip off into the sunset. 6 months of use, we're good. That's mostly a joke."
Until "that's mostly a joke", & depending on earlier context/levels-of-mutual-trust, that sounds like a specific offer to do whatever eases things for Reddit in return for $10M cash.
And even after "that's mostly a joke", the 'mostly' leaves open that maybe something of this shape is legitimately in Selig's mind as a resolution.
> Uh, hey, I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20M a year, you cut me a check for $10M, and we can both skip off into the sunset. 6 months of use, we're good.
This is an offer to sell Apollo. The opening stage of a negotiation. There’s nothing wrong with saying this, at all.
That's a possible interpretation. We don't hear the discussion before it. And it's a weird wording to merely offer a sale of assets for Reddit to then manage.
The word choice, to my ears, more implies a "just gimme cash to make me shut up & disappear" attitude, or at least openness to torpedoing every other goal as long as the cash prize is big enough.
I further think Selig's rush to qualify it as "mostly a joke" is evidence that he noticed, in the moment, that what he just said sounded a bit brutally grubby. Maybe by this point he was getting angry his other hints that he mainly wanted an attractive buyout weren't being met by serious offers.
As I mentioned, such a tactic could be far from what the law declares as actionable 'blackmail' but still feel like a tough, "play ball or else" shakedown on the other side of the negotiation – the sort of thing people commonly describe, though somewhat figuratively/hyperbolically, as 'blackmail'.
Is there anything "wrong" with that style of making joking payoff offers to "skip off into the sunset"? Well, in negotiations, as long as you're not breaking the law or sabotaging your longer-run reputation, what's 'right' is largely what gets you what you want, both for now and in enduring relationships.
Did Selig get what he wanted? Does he come off as a desirable & trustworthy counterparty in other future collaborations & negotiations?
I think he's got a legitimate beef with Reddit in many dimensions, but at the same time this audio clip doesn't make him seem super clear & fair in his communications.
The "mostly a joke" bit is him suggesting that while his previous bit was just making a point about the $20m insistence, he'd be open to selling and walking away. He doesn't shut the door on selling it in the linked post either.
It's still very unclear what exactly right it would be buying with that $10 million. Instead of Apollo shutting itself down right it would pay for the privilege of being the one to shut it down? The payment doesn't make any sense and doesn't help Reddit offset the losses in any way.
The Proposal was to have reddit by Apollo and monetize it, all the talk about going quiet doesn't make sense.
Selig's posted audio doesn't vindicate him like he thinks it does. He struggles to speak about what he actually wants and should have hired an attorney (or someone who doesn't clam up and make unfunny "jokes" when nervous) to do the talking for him. I respect what the kid has done, but he's clearly out of his element here and I can totally see how reddit execs took it that way.
Of course it would be on his mind as a resolution. He makes a living building that app. If his expenses are covered for the forseeable future, that’s a mutually beneficial offer. He says it’s mostly a joke because he knows Reddit won’t go for it, even though it would make a lot of sense.
Or because as long as you say 'just joking' after a threat no one can say you threatened them right?
Really a thinly veiled attempt to ask for a buy out. The guy only needs to charge his users 2.50 more to make up for lost ad revenue, but instead he chose to burn down Reddit.
TBH that doesn't sound menacing to me...however you misinterpret it, it feels more like making a deal than blackmailing. Granted, even taking money to let a publicly discussed issue go away is more akin to a settlement.
I'm shocked that people are interpreting this as not fishing for a payoff, honestly. "We can both skip off into the sunset" does not mean "rewrite the app to do fewer API calls", as he tries to claim later in the call. It means it's done, over, everyone is happy. And why would he say "mostly joking" if he actually meant doing fewer API requests? Nothing about this recording or transcript makes me think Selig is an honest person.
I'm sure the price is negotiable. Off the top of my head, the reasons you'd pay any nonzero amount of money for it are:
1. You avoid all of this drama. Christian makes a post that says, "Reddit offered me a lot of money and I said yes because I want to have a lot of money. It's been a pleasure working with them and it's been a pleasure developing Apollo for you. Peace out." Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
2. Reddit could rather enshittify Apollo gradually, and/or fold Apollo's subscription model into Reddit's own model to maintain a premium power-user experience. It is an absurdly well-polished app, even if you added advertisements to it. It is a better user experience if the app gets worse slowly than if it disappears all at once and forces everyone to migrate to a new app. Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
The goal of reddit here is to obviously shut down the app, he was saying "just pay me then" - he's obviously annoyed. Stupid thing for him to say for sure, it shut the "negotiation" down.
I don't understand, what is the threat on Christian's part? His project is being killed, that's not a threat but something that is actually happening. He suggests that they pay him a small fraction of what he has cost them to shut down without compromising the reddit API as a whole. What's the threat, that he keeps operating? That's not an option, they are FORCING him to shut down.
The author doesn't want to look at it this way, but this is a really weird thing to say. My interpretation was that they'd make an offer to sell the app to reddit, but the specific phrasing there really is not that.
edit: I still think it was the wrong way to approach the situation. Consider this from reddit's perspective,
it would only make sense for Reddit to pay for the traffic if they think they would lose it if it Apollo went away, but then it's not opportunity cost.
It doesn't make the change any better of a look for reddit, and you can certainly question whether it's true that Apollo users would just use reddit, but if you accept that then I don't think you can claim the moral high ground if you offer to accept payment to "make it go away". The developer should have approached this from the perspective of the value that Apollo offers users and reddit instead of the cost to make the problem go away. I imagine the dev doesn't accept that Apollo users would just switch over, but they shouldn't have made their statement in those terms then, and I think that was a mistake.
I've listened to the voice call [1] linked in [2] and I interpret it the same way that Reddit staff apparently did -- as a veiled threat.
Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.
I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian's offer is for Apollo to "go away quietly", as in he personally won't make noise about it. I'm not honestly sure that there's another sound way to interpret this.
Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It's not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.
This 'clarification' that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will "go quiet", doesn't make sense, because Reddit doesn't need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.
What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that "Christian will shut down the app and go quietly" is the only answer that makes sense in context.
We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren't necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: "Vote for our initiative or else we'll stop funding you and fund your opposition"? No, almost certainly not. They'd say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.
Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he's offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It's not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. "Buy me out or else I'm going to cause even more public fuss about this". The way that it's communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.
I don't see it that way. That was just a proposed business transaction: reddit pays a fee, and in exchange, the Apollo dev doesn't comment publicly on the API changes. What's the threat, real or implied? The alternative is he goes public, which is only a problem for reddit if they know what they're doing is wrong.
Him going public with... what? The API pricing? This was discussed in similar calls with all third party app devs. The pricing was going to be public anyways
They don't need to buy Apollo for it to shut down, that's the point. Apollo gets shut down with or without the buyout, so what exactly is the $10 million payment securing
So the whole raise-api-cost was in fact intended to just shut these apps down, and isn't to recoup costs, like Reddit is saying?
That means Reddit entered in bad faith - at that point you can't fault Apollo for reacting to that bad faith in any way really, as long as it was legal. You can't be expected to act in good faith if the other party isn't.
So, I still see no blame for Apollo folk (I don't use the app or know who they are before today)
Apps cost them money they could be making in advertising, So they want big money or will cut the apps off. If apps could offer more money than reddit thinks they could make without them, then everyone would be happy, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
What do you think is fair? They dont owe Apollo anything and they dont want anything Apollo has to offer.
If we are being real, Reddit wants Apollo gone. The only definition of fair would be terms both reddit and Apollo mutually agree to, but that isnt going to happen.
Apollo had a good run while it lasted, and I hope the devs walk away with some money to show for it.
Honestly, reddit shouldn't want Apollo gone. They should want Apollo. If a large number of your potential users are going to a different platform it's because yours lacks something. Shutting down some of your competition doesn't change that fact, and those users are still going to be open to bailing for better options.
Why piss off your userbase by trying to force them back to your inferior option when you could just buy the thing they've clearly shown they prefer and give it to them yourself?
>Why piss off your userbase by trying to force them back to your inferior option when you could just buy the thing they've clearly shown they prefer and give it to them yourself?
Because Apollow doesnt bring in the revenue but Reddit's user hostile platform does.
The goal isnt to make the users happy or their preference, it is to make money.
If you run a restruant, and the restruant next door gives food away for free, of course diners will prefer it. The problem comes if the place next door is using your kitchen and supplies. Buying the restruant next door doesn't help your problem.
Not only do the receipts contradict the Reddit CEO, but even if they didn't, the Apollo dev is well within his rights to offer an ultimatum that either Reddit acquires his app, or he shuts it down. If he has enough leverage in that situation for Reddit to feel as if that's "blackmail," then it actually means that Reddit is the one blackmailing him with the pricing changes.
On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it "blackmail" - meaning they're losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can't they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo's costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?
It was certainly telling when Apollo guy offered what seemed like a pretty lighthearted open in a potential negotiation, and reddit claimed this as "blackmail".
When I negotiate the price on a piece of real estate, I often will include things that I want the owner to fix before closing (this is very common). The implication is "fix this or I won't buy the property".
Is that "blackmail"? Apparently according to Spez it is.
It was the "go quiet" part, as in if they don't just buy him out he'll scream and cry to the public so they get really negative publicity on the API updates. To be clear, I don't think that's what he meant, but I think that's what the Reddit person thought was being said.
I know I'm stretching really far with this, but is it at all possible that the mods made that up, or somehow misheard Steve?
Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...
Basically, the whole post hinges on the claim that spez was telling internal employees that Christian was making threats. But neither the calls nor the transcript seems to give any details about what exactly spez said. I'm inclined to take Christian's word, but we should all be aware that we are in fact taking him at his word, rather than the claim being proven.
It seems really hard to believe that spez would apologize for misunderstanding him and then immediately tell employees that he was threatening Reddit. This feels like a misunderstanding rather than malicious intent.
> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
This doesn't sound like a transcript. I don't know what it is, but that's not how anyone in a work call would behave. Supposing Apollo did threaten Reddit, why would spez even mention that to the mods? Something's weird.
> Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...
He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators. He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place. Both are in the OP reddit thread here. Just search for "transcript" in the page.
It's the sort of thing you'd say to mods if you think it will get them off your back.
> He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators.
The part I pasted, right?
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
That's not a transcript. That's a sentence devoid of context. We're now two steps removed -- not only do we need to believe Christian, but Christian needs to believe whatever mod sent that to him. Who's the mod? Why is the mod telling Christian anything? Why was Steve talking to mods about Apollo's threat? None of this makes any sense. I don't think anyone has malicious intent here –– bet you $50 that it turns out to be some weird miscommunication. After all, there's zero benefit for Steve to be doing any of those things, and a whole lot of downside. Ins't a miscomm the more plausible theory?
Ironically, if Christian's claims are unsubstantiated, then he's slandering Steve. But Steve slandering Christian to internal employees is precisely what Christian's so angry about. But why would internal employees break ranks and go tell Christian?
There's something more going on here. I'm not sure what.
> He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place.
That's the point -- all that he's posted is a transcript where Steve says mea culpa. Then he posted some other person's two-sentence "transcript" of Steve badmouthing him. But it's not a transcript; it's weird.
> Me: No, no, I'm sorry. Yeah one more time. I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that's a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too. As is, it's quite difficult.
> Reddit: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think it's… I don't know what you mean by quiet down. I find that to be-
> Me: No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-
> Reddit: I'm going to very straightforward to you too, it sounds like a threat. And I'm just like "Oh interesting". Because one of the things we're trying to do is say "You have been using our API free of cost for many, many years and we have absolutely sanctioned - you have not broken any rules." And now we're changing our perspective for what we're telling you - and I know you disagree with it. That hey, we want to operate on a thing that is financially, you know, footing. And so hopefully you mean something completely different from what I said when you say like "go quietly", I just want to make sure.
> Me: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> Reddit: Oh, like, because you were like, "Hey, if you want this to go away".
> Me: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
> Reddit: Oh, go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry.
> Me: Like it's a very-
> Reddit: Yeah, that's a complete misinterpretation on my end.
> Me: Yeah. No, no, it's all good.
> Reddit: I apologize. I apologize immediately.
> Me: No, no, no, it's all good.
> Reddit: Because what we're hearing in some conversations is folks are, you know, like in other- making threats, and we're like "Hey, that's not a conversation that we want to have". So I immediately apologize.
> Me: Oh, no, no, it's all good. I'm sorry if it sounded like that.
I am more confused after reading that than I was before. Why is Reddit apologizing? What does “go quiet” mean here and why aren’t they speaking more plainly?
There's an actual mp4 recording of the conversation on the phone call which lasts about 3 minutes. Maybe "He posted a transcript" should have stated "He posted a call recording" instead, but it's all out there now.
I'm not talking about the call. The call proves nothing. In fact, it proves that Steve is behaving reasonably -- he realized his mistake, then apologized.
I'm talking about after the call, which is what the central claim of the post hinges on. The claim is that Steve went to internal employees and said that Christian was threatening Reddit. Where's that transcript? There's only two sentences, and those two sentences came from some third party moderator that wasn't even introduced in the story.
Everyone is being hypnotized by the audio recording. But the audio recording doesn't say anything about Steve. The only one who said anything about Steve was the unnamed moderator, which we get no info about beyond two very weird sentences.
That was posted 20 hours ago. And yeah, if I were Christian and saw that, I'd probably go nuclear too.
I thought Steve was badmouthing Apollo behind closed doors, and then someone behind those doors went to Christian. But that's not what happened. Steve publicly accused Christian of threatening Reddit – a council meeting counts as public.
Steve, come on. Maybe Apollo shuts down, maybe you figure something out, but this whole thing becomes a lot easier to judge as an outsider if one group starts throwing mud like this. You should know better.
They probably thought it'll be a "he said/she said" situation and people will err on the side of the big co vs. the little guy. It's extremely funny that the conversation was recorded, so satisfying to catch them in a lie so open-faced...
It sounds to me like the conversation went in a way that it could be interpreted as a threat.
This is from the Apollo developer's own telling of the story:
> As said, a common suggestion across the many threads on this topic was "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal!
If someone said that to me, i.e. "hey, just give me $10 million and I'll stop making things difficult for you," I would interpret that as a threat, even if they denied that it was.
I can only surmise from all the posts and interviews that Christian has done post that call but it simply seems like he tried calling their bluff on the $20 million number and/or was fishing for a buyout. He found the number ridiculous, the reddit admin told him that this number wasn't server costs but opportunity costs for lost revenue, Christian decided to poke the bear and ask if instead of him paying them 20 million dollars a year, they could buy him for 6 months of that "lost revenue" and then make that revenue for themselves. He was offering to be acquihired and was simultaneously calling their bluff about the API pricing
The reddit person seems to have thought that Christian was threatening them in some way??? I genuinely don't know what Christian could even have threatened them with. It seems to me they didn't understand the power dynamic at all of a small solo app developer talking to a massive corporation. Maybe they thought he was threatening simply shut his app down for that amount without telling anyone which might have avoided this ruckus? I'm sorry but I genuinely cannot fathom what they thought was going on
1 and 2 are different in that clearly the admin thought Christian was making a threat to their business whereas he was merely calling their bluff and possibly opening himself to business negotiations if reddit actually thought his app was worth that much. Through all this it feels like Christian did not communicate what he wanted effectively (though this seems to have been a throwaway line in a much longer call that got misconstrued gravely) and the admin was simply not equipped at all to handle negotiations
That seems like a fair read. Maybe I would restate as:
Reddit: If we had all Apollo's users, and showed them ads, we could make $20M/year more than we are making now.
What Christian meant to say: Ok, if that's really true, how about you buy my app and all my users for $10M? Then you can show them all the ads you want. If what you say is true, that's quite a deal for you. But my real point is that I don't believe your $20M number.
What Reddit heard: If you pay me $10M, you can have my app and all my users and I will stop making a fuss. Otherwise, I will badmouth you to my users and the press, encourage boycotts, and otherwise try to force your hand.
This read mostly makes sense to me. The only part I don't get is the part of the call where Christian says:
> I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
If Christian's intention was to sell the app and all its users to Reddit, then the load on the API wouldn't change, the only thing that would change is that Reddit would own it and the users would also see ads. So Apollo wouldn't "go quiet" under this scenario, and I don't understand the comment.
For some reason, in all their communication, the reddit admins have been VERY insistent that his app is one of the largest users of the API and that he needs to "optimise". My read is basically that if he sold the app, the external API calls all become internal API calls, they are free to either let the app work but with their own internal APIs or kill the app completely. It would be out of his hands and the issue of the volume of APIs being invoked would quiet down. Not sure if I'm being too charitable but from all the communication from both sides, this is what I'm surmising
You might be prone to perceiving threats where there aren't any then. The only threat here was reddit's potential loss in revenue - offering to let himself be bought out for half of what they would supposedly "lose" in a year is extremely generous.
Of course, this is all a deliberate reframing by reddit. Reddit wasn't going to "lose" anything so much as "not get".
Framing it as "give me money and I'll stop making things difficult for you" is disingenuous. The proper framing was "buy the app out and the API usage, and thus the $20mm/year in costs, will stop, or whatever you want to do with the product at that point".
Reddit said the majority of the lost revenue was in opportunity cost (money they could have made from those users if they were using the official app), not the literal cost of maintaining the API. So the idea is that they would buy the app, then could serve ads to those users (or however else they monetize users on the official app) and recoup the opportunity cost.
Apollo is fully allowed to make things difficult by complaining on social media that he thinks the pricing is unfair. What is illegal or even unethical about that?
To be fair, buying 3rd party apps out makes absolutely zero sense when they can just ban them and improve their own client if that aligns with their business priorities.
I stopped reading at that point. I probably would have laughed at the suggestion instead of taking it as blackmail though.
Well a) the Apollo team is two people and b) why would they? Reddit’s priority is monetization. Acquiring/hiring the Apollo team doesn’t help that goal.
Monetization and growth go hand-in-hand. I'm an old.reddit.com user (even on MoWeb, I know I'm a psycho), but the way people talk about Apollo is like it's absolutely superior to the current Reddit app. If I were Reddit, and my users loved this third-party product _so much_, I would at least explore promoting Apollo to a first-class interface for browsing Reddit.
For the scale of Reddit as a company, it's likely a trivial deal; whereas the cross-pollination of ideas and UI/UX learnings could easily be worth more than the cost of collaborating.
It is the vastly superior app. That said, Reddit thinks it can get significantly more profit per user itself or it wouldn't be pricing the API so high Apollo had to shut down. I think they are laughably wrong, but they clearly don't see it as worthwhile vs whatever they are planning.
Apollo saved my Reddit usage years ago. It has too many nice to have features to list. I suppose off to Discord I go. Most subreddits have a discord parallel. More than ever it feels like all of the major platforms are ripe for disruption. They are filled with aggressive hostile ads, algorithms set to engagement, and closed experiences.
Just seems like that network effect is too powerful. Look at all the attempts to create a new Twitter (or Reddit for that matter) over the past couple years.
I suspect that these efforts keep failing in part because people never needed Twitter and Reddit in the first place. Leaving one social network doesn't imply that a person will join another. I didn't open accounts on similar platforms after leaving Reddit, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter over the years.
Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.
If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.
The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?
What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.
I left facebook towards the end of 2016, for exactly the reason you might think. I used Twitter for a while before and after that as a kind of methadone, and even stipulating that I was not looking for connection to friends and family, the interactions I had on Twitter in 2017 were, by and large, incredibly low-quality, and I was only interacting with people who ideologically agreed with me, the trolls never reached me, or if they did they were in stealth mode and ineffective.
In retrospect, some of the accounts might have been intended to make the left look extra ridiculous, not sure, but I don't really believe that's true, I've seen people chase enough bad ideas en masse now that I think these were well-meaning people who believed that by participating in this infernal attention mill, they were doing things that would change the world for the better.
Reddit has likewise never been even mediocre at what it's purporting to be, these are all just what happens when people approach the internet, which is one thing, as though it was a super cool television, which is a whole other thing. The illusion of participation and having a voice is really what people are buying with all their attention, because actually having a voice on the actual internet means knowing html at a minimum. Not actually a tall order for anyone who has a couple days and a willingness to do a bit of mental labour, but why bother when you can just post on whichever corporate daemon you favour.
The weirdest thing of all to me, I don't even know how I found this place but it's got some of the best interactions I've had since Usenet died, and I didn't know know what ycombinator was or why it wasn't called hackernews.net or whatever. To learn just this week that the platform is just a service operated by the people behind quite a lot of this VC fuckery, I'm still integrating it, but it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts.
Anyways didn't come to talk about that, came to say, been using Mastodon the last month or so, and I am also having pretty high quality interactions there. Nothing remotely like the idiocy I encountered daily in my Twitter feed. Occasionally a thing that I don't care for, like, I really don't need all the furry porn, holy crap are there ever a lot of very dedicated people servicing the furry market and I'm gonna be looking into that cause I know how to make tails move. But that filters out easy.
I'm on the main instance and I'm looking around at others while I decide whether to just self-host, but I enjoy the scroll with the accounts and hashtags I follow, the quality ranges from boring to amazing, very little annoying, trollish, spammy, Mindset-infected trash comes through my feed, and like I said, the only heavy filtering I've done is the porn.
Best part: I loved Facebook when I first joined and when I started to get discontented was when the default feed stopped being "what you follow in the order they post," and that has never been around since, except notably on reddit I suppose. Nothing wrong with having an algo feed available for discovery, and Mastodon has that, but your feed is just what you follow in the order they post as a default. So you scroll down till you realize you've seen it already, and you know you've seen it all for now and you move on. There is no machine trying to hold your attention, there is just what you asked for. What a concept.
>it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts
The tech genius hobos, burnouts, and weirdos come here to rub elbows with the Patagucci vest crowd. The guy who manages this place ("dang") seems to tolerate us unwashed types, as long as we don't post polemics. You're not necessarily in the wrong place, but I can see how you might feel outnumbered.
Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.
Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.
There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.
Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.
Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.
>So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?
It's because of misaligned incentives.
Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.
First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.
First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.
Furthermore, having third party apps in directly against the business model, which seeks total control of the user's attention to deliver ads and optimize for profits. They are hoping to bump their valuations up before the IPO by this.
1. "better is subjective" and what reddit's native app is trying to do is "better" for reddit's bottom line.
2. more importantly, there is a case of "good enough". As I'm sure we've seen over the history of the internet, the "better product" doesn't always win. this is 1000x truer for social media. Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives. it lets you scroll, look at pretty pictures, and maybe up/down vote quickly. Anything else to that user is fluff. You can skimp out on a lot of features, even core ones, if those 3 parts are good enough.
Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives.
The problem with that, if it's true, is that those people are less likely to be the content creators and more likely to be people who come to read what the 'serious' Reddit users post. Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.
Ultimately, Reddit's main work is to serve a small core group of people who post new content, and that content is what draws the rest of the users. They'll need those users to be happy in the first party app. That might be the case already. If it isn't, Reddit are taking a huge risk.
>Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.
I agree. I guess the gamble here (that historically, usually pays off) is that the casual userbase size is good enough to keep the power users around, who ultimately want visibility. That's the hardest part of the modern internet and why social media survive well past what would be downfalls for any other product.
I'm not going to say Reddit is too big to fail, but I don't think reddit's death will be by a thousand paper cuts. it will heal with new mods as fast as the old ones leave. Whether it whither and rots away over the years with that new modbase is the big question mark.
Reddit largely leeches anyways. I’m not exactly sure why (I suspect the sorting algorithm and the quick turnover of content), but its community is shockingly unproductive in terms of content creation. The only thing it does somewhat well is aggregation. So no, I don’t think they have much to fear in that regard.
They are risking the relationship to their army of unpaid cops though. These people are absolutely crucial for maintaining the gentrification of that space. Without them, all the hard work to slowly change the tone towards an ad-friendly and ideologically compliant tune is going to be lost. It is not unlikely, but by no means guaranteed that they can recruit another batch of people wohnst willing to do this for free after ruining the relationship with those who got invested during a time when the company was masquerading itself as a community.
Not surprising at all. Reddit's culture is vehemently against original creation and deftly afraid of any hint of self-promotion. The users claim to be tired of all the same reposts but shun 99% of attempts for people to share originality.
> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.
This seems like half the argument. The other half of the argument is that you could build a federated system of similar efficiency where everybody notifies/queries a central hub decided by convention.
The important-ish distinction is that you don't need as many resources (for polling) if you can generate enough trust that ~everyone is willing to push to you.
(I don't want to get up my own ass here, so to my mind the only thing that matters about "having enough resources to make a better product" is that you have all the content, presumably by crawling the entire network on shorter intervals than anyone else.)
> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.
I wouldn't phrase it like that.
I'd say 'The anti-federation reality has always been that centralized entities have the authority to more quickly evolve their product.'
Whereas federated models have always had a terrible time upgrading standards in a timely manner, even when upgrades are obviously needed.
However, products typically exist in distinct phrases -- rapid growth/evolution is eventually followed by stability/maturity.
Once the product switches to that latter mode, the evolutionary speed benefits of centralization dull.
Obvious example: AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ's initial popularity... before multi-client Trillian et al. became preferable... because the limited intersection feature set it supported already covered everything everyone wanted to do via IMs.
Reddit reached feature completion and maturity a while ago, which made it ripe for disruption via a decentralized clone.
However, they're just realizing the emperor has no clothes and their only remaining moat is their existing users, and users are a fickle moat.
My feelings exactly. We're all stuck with the official Reddit and Twitter clients now. They're not even good. We know they're not good, but they're now the only place to experience Reddit and Twitter. It's like enterprise software for a whole social network.
I wish the Twitter client were half as good as Apollo. I really miss the ability to navigate the stack by swiping as intuitively as I can with Apollo. In Twitter the best I can hope for is a stack of depth two.
Twitter pushed me onto Mastodon a while back and i imagine Reddit will do the same. Funny enough, i have exactly one of the clients mentioned in this discussion - Tweetbot - on Mastodon. Ie the app made by the same devs.
I just don't think I'll use Reddit anymore. It was a nice place to catch up with my interests but the only way in which I used it was via Apollo. The one thing that made Reddit unique compared to all its competitors was its developer community and they have deliberately torpedoed it.
All good things have to end but this was avoidable.
Indeed. And it even has the same features (centralized, ultimately beholden to commercial interests) that destroyed Reddit!
But don't worry, that's not going to happen here. You don't need a decentralized non-profit community, trust me. It's going to work out this time. Really.
I'm not sure if you're being entirely serious but I disagree. HN is special because while it's a popular (relatively speaking) social media site, it's also run by a company that isn't in the social media business. YC is not concerned with how to make HN revenue generating, they just want to push people to where the real money is made for them: their startup accelerator.
With that said it's in YC's best interest to keep users happy, only change what is requested and generally keep the status quo. Unfortunately for a company like Reddit that is a social media site and has to make money with their social media product, keeping users happy at all costs is not in their best interest (though that has yet to be seen).
Yeah it's a bizarre claim. I've described HN as a single, usually really good, subreddit before but it's absolutely not a replacement for the entire site.
I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more:
Not commenting on your app, but I think the real reason mobile clients are needed for Reddit is that they intentionally try to break the mobile web experience to force their app down your throat. In contrast, HN.. doesn't. The mobile website is pleasant to use, if you are okay with the rather small text buttons.
That's a perfectly fair point. I personally think HN is one of the best designed sites out there. Being extremely minimal is one of the best designs. I hope that never changes.
I built HACK specifically to be able to be notified when people reply to me. That's one of my selling points.
Commenting this from HACK. The default HN interface does have problems. The buttons are indeed too small. The comments indentation is a little too small. Lack of notifications. A separate page on clicking reply, etc.
I was spoiled by Apollo for Reddit and HACK has done the same thing for HN. Thank you!
message me at (my username) at gmail dot com. I'm the creator of Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) that lets users share all their online platforms in 1 profile, and I want to speak on possibly integrating HACK as a platform that users can share their account of.
Hey I’ve never been on HN before but have seen good articles pop up on Reddit. A few minutes ago I searched for hacker news in the App Store, scrolled a bit, and downloaded HACK because it looked the most promising :)
And now I’m posting my first HN comment on this app to the dev hahah.
"We're" not stuck unless your career is in social media, in which case yes, they will still be the most popular sites and the best way to reach people.
But for the rest of us, there's always a choice to foster a new community. Whether there is enough for that, and if a server is ready for that load, are big questions to answer though
And that’s fine. We need less low effort rage bait, viral influencer influence on the economy.
The reach of contrived political philosophy, fiat economic hustle, and pop culture gabber can be constrained; the obsolescence of /. , MySpace, and the like did not destroy reality. Now we know the outcome of the social media experiment. Utter dumpster fire.
It occurs to me people made a whole lot of small business work before handing sacks of cash to cloud SaaS
We need less adminisphere in all contexts so we can screw up again, let the wrong people helicopter us with banal AI bots, make lizard brain m sedate until it gets bored with AI bots. Then we’ll trot out a new copium for the masses and they can lean back again, super proud of their commitment to whatever hallucinated ideology they believe they’re serving.
All while waving off the ecological impact, because reality is just a big graph, mmmk
You certainly can redirect people to a website/app for a more tailored platform. But it's not the 2000's anymore where sites feature forums, comments sections, and other community features encouraging users to stay in their environment. At best, the ones that remain use middleware liks Disqus or Discord (and that is a whole other tangent that I could rant about all day) or simply encourage users to share on Reddit/TWitter.
They still can, but most sites these days are fine going where the people go, and linking to their custom stuff.
I have no idea why, but I can only stand to use reddit in "old" mode. Even on mobile. It's completely 100% unusable in any other format. I've tried to use their app and standard mobile website, but I can't make heads or tails of the hierarchy of content.
There could be a userscript for a better reddit UI if someone cared but looks like nobody does. There's also Reddit Enhancement Suite but I don't think you can use it on mobile.
If you don't use old mode in a mobile browser, they block off 1/3 of your screen with "Are you sure you don't want to use the Reddit App?" Pretty sure I don't Reddit.
Wasn't there something called `teddit` that was written in nim that did a better job of removing all the js crap that makes reddit terrible?
I would imagine everyone will just move to that if possible. Although perhaps that may also be affected by their idiotic API charge junk.
Decentralization doesn't seem like a bad idea now?
Only if there was a way to host websites where no central authority ever owned the data and the people who ran relays got paid in some form of cryptographically secure crypto currency. Frontend clients that made requests would need to pay in the same token to avoid abuse.
This exactly. Furthermore, Mastodon rewards those that want to actively participate in communities. It does not reward lurkers who want to passively (doom)scroll.
If Alice posted once the last months, and Bob 20 times, and they both post another post, then ... maybe Mastodon will promote Bob's post and demote Alice's because Bob has been more active? (I would have preferred the opposite, hmm)
I don't think Mastodon has "promotion". If Alice posts once and Bob 20 times, you'll see Bob all over your feed and can easily miss Alice's post unless you seek it out. There is a retweet type feature (I forget the name) but I'm not sure it really does much to get Alice's message out to a wider audience.
It depends on what sort of community you follow. The ML and tech podcasting communities have largely moved over. The politics, journalism and celebrity part of twitter hasn’t moved over. The corollary to that is that much of the vitriol and random toxicity also hasn’t moved over. I have a more vibrant and more interesting mastodon feed than I ever had on twitter. And my twitter feed now is a wasteland, stripped of the good content but still filled with all of the bad content. Twitter is dead man walking as far as I’m concerned.
The problem I experience with Mastodon is it seems like a total echo chamber. Very little interesting conversation most of the time. I still find good links to content there though.
Historically, before the "mass migration" most Mastodon servers were built around a specific community and their shared values of what was appropriate to post. Sure it was federated but many early users tended to stick to "their" server exclusively.
It's no surprise that can end up feeling like an echo chamber. It's getting better than it was when I first started using it about six months ago but some of the posts people catch heat for seem a bit too over the top.
One of my favorite examples was a user who posted a photo of their dinner. It was nothing crazy just like rice, veggies, and chicken. They were immediately accosted for not posting a trigger warning since some people have eating disorders. That's the type of community I have no patience for.
>to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps.
To me it signals you're a fairly new entrant to the intertubez.
Third party frontends for a given backend have existed since time immemorial, with or without sanctioned access to the backend's innards.
Alternatives to Explorer and Program Manager for a Windows shell are one of the older examples, more contextually relevant and newer examples would be programs like Pidgin and Trillian which served as third party clients for AIM, MSN, YIM, ICQ, etc.
None of this in any general sense is going away, though specific examples might.
I have been browsing Reddit off and on since Digg lost their minds. Apollo was the only IOS app that was good quality for a long time, and it only got better as time passed.
Honestly, I'm surprised that spez kept his job after getting caught modifying user comments straight from the production db[0]. That's who these people are dealing with, to be clear. And now he's accusing Apollo of threatening Reddit? Give me a break. How is this the guy who's gonna lead Reddit to the promised land?
I haven't been able to find the comment again, but I am 95% certain he admitted to editing the production DB long before this incident. I think it was an IAMA with kn0thing, where they admitted something along the lines of editing the DB to fix typos in titles. Not quite as bad, but no surprise he continued the behavior.
I can't believe people are pretending to be outraged about something so boring. Oh no, a forum admin trolled a user in a troll subreddit, qué horror!
The thread he changed the comments in was filled with users literally accusing multiple innocent people of being pedophiles who ate children, but sure, it's a bridge too far to change the user tag of comments literally threatening him rather than e.g. banning everyone who commented there or reporting the threats to the police which would have been well within his rights!
Tbf, you could totally lose your job with a single edit if your identity is associated with your Reddit account. It would be very very very hard to argue with a straight face that the admins added a racial slur to your comment without sounding completely crazy and dishonest.
Sure - but none of that happened, and the possibility of that happening is exactly the same whether Huffman had trolled the dredge at TheDonald or not. Not everything in life is a slippery slope, it's often just best to weigh things on their own merits.
He already admitted to changing post titles (in his own words to fix typos and other minor corrections). So he got the hang of modifying prod data with a "good cause" and once he had the know-how he turned around and sued it to edit someone's comment.
Had that not caused a big stir, maybe it would have become his new past time. maybe it has, maybe he goes back 5-6 years to comments you cannot reply to because the threads are locked and adds little jokes there, who knows cause he is now totally untrustworthy on this matter.
I mean that was really stupid of him, but it seems like the kind of thing someone would do impulsively one time and then never again after getting reprimanded. Meanwhile, this API debacle has made me lose all respect for Reddit and its leadership — if everything the Apollo dev is saying is true, this is completely inexcusable. Reddit lied to the faces of the developers who trusted them and depended on them for their livelihood. I think the API thing is dramatically worse, and it isn’t close.
Uhm.. Sorry? This is something that you do one time impulsively? This is something that you do once and then never again, because you're out unless your company has unhealthy ethics.
> I mean that was really stupid of him, but it seems like the kind of thing someone would do impulsively one time and then never again after getting reprimanded.
Only a founder would get reprimanded for manipulating production data, anyone else would get fired on the spot (as they should). I'm not here to argue which action is worse, I'm simply pointing out that this guy clearly has a control issue and poor judgment (which is common among CEO's, granted) and it's been obvious for years. Of course he's gonna distort his reality to suit his needs, that's what these guys do.
People don't learn when they get away with things like this, they just go bigger and crazier.
Maybe a junior developer fresh out of college does it once and gets reprimanded and probably fired.
But the CEO? Who presumably presided over numerous discussions involving appropriate data access policies and risk to the company’s reputation? That’s shockingly juvenile and shortsighted.
The comment editing in production is indefensible. However, there is legitimate reason to suspect the Apollo founder did suggest a monetary buyout in exchange for "going quiet". It is evident in the audio recording posted by the Apollo founder himself, top post of reddit at the moment.
You'd likely have to enter an API agreement with Reddit, and it's unlikely they'd be willing to run you through the sales funnel and write up a contract just sell you what's effectively a $3/mo API plan.
That said, open sourcing the app would be great to archive it for posterity.
If you didn't have a need to post, I would assume Apollo could be update to allow one to specify a Teddit/libreddit instance's API (which would act as a caching proxy for reddit). You'd be able to get a similar experience without relying on Reddit directly.
He’d open sourced his Achoo app in the past. All it led to was copycats pretending they are not copycats. No attribution and the whole nine yards. If you google it, there still might be remnants of the incident. So I wouldn’t hold out hope on Apollo, rightfully so.
Or adapted for another platform. Open source UI means you need basically the database adapter to set up a clone. Betcha a lot of current Apollo users would swing onto that new platform.
I personally like forums better anyways rather than the multithreaded up/down vote systems. I feel like the gamification of Reddit style discussion exaggerates echo chambers.
Yep. Discussion boards should have a flagging mechanism for user-driven-moderation to help remove hateful/inappropriate/offensive content but that's it.
You might be right about the voting system, but reddit- (and HN-) style threading is so much better for following discussions as they naturally branch into different things. Trying to follow a certain "thread" of discussion in a traditional linear forum thread can be next to impossible when you have 10s of pages to flip through looking for any replies addressed to a comment on page 4.
I see two pretty distinct issues here: 1) most people's favourite app is going to die, and 2) many subreddits will be negatively affected by this move: prime example is /r/AskHistorians.
Personally, 1) is not really an issue and people are enjoying the outrage train, and that's ok and valid and whatever, but it's a third party app. It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make more money. At the mid term is a great incentive for Reddit to improve their shitty app experience ("but Ads!" yeah, ads of course, you're not paying shot for using it, it's an impopular but pragmatic business model)
But 2) it's the one that's really concerning. Hopefully they reverse this course for this point specifically cause this has a measurable impact on eyeballs, which ultimately means money.
inb4: "Apollo dying means less eyeballs too dummy", yeah as I mentioned before the outrage is the fad. Once it passes, will see how much people actually leaves (little to none alternatives for Reddit btw). My bet is that could result in a small hump, if anything, in the long run.
The change isn't about Apollo exclusively, Reddit is going to start charging for their API. Basically all remotely adequate (which Reddit's 1st party tools aren't) moderation tools make extensive use of said API, so Reddit has basically decided "Hey, people who do most of the work necessary to keep our platform afloat for free, mind if you start paying us for the privilege?"
Most communities rely on third party moderation services and tools which will also be impacted by the API changes. Many have said that moderating larger communities will be untenable without them.
That is of course their right, but they way they went about it is really scummy. Third-party apps, and the user-contributed content they engendered, built Reddit. Without its users, Reddit has nothing, is nothing. Just another forum site.
They could have simply said "Due to business pressures, we're going to stop offering our API in 1 year" and honestly, nobody would have blinked an eye.
Or they could have said "Due to business pressures, we're going to include advertisements in the API. Any clients found deliberately not displaying the ads will have their API keys permanently revoked."
Or they could have said "Due to business pressures, we're going to stop offering free API access. Users who subscribe to Reddit can use their own personal API keys with a limit of 1000 calls per day."
They did none of those things; they raised prices to a point that was completely untenable and gave app developers 30 days to FOAD.
Maybe so. But this situation has been blown up so much that now more than 5% of Reddit's traffic probably has a sour taste in their mouth about how Reddit treats people. This is something that's going to affect a lot more than 5% of their traffic as mod tools, bots, and more go down.
I think issue 3, especially in relation to a potential IPO, is Reddit's leadership again demonstrating a flippant willingness to lie and distort reality to suit their purposes and the carelessness to get caught doing it.
Surely there is a reasonable business case to be made for this policy change. Attempted character assassination of a 3rd party developer with blatant falsehoods, not so much. I dunno, maybe they aren't worried and there's plenty of investors an wall street ready to hand over big bags of money to a demonstrated liar.
Why is this not an issue for user's protesting? I use Relay for Reddit on Android and I think it's absolutely the best way to view Reddit on mobile if you're a fan of old.reddit.com.
That app is going to die and I say screw them. I owe reddit nothing. If they want to turn the site into something that I don't want to use because it makes them more money that way. Good luck with that but I won't be around to see it.
I'd gladly pay for Reddit Premium (which has no ads) to continue to use 3rd party apps that I like. But it's not about the money or the ads -- it's about control.
That's ok, you've certainly used their services for free, as most of us, and they don't owe you anything.
I get the feeling that some people are trying to spin this into a crusade of sorts, I fully get this feeling from your words.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that I guess, but look a the big picture as well: you've used the services of a private company for years, paying zero cents. They made a business decision after potentially delaying it for years, and you rant about control.
This outrage makes little sense, we don't own Reddit, never had. We're just making noise because some of us confused private property for their own.
Valid point. I think people are turning this into a 'crusade' partly because they are just shocked and appalled by the way Reddit handled this whole thing.
In the end, it's their site and their decision to make, but it's understandable many people are upset by their actions and no longer want to use the site (which, btw, even if you were using it for "free" you may have been contributing in other ways via posts, comments, moderation, etc).
It also means losing potential customers - I would have been willing to upgrade to Reddit Premium to continue using Apollo, for example, but now I wouldn't even consider it.
I absolutely get your point. I'm not saying they're not free to make whatever business decisions they want -- of course they are. And, of course, I want Reddit to be profitable and survive.
But if they're profitability involves alienating me as a user then I'm going to be alienated and I'm going to act like I'm alienated. I think the outrage makes perfect sense in this case. I'm equally outraged at other companies doing things that manipulate their customers for a tiny bit more profit (like shrinkflation).
Ironically they could have turned this situation into profit from me as I'm happy to pay for Reddit if it was required to allow me to use it in the way that I'm accustomed. Instead of embracing me as a customer, they want me gone.
> And there's nothing inherently wrong with that I guess, but look a the big picture as well: you've used the services of a private company for years, paying zero cents.
While that's not false, look at it the other way: I've provided content for a private company for years, taking zero payment. Millions of us have. Reddit lives and dies by user submissions and comments, and taking what seems to be a stance that's wildly hostile to users feels very foolish to me.
To me that makes even less sense. You provided that content knowingly for free, voluntarily, fair and square. No one forced you to, it wasn't an unfair nine to five job. You decided to do it.
Can you realistically expect to have some sort of return, wether in control or whatever for that? It feels more aligned to a tantrum rather than a coherent argument. Have we consiously forget how Web 2.0 works?
> It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make more money
The no-brainer decision would be to make your app a lot better than any third-party app instead of pulling the rug from under people whose work has made reddit better in the long-run.
1,695 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 6331 ms ] threadThat makes sense to me. I was also wondering how come I had never heard of this app.
It also changes the calculus significantly: how many users does Apollo have, and how many users does Reddit have?
Reddit just might not even notice the content produced by Apollo users.
[0] https://apolloapp.io/
Reference: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/141mdvt/apollo_o... (Video with timestamp: https://youtu.be/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=2780)
(In other news, TIL Youtube search seemingly looks through transcripts. Nice!)
I suspect we may see another round of forum expansion again as people want to carve out their own niche communities again. We might not see Usenet 3.0 for a bit while we let people expand then let a new site come along and consolidate.
The outcome was unsurprising and it is unfortunate. But this is why third-party apps are always at a disadvantage. The same happened with Twitter and they made that clear and now so did Reddit.
Like I said before in [0]
"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087219
For iPhone apps this isn't really an option in the first place.
Most of our commodity software is built & deployed by packages, APIs and frameworks we have very little control on. We just hope things don't break/change as drastically and we can modularize our projects as much as we could, to bear some shock or disruption. Unlikely anyone can build & maintain consumer grade softwares ab initio
I still feel no matter how natively one tries to build products - they cannot build everything. You cannot create CI/CD, monitoring, frontend, containerization, and cloud services just for your software or service. Those depend on some platform API which you won't create just for your product. Short or long business value - unless one becomes a major player with several software engineering teams building a product ecosystem - other people's APIs and frameworks will be used. And that is perfectly fine. That is how good products should be -using nice building blocks. No need to reinvent the wheel everytime.
(Ps. your obsession with citing yourself is one of the worst parts of reading HN)
Good. I don't care.
It is a priceless prediction that became true. Hence how unsurprising this is.
Or are you just saying third party clients shouldn't be considered viable to begin with?
Reddit's free APIs left a lot of uncaptured value on the table. This has become obvious by the sheer number of AI models trained on Reddit data. Free Reddit data goes into the machine, and piles of VC money comes out. Reddit wants in on it, but is unable to stop free API access without the consumer apps being collateral.
We're not disagreeing. The comment I was responding to was saying they are "paying" Reddit with content. As you noted, Reddit doesn't want that, instead, it's asking API users to pay real money so they can see the content without ads. That in itself is pretty reasonable I think - what may not be reasonable is how much Reddit is asking for.
> Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all
What's the breakdown of content producers on 3rd Party apps vs reddit.com and reddit apps? It is reasonable to assume this is a rational decision being made by Reddit after looking at the numbers and doing some projections.
Edit: removed references to ads from parent commenter paraphrasing
I never said any such thing about ads.
I mean, I'd rather not, but that wasn't even part of the discussion.
YouTube got away with lots of bad changes because many creators are getting paid to produce content and competing with YouTube is near impossible. But Reddit is one of many primarily text-based online communities and they are currently destroying the only things holding people on their platform. Aside from the userbase Reddit has no redeeming qualities that would make anyone hesitate to leave.
If you assume they know all what you said, and that they have dashboards showing breakdowns of submitters/commenters/voters by client, can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions? Even if you do not like the reason, do you think it may be rational?
IPO value. This entire scheme, is a last ditch attempt to maximise exit value for the founders. The actions all point in that direction, many fo which are borderline illegal.
Let's break it down. Reddit has had a metoric rise in the past 5 years, adding like 200 million mobile users to their official app. This started in 2018 when the first news of the IPO began. Reddit started heavily advertising.
They initially redesigned the web version, started giving a worse mobile experience and had a massive, intrusive banner that said "try the official app" on the mobile client. So we have a "friendlier" web experince and an aggresive app marketing push.
We now have more users than ever. Should we focus on efficiency, tools for mods etc? Nope, the entire product stack of reddit since 2019 has been releasing Monetasation tools. From badly hidden NFTs as profile pictures, to reddit awards paid with money, to ads hidden as actual content on the front page of the new web and mobile app.
So now we have record users, a new set of money making tools what else can we do to maximise exit value? We reduce 3rd party users, this way even if a fraction come to the app we still have new record user numbers. And we generate as much content as possible, preferably in areas that will be considered growth vectors in teh sale.
So reddit made a ridiculous API pricing plan, with 0 time to implement to essentially kill 3rd parties but not having to do it officially. Other less verifiable events that seem to be happening is that bots have increased, and some non english subs like the french and german communities are having new content generated by badly translating popular reddit posts with AI. This would benefit reddit as more content (even if by bots) is a higher exit price and communities that do not speak english using reddit more would also be seen as a positive by whoever would buy reddit. This is not attributable to reddit, bt if it was, it is straight up fraud. However the timing of the bot activity increasing and the non english subs seeing increased activity directly benefits the IPO plan therefore it is worth mentioning.
In other words, the charitable explanation is that this is the last hurrah in a 5 year plan to make the owners of reddit rich before they off load a website full of bots and angry users to whoever is silly enough to think they can fix this mess.
Then again. I hate using my phone in general, so I always think that any content creators would use desktop and maybe old reddit.
I can type just as quickly on a phone as I can on desktop, and in many ways I prefer it.
Imagine a free music festival with zero security. It would be chaos and the volunteer artists would stop performing.
Labeling that as "only costs" is extremely shortsighted.
Reddit is a shell of what it was when I started on the platform 14+ years ago.
It takes someone who is more than just a bean counter to realize that maybe, just maybe, the only reason people are interested in those free requests in the first place is because of the communities on Reddit that bring all the actual value.
And who knows, maybe one day everyone will realize that the “free social media monetized by ads” business just totally sucks and can only ever lead to situations like this.
>Abundantly. Unlike other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter who pay their moderators as employees, Reddit relies on volunteers to do the hard work for free. I completely understand that when tools they take to do their volunteer, important job are taken away, there is anger and frustration there. While I haven't personally mobilized anyone to participate in the blackout out of fear of retaliation from Reddit, the last thing I want is for that to feel like I don't support the folks speaking up. I wholeheartedly do.
>It's been a horrible week, and the kindness Redditors and moderators and communities have shown Apollo and other third-party apps has genuinely made it much more bearable and I am genuinely so appreciative.
>I am, admittedly, doubtful Reddit wants to listen to folks anymore so I don't see it having an effect.
Man this is just a bummer to read.
While you might be right, super fucked up if their users care more about third party apps being killed than their long past acceptance of child exploitation.
Tha dam will burst, it's not a question of if but when. It's a guarantee from the ever declining quality of reddit.
You need enough power users to sustain interest, post content, and launch it.
The goal shouldn’t be to replace Reddit as it exists today, because if you go down that route you are doomed to repeat their mistakes of constant growth at the cost of everything else.
I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.
Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.
The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.
RIP
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/144jp3w/sync_wi...
Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recording his calls with them for over a year (legally I might add). Reddit has 0 wiggle room here.
EDIT: Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value? I feel like this is going to significantly reshape Reddit as moderators of large subreddits will be furious and quit if not destroy entire subreddits. Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...
EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
EDIT 4: #1 Reddit Android app "Reddit is Fun" is shutting down too https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...
You'd think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app.
Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they're the one's submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform.
With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the number of actual visiters to the site will also go down. Thus lowering potential revenue.
If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?
BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.
I know that you do, and you have your reasons, but...well, I don't. I think people are taking reddit commenting way too seriously if heads need to roll over a comment edit.
Suppose dang edited your post to say "I like to get drunk at work", and there it is for the world to see. You never said that, but anyone looking at Hacker News would see:
"qup 10 minutes ago: I like to get drunk at work."
No, that's absolutely not OK! Now, consider that spez could just as easily edit some old Reddit comments someone wrote years ago to say something horrendous. Do you often go back to verify that all your old comments are unchanged? I certainly don't.
I have no way of knowing exactly which comments spez edited, or how significantly he changed them. And honestly, the not knowing is simply inexcusable. All we know is that he has tampered with the production database, not how often or how much.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...
Should he have been able to? No, that's a concerning setup for the reasons you say.
How bad is what he actually did, from what we actually know? For about an hour, comments that said "fuck spez" after he banned the pizzagate sub were changed to "fuck $the_donald_mod_name".
I just don't find that a big deal. It's not like editing your comment to say you drink at work.
If he only made those changes and solemnly vowed never to do it again, fine, shouldn't have done it but whatever. But who besides him can say for sure?
You mean changing fuck spez to fuck $mod?
> We just don't know to what degree
Well I'm not sure what auditing they have, and I know there's public databases of all Reddit comments. It's been a while and I'm not aware of other claims.
My point was more that you two were arguing at crossroads. You seemed more concerned about what could have happened, and they were talking about what has evidence.
> He played his hand that he is willing to put words in other people's mouths basically just for entertainment, so why should we believe he hasn't done it in much more important cases?
I find this logic a bit backwards. Willing to do something when the stakes and impact are low to annoy someone trolling you is very different from changing comments in important situations.
Dang can edit my comments. (He does have to edit comments sometimes, I'm sure, but for reasons you approve of.) I would find it annoying. Until this comment thread, though, I'm not sure I would have considered that dang would get fired for it.
I don't think I nor anyone should be held accountable at work for comments made on Hacker News. If I lost my job over dang editing my post, I would think I worked for a really shit company and nobody went to bat for me. Basically, I would continue believing the interaction on the forum was totally unimportant, and I would be dumbfounded by the idiocy of my manager for elevating it to that a fireable offense, particularly after I let them know I did not make that comment.
FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.
HN isn't partnering with the CIA to catch some Russian spy by modifying a comment so that the drop is in a monitored location. He's just going to delete the comment if it contains something it shouldn't.
> FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.
Great, but now bring it back to real life, because a ton of people are held accountable at work for comments made on social media and do have a boss.
Bringing it back to real life: I don't fire my people for what they say on the internet.
This is the saddest thing I've read all week and my uncle just died.
Before: I have no evidence that spez tampers with anyone's reddit comments in production
After: I have evidence that spez tampered with ONE reddit comment in production.
The new status quo does not increase the likelyhood of "I have evidence that spez may be inexplicably tampering with old reddit comments habitually" being more true.
And thinking that it does shows a poor understanding of human behaviour and nature, especially under stressful emotional circumstances.
You're generalizing the action described in the article to something that feels very different to me. Yes, his actions fall under "editing comments"; yes, your hypothetical falls under "editing comments"; yes, I think that his actions make him more likely to do something like your hypothetical; no, I don't think that we should treat his actions like your hypothetical because they are different.
> Reddit CEO Steve Huffman today admitted that he had edited Reddit user comments that criticized and insulted him, wielding his power to anonymously change references to his own username, and replace them with moderators of the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald.
> Huffman — who posts on the site as "spez" — admitted to the transgression after being called out by users of r/the_donald, saying he was inspired to edit the comments after a spate of insults emanating from the pro-Trump subreddit. "I messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," Huffman said, indicating that the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults.
* Any media reporting on what’s happening within Reddit. Remember when WSB was all over the news cycles? Picture that but with some malicious mod/admin setting somebody up to take the fall for equities fraud.
* Any person or entity with legal or fincial muscle looking to protect their reputation or product. You don’t want Wizards of the Coast sending the Pinkertons to your door because they think you’re selling stolen goods.
* Anyone who values their own reputation in the internet. Imagine being an aspiring politician and having somebody insert racial slurs into your historical posts.
The issue isn’t somebody being petty, it’s that there is potential for systemic abuse of power and trust.
This isn't the old days when everything on the internet was in good fun. For a lot of people these days, internet unironically srs bsns. And a lot of those people think it's okay to harass folks over their passing thoughts on the internet.
what attacks are you specifically referring to here, other than kicking them off the site?
I don't think there is a neutral interpretation better than "the_donald was a lot of trouble for reddit as a business and social network, because they caused hostility, even by their existence, and it's not reddit's business to make humans less tribal, so why continue supporting them? Especially after they were clearly brigaiding and manipulating front page content. This front page manipulation was different from what the reddit owners wanted to be on the front page, which for the most part is benign and fun stuff that's easy to monetize."
The admins always had some new rules and some specific ways they had to be enforced, and were always happy to heap ever-increasing punishments on the subreddits capriciously
Oh, you can't say "Retard" any more, if we find any more examples of this prohibited hate speech your subreddit is going to be actioned against. Also we banned half of your most active moderators for wrongthink. We'll continue banning moderators and levying punishments until the situation is rectified.
I think we're on the same page overall here, just that I never put any faith in the sanctity of Reddit's database
They sure as fuck were not! Even to this day, /Conservative still claims the moral high ground bastion of free speech and balance while banning you for any slight question of the narrative being encouraged. Importantly, this is VERBATIM what they claim /politics does.
On the other hand, we expect some level of fairness and professionalism from Reddit and its administrators.
But Reddit is and always has pretended to be a "big name" company like Youtube, Facebook, etc.
They would even feel good about it because they have managed to obtain an unfair advantage and get away with it.
It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.
Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.
Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.
I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.
I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
Pretty much. Long tail of tiny-userbase clients probably doesn't matter that much, I suspect a small number of apps that can reasonably be spot-checked if it complies is the vast majority of traffic.
> I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
No reason third-party apps couldn't be allowed to be ad-free for premium users too. (or if the API is explicitly pushing "show ad URL X to user in this context" the API can take care of adjusting that)
I cannot understand how anyone in his team with a sturdy ethical compass could look him in the eye after seeing that post, especially if they were party to the original conversation. I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate leader get caught in such a high profile absolute falsehood, especially directed at a single individual.
If this reflects the company's culture I have no idea how it can succeed as a public firm. How will Steve deal with criticism from public investors? What is he not willing to lie about?
Can you point to a source for this for those of us not familiar with his comments?
Additionally, someone else in the comments here linked the text of a post[0] made in /r/partnercommunities with similar accusations to what's quoted in TFA.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
This is rich. The entire for-profit Reddit business is based on people contributing data for free, subsidizing their for-profit business. These guys couldn’t be any more clueless.
We owe it to the world to make sure touching the stove DOES burn you, otherwise it's just DARE all over again.
See the section titled “ Bizarre allegations by Reddit of Apollo "blackmailing" and "threatening" Reddit”
I don't use the app and I don't have any great attachment to Reddit, but I wondered if Reddit screwed themselves a bit here by not having a clearer link between the two parties. If either the Reddit employees involved or Steve entered the fray with any sort of bias/grievance, they likely misinterpreted the developer's comments.
Their best case scenario is really Twitter’s case, where they go public, have middling performance, and then get bought out by a billionaire after annoying them with bad moderation decisions lmao
Is that a matter of fact? How do you know it isn't higher? Also consider that it's not just advertising, it is also about funneling users to new products Reddit may want to develop
Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.
Within the realm of folks who are willing to pay for a Reddit skin, imagine that very few of them will just give up the site once their skin is gone.
More likely is that someone comes in and makes a similar app and charges more for it. Power users and professional users will pay, and most of them will gladly pay a premium.
Not gonna lie… I think op said he charged $10 a year. I raised my eyebrows… that should probably be the bottom option of a three-tier monthly price matrix.
I think someone should buy this app and just price it properly based on value add. Im not sure what the various user profiles of Apollo are, but my guess is that there are a few profiles that can be profitably monetized even with the new Reddit API charges. Imho, Reddit is being shortsighted, but they do have a unique and large community.
I'm so annoyed with three-tier monthly price matrices. It's honestly a red flag for me at this point.
On an aesthetic level, I agree with you. For some business, it’s just not needed.
That said…
As someone who has optimized pricing matrixes many times, I will just say that it works incredibly well. Also, for the whatever number people (like you? sort of like me?) who drop out due to “red flags”, there are legions more who allow their behavior to be shaped in an incredibly profitable way.
From the post:
> Me: "Because I assume the majority of it isn't server costs. I assume the majority is the opportunity cost per user."
> Reddit: "Exactly.""
Reddit's doesn't care about the $0.12, they care about the ads that doesn't get shown.
For reference, approximate global ARPU if converted to monthly for other social networks in 2022: Pinterest: ~$0.5, Snap: ~$1, Twitter: ~$1.6, FB: ~$3.3
This says the IPO roadshow will say Reddit has potential somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, which feels like the right sales pitch to me.
I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.
I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:
1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API
2. Developers don't want to pay that much
3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly
4. Developers push back and announce app closures
If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.
They think $X is vastly larger than the $Y they would get from third party app developers. So, goodbye to third party app developers.
which is absurd... the entirety of reddit has already been scraped before. the marginal utility of this today onward feed of data is a lot less than they think it is.
>Hi Mods,
We’re providing a follow-up on the last API update we made to make sure our mods, developers, and users have clarity on changes we are (and aren’t) making.
API Free Access
This exists and continues to be available.
If usage is legal, non-commercial, and helps our mods, we won’t stand in your way. Moderators will continue to have access to their communities via the API - including sexually explicit content across Reddit. Moderators will be able to see sexually-explicit content even on subreddits they don't directly moderate.
We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API. We will support legal and non-commercial tools like Toolbox, Context Mod, Remind Me, and anti-spam detection bots. And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.
Developers can continue non-commercial usage of the API, free of charge within stated rates. Reddit is also covering hosting for apps via the Developer Platform, which uses the Data API.
Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).
If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.
I'm a little surprised reddit would not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.
This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.
Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.
Reddit is worthless without community contributions, and Reddit is very clearly telling the community (both users and developers) that they aren't valuable and should go find somewhere else to spend their time.
Apollo will never pay, because it's shutting down. It was always an option to monetize 3PA but Reddit decided not to.
This 100% reeks of business people who don't even care to understand what Reddit is coming in and seeing the raw metrics of "% of users who aren't seeing ads" and the "lost" revenue.
10 years too late.
I really don't see why Reddit doesn't just purchase the app.
They've all but stated openly that their goal is to kill Apollo in its current form. Why pay millions to do that when they can accomplish it for free?
> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?
> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.
> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.
seems reasonable.
How long will Reddit survive if they don’t do this? I have no idea. But I do know the CEO has to deliver more than happy users.
Had they set out a reasonable timeline for the new prices, they would have had a new revenue stream. Instead they killed it and at the same time created an incentive for some of their most active users to leave.
This is *literally* what is expected of someone running a company with intitutional investors - anything other than this and investors are not interested.
What more proof do we need that there is nothing more important to a small group of humans that own all the money, than them getting more money?
What is the employee culture like it Reddit?
I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite.
Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions based on personal relationships, rather than anything else.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...
I don’t really understand how they could make that hire or why they would have thought that person was a good choice…
Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing.
I don't know how monthly subscriptions work, but yearly subscription refunds are pro-rated.
> I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing
I'm not, at least not for apps like this that need consistent revenue to support regular maintenance and/or server costs in an era where customers balk when an app costs more than a few dollars. To achieve this you end up balancing whether or not to serve ads, hope you can just grow enough new users forever, charge for major updates, charge a subscription, or beg for tips. While there are some exceptions, you can probably tell that ads or subscriptions are generally winning this nowadays.
One-time purchases are a tricky thing, since you've realisitcally now precluded ever charging for a major update. This is great for them, and might be for you if you've gotten your math right, but if you haven't (or it changes) then you're stuck. And, for better or for worse, they tend to be the loudest users.
Marco Arment talks about this balance in general on an episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast a couple weeks ago when discussing how Casey (another host) should price an app he's writing. For context if folks aren't aware, Marco created Overcast, which is a popular 3rd party iOS podcast app. The discussion spans a couple episodes but I the post-show of [Episode 535](https://atp.fm/535) captures the gist.
Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.
Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?
Yet for some reason, the Twitter client devs (who had happily shifted all their users to a subscription-only model) all of a sudden realized that they had sold a bunch of one year subs they had sold were going to be useless as soon as Twitter turned off the API and, more pertinent to their pocketbooks, all those customers would be entitled to request and receive a refund through the App Store for their now non-functional app. The devs started whining to their customers about being “small businesses” and having the food snatched out of their families’ mouths and why would anyone be so cruel as to seek a refund?
Christian is showing a hell of a lot more integrity and toughness than the Twitter client authors.
Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.
Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space?
If he isn't "10+ million"-wealthy that's extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.
But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:
* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.
* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"
Because according to Reddit, the problem with Apollo is the opportunity cost of Reddit not being able to monetize its users.
Acquiring Apollo is user acquisition. Destroying the app does not necessarily mean that all those users will now start using Reddit's official app and become monetizable, they might just quit Reddit entirely. By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.
After what Reddit did to Alien Blue I don't know how many Apollo users would be too keen on playing that game again. I personally have no confidence that a Reddit owned Apollo would retain what makes the current app great.
> A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
That's practically the definition of tortious interference.
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/liability-and-insuranc...
"The most common form of [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance."
"By way of illustration:
If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."
Generally speaking the law doesn't care whether or not you personally think it applies, merely that you've broken it.
Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs, which Reddit was not under a legal obligation to continue providing at historical rates that Apollo had based its entire product around, despite long-standing advice not to do so.
"I didn't refuse to transport your goods, I just said it would cost a billion dollars per pound to do it and you couldn't afford it" is not the gotcha that you think it is. The law is technical but it's enforced by humans.
It's straightforward: Apollo and Reddit have a longstanding business relationship, via these APIs that Reddit has provided for a long time at zero cost. Reddit generally no longer wants third parties to use the API, so they are increasing the price to a level that they know will cause everyone to balk (other third-party clients are closing up too) so that they can direct that traffic to their own native client and first-party sites, while knowing that Apollo has these long-standing business relationships of their own that are built on this relationship with Reddit.
In short, reddit is deliberately taking action to sabotage and cause economic harm to a business partner by changing aspects of the relationship that make it impossible for the partner to fulfill their contracts to third parties, so that Reddit can direct that business to themselves instead.
That is an improper taking under tortious interference, and the rest of the tests (intent actual economic loss - not just refunds but future income, etc) are trivially satisfied here.
I know people are libertarians here but the right to swing your fist ends at someone else's face, and legally speaking if you take actions that you know will result in a business partner being forced to sustain economic losses due to your improper breaking of your business relationship with them, you are generally liable for that damage you cause to the partner. That is the basic concept of tortious interference, you're paying for the damage you caused to your business partner. Swing your fist and hit someone's face and you get to pay for the surgery.
(IANAL and Reddit's lawyers would obviously say their conduct is proper, but, generally this is the type of situation where people can unexpectedly get themselves into legitimate legal trouble based on actions they think are perfectly legitimate. And generally they may have been legitimate if you didn't have this prior relationship, that changes things! It's different to not build an API at all, vs having the API be free and have third parties start selling clients and then to stop doing the API.)
(As a sibling comment notes, estoppel is another - if you promise something to someone, even a verbal promise, and they take a financially detrimental action on the expectation that you will follow through on your side of the promise and you don't, then you are generally liable for the financial harm you have caused them too. Libertarianism doesn't mean you can wiggle out of contracts, even verbal ones.)
This is the part that you seem to be confusing.
Apollo and Reddit do not appear to be business partners. Nor does Apollo seem to have any contractual agreement with Reddit, outside of the API usage agreement.
The API terms were lasted updated May 25, 2016. These include this language:
> a. Fees. Reddit reserves the right to charge fees for future use or access to the Reddit APIs, rates to be determined in Reddit’s sole discretion.
I assume these are the terms that Apollo are bound to. If that's the case, I don't see how you can support your claim. Reddit is using it's contractual right.
Sorry, I am confused what you are arguing here. If you think a usage agreement is binding they are certainly business partners. They may still be business partners or generally covered by tortious interference even if they do not have an explicit contract either.
This is quite a wide legal net by design - it is a "swing your fist and hit someone and their lawyers may have something to say about it" area of law, of course it's a wide net. You really don't even have to have an explicit contract.
Precisely. If the API agreement wasn't binding, why would it bother saying Reddit reserve the right to vary the fees?
Reddit's Data API TOS has always allowed it the right to start charging for access. That it chose not to do so until recently was its prerogative. That it chooses to do so now, is also it's prerogative.
This is not a unfair taking, since Reddit isn't taking anything from Christian, they are simply no longer freely providing something.
This is not an issue of estoppel, since Reddit never promised to make their API free forever. And Reddit gave him due notice, as required by their TOS, of changes that would take effect...several months after notice was given of the changes...
This is not tortious inteference, since Apollo could have continued to provide Reddit services to their customers, though this might have required Christian to change his business model.
This is not slander, since on the call Christian clearly suggests to Reddit to give him $10 million and he'll go away and not make a fuss about things.
It's irrelevant that they have a "prior relationship" since that means nothing in this context, since Christian did not have a binding contractual relationship that entitled Christian to perpetual free access to the Reddit Data API.
As I said, I'm looking at this from the legal perspective, not the emotional perspective.
So, this is the one thing I'm not sure I entirely agree with. While it's true that Apollo could have changed its business model, they only had 30 days to migrate users to a new business model, including some users that are on a yearly model.
Furthermore, Reddit had previously stated to Christian that the timeline was flexible, and that they'd be open to extending it. They then walked back on that promise, leaving Apollo scrambling to move all their existing users to the new model in very limited time. And that's after telling christian multiple time earlier in the year that no change to the pricing policy was being considered for at least the year to come.
There's essentially no solution for Christian here. They don't have the money to pay for the usage of their existing 50k yearly that won't migrate for up to 12 months.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd be very surprised if a case couldn't be made with this behavior.
Not that it'd ever go to court anyways - it'd be a huge time and money sink with unclear outcomes. Better to focus on the next steps.
I am a lawyer. I can say, with 100% certainty, that this case would never make it to trial. It's unlikely that Christian would even make it to discovery, as based on the facts stated, by Christian himself, even viewed in the light most favorable to Christian, he does not have any colorable legal claims.
There's nothing obviously improper about a site replacing a free API with a paid API even if it causes problems for those who relied on the API being free.
I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?
> Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years." > "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
At least for the yearly subscriptions
"We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps."
I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...
Now, even if they backtrack on this later on in a few months or years, they burned the good will, so I doubt developers are going invest the time to make a good Reddit client after this.
Truth, being perhaps the most interesting, because the main personality behind it sort of compelled it to be semi-well-known simply because of media coverage. The other attempts do not share that effect, however.
You're right that early movers have some advantage but it's a big world and the Next Big Thing doesn't have to win the whole market on day one - only enough of it to plant seeds that can grow over time.
Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.
So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
Or at least a much larger time to recalibrate that "hope".
> So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
If you read the post, it's not just about the willingness of users to pay. It's also about the existing obligations (prepaid subscriptions), the timeline of the changes, and the amount of work that would be required on his end to adapt to the new changes within the next three weeks.
None of that would be an issue with the proposed solution of Reddit charging the users directly.
He could fire up a new system with appropriate pricing as soon as he can manage. All customers, if they want to come back, are then forced into the new system at new pricing levels. Maybe this takes a month or two or three. He's not losing money in the mean time and can re-open at something resembling a profitable stance when he can do so.
Yes, it sucks. But there's a path here if he wants to go for it. I don't blame him for throwing in the towel. He's tired of getting yanked around. I would be very hesitant to keep throwing good time(money) after bad.
Good call out. It's like the business equivalent of:
You changed the rules of the game because you didn't like how I played. So I'm not even going to bother playing with the new rules. I retire.
The rules of the game changed so severely that playing the game isn't just disagreeable, it's impossible.
What would you have done instead?
Charge $5 monthly and refund the annual fee for those who want it (which is already being done it seems, regardless of Apollo's future).
Apollo has options. They're just choosing to shutdown. That's the founder's prerogative, of course, but it is totally unnecessary.
Look at the support in this thread alone - Apollo has tons of people willing to throw money at them.
He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app. Now he's put into a position to support those customers at $2.50/month. (He estimates their server cost is $0.10 per month.) That's an instant $125,000 per month out of his own pocket that he can't recoup from existing customers for at least the next 6 months.
Over the course of 2023, he'll have to pay Reddit $1 million MORE than he has made from the app this year.
Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps. That's fine. That's their right. But it's certainly not the app developer's fault that he's forced to quit.
This sentiment is obviously false. Reddit doesn't want to support third-party apps at Reddit's own expense. That is reasonable.
> He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app
And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.
I take him at his word that he was willing to pay a reasonable amount.
Again, Reddit has the right to run their business however they wish. Not arguing that it should be free.
> He has had several months to prepare for a new billing model - but chose to do nothing.
I like how you keep on refusing to read the article, but claiming things from it that are straight up untrue.
Reddit announced less than two months ago that there would be pricing changes. But not what those prices would be. Even the loosest possible interpretation of the words "notice" and "several" barely covers that.
Explicitly:
> On April 18th, Reddit announced changes that would be coming to the API, namely that the API is moving to a paid model for third-party apps. Shortly thereafter we received phone calls, however the price (the key element in an announcement to move to a paid API) was notably missing, with the intent to follow up with it in 2-4 weeks.
And at the time, there was absolutely no indication that the prices would be this high.
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
They announced the actual prices six weeks later, which would put it May 30th. The day he posted this: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
Literally the most cursory of reading of the first few paragraphs of the OP would have given you this information.
If you aren't going to bother to read it (that's your prerogative), then don't bother making easily provably false assertions as if they were facts, either.
That's not what he said. He said that it's not feasible to transfer from the current pricing with 30 days notice.
That choice is entirely on Reddit, the situation did not demand such a short notice period. They could have smoothed it out but chose not to.
I find it strange to push the blame onto someone who was assured by Reddit of their intention to charge a reasonable price, and to work with 3rd parties on a flexible timeline for the introduction of the charges.
The worst I can say about the Apollo developer is that he believed Reddit were acting in good faith. Reddit on the other hand look like incompetent arseholes.
Christian has already shared his correspondence on Reddit with this. He pretty clearly sought and received regular assurances that when and if Reddit moved their API to a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost and with a flexible timeline to accommodate third party apps.
After telling him no such big moves were happening in 2023 they changed their mind, set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
What does this even mean? "Reasonable" is subjective - and from Reddit's perspective, I'd bet they believe the fees are reasonable.
It's on the business operator to mitigate risk. Apollo didn't do that - and is now throwing in the towel instead of charging their customer's more.
> set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
Just stop.
You’ve been told multiple times, by multiple people, that this was not the case.
You’ve been provided the timeline, which you refuse to acknowledge.
You very well know that he was not provided the pricing until 8 days ago.
At this point, you continuing to say this is just being disingenuous and talking in bad faith.
What, exactly, are you getting out of this? Is unreasonably placing the blame on a single developer your way of getting your rocks off?
You may want to believe and be sympathetic toward Apollo - fine.
That doesn't change the circumstances nor realities. Apollo screwed up, and is now throwing in the towel. It's really hard to be sympathetic towards a business operator that's made a series of bad choices and now is playing the victim card and shutting down.
You’re the only one who is finding it hard, and your constant push to shift the blame off of a massive corporation and onto a developer is frankly weird.
Re-evaluate your life choices if you truly believe this, but it’s clear you are the extreme minority here.
Says the person who has been told multiple times to stop making things up and incorrectly reframing the facts by multiple different people. The projection is strong with this one.
> This may go down in history as a case-study in how not to operate an internet business.
It certainly will, but not Apollo’s handling as you so desperately want, for whatever reason.
Reddit fucked up, are probably going to lose a chunk of their most active users and volunteer moderators, and will probably materially damage their IPO as a result of this.
You seem to be one of very few people who refuse to even remotely consider this idea.
There is no chance I'm paying for a "service" where power-mods will ban you for disagreeing with their radical politics, where most of the subreddits are actively taken over by similar power mods who push their radical ideologies, and where any attempts to evade this stuff and simply use the website can get you permanently banned from the service.
Imagine spotify, but if you listen to the wrong songs, you get banned from other random artists, and if you try to work around this you just get banned outright from spotify.
No thanks.
In that case, app developers have several options:
* start showing users ads, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit
* start charging a monthly fee for the app, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit
* some combination of these two (e.g. pay a subscription for ad-free use)
Sure, Reddit could make this easier for app developers, but isn't it all basically the same thing at the end of the day? Reddit wants (or needs? I have no idea what their financials look like) to make a certain amount of money per-user or per page view. Apps take home ~100% of their profits currently, and make Reddit ~nothing. So Reddit is pricing in a profit rate into API access.
I mean, just to look at Apollo, they have 166K ratings on the Apple App Store, and surely far more users than that. Reddit wants $20M a year from them. That's high, maybe too high, but how does it compare to the value of (say) a million users a year on the official Reddit app? If Apollo switched to a subscription model on which they charged $1 a month to users, would they be able to pay Reddit's API fees? (Assuming those API fees would drop by at least 50% after non-paying users quit using Apollo.)
The issue is that the actual numbers are closer to 2,000%, not 80%. [0]
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
- Reddit is charging the equivalent of 20x its published revenue per user for the API.
- The new API agreements ban the display of any advertising by API users. (Apollo did not show ads, but other third-party clients did, and Reddit claims the low quality of ads was harming Reddit by association.)
- Charging $5/month would be break-even given the API pricing, and only for new customers. Apollo would still have to serve earlier subscribers at a huge loss. API fees would certainly not “drop by 50%” — the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users, so the average API usage per customer would _increase_.
There's a lot of strange stuff happening in your comment. On the one hand, let's take for granted that Reddit is charging 20x its revenue per average user for the API. But that's just the average user; as you yourself point out "the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users". Surely they are worth much more to Reddit than the average, extremely casual user?
The underlying problem explained in the post is that the author pre-sold access to Reddit through an app to users, while this access was actually conditioned on the continuing availability of access to the Reddit API. No doubt this does put the author in an uncomfortable position! Given that the current plan is to shut down the app anyway, surely cancelling active subscriptions should also be on the table? Subscribers are going to lose access to Reddit through Apollo either way! So realistically, what we're talking about here is whether $5/month is a reasonable price point for power users. My answer is... maybe?
I think my instinct is to say that this is all ultimately the place where negotiations are supposed to happen. Reddit needs to go from making zero dollars off the API to making something. Is what they want to charge too high? Probably so. But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
Is that the case? Every reaction I have seen has been to the magnitude of the price, which is much, much, much more than what Reddit makes off of users
A text website is easy to run.
Its greed that they got here. They made choices, and then as a consequence of those choices they made choices that are significantly reducing the value they provide to their users. Its enshittification, its killing the golden goose, its destroying a public good for the benefit of investors who don't care about anything other than making a return.
The worst part is the investors don't care about anything other than making the numbers look good in the short term so they can dump their investment onto other investors. Its like all of corporate america decided to watch The Wire and go "Oh see how they're pumping up the numbers to make them look good for the mayor, but not actually solving crime? THAT should be our business plan!". Providing value is a side effect of making money, on the false equivalence that making money means you're providing value, so therefore making more money means you're providing more value.
Wikipedia is pretty fantastic. Signal is pretty great. I'm pretty happy with NPR. Archive.org makes me happy.
Appeal to people with money (the professional class) and then beg.
I feel like the next great social media platform will result from a rich person disillusioned by reddit (a Bryan Acton type) creating a platform resistant to "next quarters profit"-ism.
So ultimately they want 3rd party to use subscription model to ultimately get worse experience.
I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is really beyond the pale.
From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?
And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good.
Edit: not to mention Christian's full-time job has just been ended by this policy change. How especially and thoughtlessly cruel to now also make him out to be an extortionist liar, and for nothing really.
I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.
https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255714/reddit-app-dau-w...
Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless
Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.
Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?
Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.
As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.
I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.
In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.
Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019768/us-retailers-app...
I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.
The app sucks.
I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to
Apparently all five of them use my little web browser extension with Reddit-specific features, requested by users.
But I can guarantee that your estimate is totally wrong.
I know reddit is pushing it's all but even that is not 3th party apps.
I just hope they don't get rid of old.reddit.com
For me I will continue to use reddit as I have before.
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo
1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat
2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App
A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit
3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper
You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.
Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.
And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.
Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good
likely untrue. its not just 3rd party apps it affects. it changes api access for anything using the API
for instance modtools will be affected which means literally everyone can be affected desktop or not https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/12rt5f8/how_wil...
some subreddits make heavy use of bots
these are all going to be hugely affected
Yeah, but that adage has never been true. It's just something said by people who get bad press to make themselves feel better.
Reddit is not a bank account
I argue bases on them but they do not matter to me.
I do not use a 3th party App. For me it makes sense. But if they lied they will hurt themselves anyway
Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.
The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.
plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:
If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.
you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)
voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.
Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.
But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.
So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.
It is when you're about to restate what I've said...
> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term
Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?
> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?
> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either
> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO
> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people
Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"
It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.
My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.
I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.
It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.
In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.
To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.
If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.
Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.
Reddit won’t work without API access… it just turns into a 4Chan-like cesspool over night without auto moderation.
After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."
That one is not downvoted currently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203733
Sometimes posts get downvotes "in the noise"; I've had some of my posts go to -1 or even -2 before jumping to >30. It happens; people have axes to grind, think you're stupid for asking a question, etc. and by chance sometimes they cluster just after you posted. Don't assign too much value to it; it's very rare that I see a normal on-topic question like that downvoted.
That's not what made Reddit seem like a cesspool to me. It was the commenters.
Mods can be great, and many of them are. But... there's plenty of bad ones out there that make participating in some communities stifling at best.
I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.
Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.
This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.
Oh --- wow --- another SNI clause!
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
But he will be the person to increase revenue anyway.
Because he can now say that whatever app survived this is now paying for it instead.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.
That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
Hmmm ...
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.
You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.
Nuke reddit (only on the edge extension store it looks like) is giving their frontends a workout.
They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream.
For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO)
the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business.
If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc.
In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams.
To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.
A coordinated blackout on Reddit to protest the new Ugandan anti lgbt legislation wouldn't make as much sense or be as effective. There are regularly posts voted to the front page of reddit about these new laws and other human rights issues and what you might be able to do to help if interested.
These different issues don't have to be in competition and aren't analogous to each other.
That's an effective end-run on Godwin's law. Well played, sir.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand, and to be frank, I get enough LGBTQ propaganda firehosed at me every other which way, thank you very much.
--- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat.
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat. ---
Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million."
> Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.
(for the record, I almost feel like he's in the right to do so. Still weird how this is being presented)
It seems like he was trying to invoke a sort of ironic use of quiet down to ease the situation, but ironic extortion is still extortion.
The alternative is that he has no choice but to shut down the app, given that they've announced what the price will be 30 days before it's introduction. Even if he'd said nothing there would have been a shitstorm; the timing would be obvious.
Reasonable notice of the price increase would have given 3rd party developers time to monetise and meet the new costs. A more reasonable price could have been borne by 3rd party apps with very little fuss. Making API access a premium Reddit feature would have put even more money in Reddit's pocket. Buying out the 3rd party apps would have been unpopular but would give Reddit the appearance of being less incompetent, underhanded, and duplicitous.
Instead, Reddit made literally the worst possible choice in this situation: alienating their users and the moderators that do most of the work on the platform.
It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.
Of course this was a threat. It wasn't a language issue. And the post-hoc explanation was nonsense. It was an obvious and indisputable threat.
And it’s even more amazing when people think they are smarter “than the average” and go the exact opposite way just because, failing a proper evaluation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0
I think that interpretation is incorrect and based on Christian's attitude towards the whole thing. More likely it's projection on the part of Reddit's CEO.
In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.
I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.
And do you think if Steve had made this offer, would we have even heard a second of this recording?
I mean, come on guys. He literally said "I can make it easy on you," named a price, and then clarified that he was mostly joking.
edit: Thank you for catching that! I've now changed "Steve" with "Steve's side."
It was not Steve on the call, it was an unnamed Reddit employee. Christian makes this clear in his post.
The misinterpretation came from the ‘quieting down’ expression, which referred to the API usage (I think quite obviously).
instead of your thought experiment, I'd request you just pose your impartial take on the most charitable view for Steve and explain why in that view it was a reasonable act of good leadership for him to make these comments. Otherwise I don't think we're really talking about the same thing.
You've quoted the transcript elsewhere for people to "decide for themselves" and I'm not sure how you could be convinced we all did in fact read it and already did, and just don't agree with you.
There's a common error where, because one believes they have been aggressed upon, they can behave as if they actually have been aggrieved without actually examining realistic positions of actual evidence. I've seen this sort of thing happen in a variety of circumstances. Whether or not the Apollo developer intended to threaten or not doesn't actually change the behavior of the person who took whatever was said as a threat, and acting in a reconciliatory manner when one feels threatened is actually a very reasonable thing to do.
You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.
If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.
And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.
Christian: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
I just listened to your audio link several times, and I totally disagree that it sounded like a threat.
Also, the call was not with Steve, as Christian explained:
> Have you talked to CEO Steve Huffman about any of this?
> I requested a call to talk to Steve about some suggestions I had, his response was "Sorry, no. You can give name-redacted a ping if you want."
I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."
That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.
Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.
It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.
The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.
To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.
They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Reliance-based_estopp...
At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.
The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!
No, but sarcasm is a tool and using it carries its own meaning, especially in negotiations.
Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
Days afterward, spez got on a conference call and falsely claimed that Christian was blackmailing him. An employee of Reddit itself affirmed that he said it in a summary of the call they posted to a (private) sub of high-level moderators, replicated here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
(The summary in the main thread was written by members of the community on the call, the comment I linked is Reddit’s own summary.)
Reddit has also repeated the same claim off-the-record to multiple journalists.
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
edit: just read that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248834
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.
I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.
Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response
This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)
He also spearheaded entirely killing off reasonably sized and loud portions of the community - love them or hate them, r/The_Donald was a massive, advertisable bloc of users.
Bit soon to whitewash history.
Uh, no. Turns out that there's a noticeable percentage of Americans who are white men for whom education is apparently not relevant, but they're far from a majority - they're just obnoxiously loud and in your face.
And I'm not going to say that they're dumb, but it's undeniable that approximately half of people in the USA are of below-average intelligence.
Think of the average Mexican, the most average you can picture. Now think that half of the population is WORSE than that (in terms of education, culture and "dont give a shit about you")
Its frankly scary to realize the situation of at least half of the world.
In the US, the male to female ratio is roughly 97 to 100. This means that in most areas of the country, there are slightly more females than males.
White men make up 31% of the US population.
Just under 90% of Americans have a high school diploma or GED: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
A year of high school history about how the south actually were totally the good guys with slavery and it wasn't that bad has turned out to not be the wonderful enlightenment we should strive for.
What are they buying? What would be advertised to them, and by whom?
I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.
I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.
I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.
That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/...
And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that.
I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with.
likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.
Not against a private company, no. Reddit is still owned by Conde-Nast, I believe. What to do with it is up to them.
Also in general *employees* don't bring shareholder lawsuits. Even if you own significant stock, getting fired for suing your boss is usually a losing proposition.
I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.
It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?
How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn't seem possible.
> Why not just increase the price of Apollo?
> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.
> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.
> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.
Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.
This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.
The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
Nobody really cares about your opinion on him or a monthly subscription; he explicitly said it's not going to happen and at the end of the day that's his decision to make, not yours.
He doesn't even need to give a reason for shutting down. It's his personal project to manage and he's the only one who's ever worked on it.
It's also clear you haven't read the article, because he explicitly calls out a bunch of criticisms you have of him directly.
> Isn't this your fault for building a service reliant on someone else?
> To a certain extent, yes. However, I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I've made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."
> Another portion of the call:
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023. Me: "Fair enough." Reddit: "And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way."
> Your initial post in April sounded quite optimistic. Are you dumb?
> In hindsight, kinda yeah. Many of the other developers and folks I talked to were much less optimistic than I was, but I legitimately had great interactions with Reddit for many years prior to last week (they were kind, communicative, gave me heads up of changes), so when they said they were aiming to have pricing that would be fair and based in reality, I honestly believed them. That was foolish of me in hindsight, and maybe could have had a different outcome if I was more aggressive in the beginning. Sorry. /canadian
> (And to be clear, they did indeed say this. They used the word "substantive" and I wanted to make sure we had the same definition of something "having a firm basis in reality and therefore important, meaningful, or considerable")
> > Reddit: "That's exactly right. And I think, thankfully, the word is exactly the right one. It's going to have a firm basis in reality. I also just looked it up. We're going to try to be as transparent as we can."
Reading this with 15 years of corporate experience the developer was at best naive. In corporate speak Reddit is completely consistent in their actions and words. It's a crappy situation and I'm sure the developer is a great person and I agree Reddit did them dirty but also that's how these things work. You don't take dependencies on third parties without a lawyer and a contract.
> There's not gonna be any change on it.
Nobody can make this promise, those are just words to make you feel good.
> There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
Plans can be made quickly. Action can be taken without a plan. What is the guarantee on lead time?
> And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way.
Define improvement. Improved for who?
> It's going to have a firm basis in reality.
I have no doubt that Reddit based the API pricing on them making money on it. We can debate if they got it right.
> We're going to try to be as transparent as we can.
Try is a weasel word, this sentence is meaningless. Zero transparency can be provided and still meet the standard of being "as transparent as possible". "Try" here even gives them the opportunity to be less transparent than possible. The Glomar defense ("We can neither confirm nor deny") is "as transparent as possible" and actually meets a higher standard than Reddit promised here because the CIA didn't just "try", they successfully provided the most possible transparency (almost none).
> I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you.
Y'all need to find a better hobby. As per his own words, he also clearly realizes that in hindsight he should have been more pessimistic. But that's all moot now. The past is in the past. Pointing it out is not going to do anything.
Reddit could simply treat them reasonably and things would be fine. There's no need for favoritism, they just need to stop being actively harmful. And part of that is the fees (they're not reasonable).
It's like, I know this funded company that's doing a lot of work using intel SGX, if intel kill it, about 80 people lose the jobs and several million in VC goes up in smoke. It's insane to me that people are building businesses that can be killed by 3rd parties that they have no hope of influencing, and have no contracts with.
Another chapter of the internet drama concludes, I suppose. I wish them all the best and I'll be curious to see if reddit survives.
How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? Or a business having to renew their contract with the power company?
You pay for your cloud provider...
First being Reddit wouldn't have suddenly needed to stop supporting 3rd party apps for free - apps that only cost Reddit money and generate no income. If the API made Reddit money, instead of costing them money, there would be no need for a sudden change. The "suddenness" of this change is due, in no small part, to the cost of supporting basically free-loading 3rd party apps that consume resources but offer nothing in exchange.
Secondly, Apollo would have formed a business model that supported paying for API access, be it monthly subscriptions, freemium, etc. The current model of pay-once-use-forever is simply unsustainable (on an obvious level) - and the $12.99 annual subscription equally so. The Apollo model, as it was, required free API access.
Even if Apollo had been paying for API access all along, and Reddit decided to suddenly hike the prices - Apollo would have been in a better position to raise their own prices accordingly, and would have had a userbase more accepting of paying.
Paying for API access also compels the business to be more efficient in their calls. As it was, there was little-to-no incentive to operate large content caching on your own servers/services, etc. I have seen, but do not know their credibility, that Apollo was not very efficient in it's API calls and essentially hammered the API far more than was necessary. If you're not paying for it, why would you bother designing a more efficient system?
The API fees were inevitable. More are coming - be sure of that, as corporations tighten their figurative belts and look for ways to stop bleeding money.
And the "hammering" is addressed and strongly countered in the article.
Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications...
$12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low.
$12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.
If the polling was the bulk of the traffic they could just remove that feature.
And there's no way the compute burden is an entire dollar to do 4000 requests.
Specifically, the $12.99/year model is floating a ton of free users, in addition to paying for server resource usage. None of that $12.99 currently was allocated to paying Reddit, and we know Apollo calculated an approximate cost of $2.50 per user per month with the new API fees.
This $2.50 fee seems to align costs with what we can reasonably expect Reddit to earn per user on their platform. Reddit prices Premium membership at $5.99 monthly, which among other benefits removes all ads. $5.99 likely indicates a $2-3 profit when all ads are removed but user engagement remains constant.
The typical mildly engaged Reddit users probably easily spends an hour a day looking at ads via the app - so while the math may be fuzzy, it seems like Reddit possibly based their API pricing off something like this.
At a minimum, that is $2.50 x 12 = $30 of cost annually per user. This means all users need to pay Apollo $30 a year to break even on just Reddit fees, or some subset of users needs to pay a lot more than $30 a year to float a bunch of free users. Apollo has other expenses too (labor, servers, etc.).
Even if the API fees were reduced 80% down to $0.50 per user per month, that's still $6 annually per user - and Apollo has a lot of free users.
All of this is to say, the $12.99/year membership for Apollo was never going to work with any API fees.
I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.
These things are different though, we must admit. Imgur used to be much bigger, but today hardly pulls the same audience volume that Reddit or Twitter do, for instance. I don't think Imgur could get away with API pricing like Twitter is, and Reddit will soon be.
> I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.
Given the number of ads you see while browsing via the official app, I would peg it around $2 per user per month (which mostly aligns with my previous statements and estimates, as well as with API pricing), for someone that uses Reddit for 1-2 hours daily. I suspect, without evidence and can be wrong, that 1-2 hours daily is typical for a mildly engaged Reddit user.
Apollo doesn't need to drop free users - they need to get revenue from them. If not directly, then via ads. Although that seems antithetical to what Apollo was trying to create... but reality has come knocking.
He probably could, but not in 30 days.
> but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
Or chose not to.
Reddit will begin charging for access to its API (nytimes.com) 303 points by alexrustic 51 days ago | 339 comments --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617763
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... was posted April 19th.
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates
> ANNOUNCEMENTS Staff • April 18, 2023
> ...
> To ensure developers have the tools and information they need to continue to use Reddit safely, protect our users’ privacy and security, and adhere to local regulations, we’re making updates to the ways some can access the Reddit Data API:
> We are introducing a new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.
The prices themselves were announced May 30th. I guess if you’re feeling generous, that would be 32 days notice.
He had notice there would be a change and was explicitly told:
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
There is absolutely no actionable information there, and everything they said indicated that it wouldn’t be an unreasonable change.
30 days is ample notice to Apollo's users.
Apollo has had since April to figure out how to make a monthly subscription work, on a technical level. Now... having done nothing smart in the meantime, are left with very little time to make the changes. That is 100% on Apollo.
You shift the blame like there’s no tomorrow. At this point you either work for them, or are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to defend them. That’s the only reasonable explanation for why you’d be pushing the blame so hard.
Even if he had a full system set up in a month and a half (a fairly tight deadline), 32 days is an unreasonably short amount of time to make any sort of material change to your terms, let alone raising the cost exorbitantly.
Hilariously, your first comment wishes people would pledge to pay for Apollo. How we got from there to… this bullshit is beyond me. At least it only took a few hours to show your true colors.
Your "32 days" timeline you keep going on about is false no matter what way you look at it.
Apollo has known since April API pricing was coming, and there was no way their existing "pay once, use it forever" or even the $12.99 per year model was going to be sustainable - particularly given how many free users they float monthly.
Not knowing the exact fee in advance is completely irrelevant. The infrastructure needed to be built to support a monthly subscription model, freemium models, or whatever they needed to do to pivot and remain in business.
100% of the reason people use Apollo is because of the data and community Reddit has built. Apollo basically leached off that data, and made a profit while doing so. Any sound business operator would understand and plan for risks that endanger their business. Apollo failed to take action in a timely manner, and failed to mitigate risks to it's business.
Now they're being asked to pay for the API access that makes Apollo's business possible - and even if the API fees were 1/4 of the proposed amount, Apollo was going to need to change their model. That is the point you, and many others seem to be missing - Apollo was not going to survive paying anything for API access - Apollo had no plan.
I cannot make it any more clear - Apollo failed to plan for, and mitigate risks and failed to take corrective actions in time to save their business.
Apollo was run like a hobby side-project - not a business.
Not everything has to be run like a business, you understand that right? You’re acting like this is a big when it’s a feature.
This is a project run by a single person. And has been, since its creation. On purpose. You clearly don’t like that for whatever idiotic reason and your entire premise hinges on the fact that you think every single project in the world needs to be run like a perfect megacorp. Guess what? The world doesn’t work like that.
The rest of your BS has already been debunked. Multiple times. By multiple people. You restating it continues to be just that, regardless how many times you insist on it.
If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your obvious shilling for no discernible reason.
Sure, that is reasonable. But then the victim card cannot be played when the business fails to act accordingly, no?
> The rest of your BS has already been debunked
Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.
> If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job.
Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.
What business?
It’s not a fucking business. Stop insisting it is. We literally just went over this.
> Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.
The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death, and that multiple people have pointed out your straight up lies should tell you plenty about who is dealing in “alternative facts”.
> Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.
Yeah that hasn’t seemed to work with you for the past half day, so I don’t understand why you would expect people to keep trying when you clearly don’t bother with things like “taking things to heart”, “having a discussion in good faith”… or really “reading”.
Next time, stick to actual facts and don’t pretend everything is a business that needs to be maximally efficient.
Apollo was/is a business, handles hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and has a huge customer base. We cannot make up definitions and then insist others agree.
> We literally just went over this.
You mean, you did. Sorry to not play into your fantasy universe - out here in the real world, shouting something louder doesn't make it true.
> The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death
You make the mistake of placing stock in whatever button people click on a website - usually based on emotion, but not always. Either way, Internet Points are not real...
You may not like the facts - but that's why they are facts. They do not change even if you hate them. Calm down, re-read the original posts, and then we can discuss things more civilly.
https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/
Apparently Apollo has paid subscriptions as a way to finance it.
He would have to turn off the functionality if there is no subscription in order to avoid spending too much for API calls.
Currently this subscription is described as:
> second is Apollo Ultra, the highest tier, which includes everything in Apollo Pro plus additional features. Apollo Ultra is a subscription offering of $1.49 USD per month (or $12.99/year, or a lifetime unlock option is offered in the app) and is a subscription due to options within it having ongoing monthly costs to me, the developer.
The approach would be to do a subscription price change for Apollo Ultra from $1.49/month to $10/month (or whatever the math works out to be - I'm using $10 as an example).
About subscription price changes - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252
> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.
Everyone who is subscribed would get an alert and no payment would go through.
However, the code is already there to work as a subscription app.
---
I would also draw attention to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/141mjij/lets_tal...
> My last thing I wanted to address, and I might be burying the lede a bit here, is some of misleading, or downright inaccurate and untruthful claims that the admins have made in regards to these changes..
> > Apollo could reduce their cost by 3.5x if they were as efficient as these other 3P apps.
> So I have not dug into Apollo specifically as I didn't have an iOS rooted device handy. BUT, my guess as to the "increased calls" is due to them more frequently checking if a user has messages, and/or less caching of comment sections and more re-pulling them for the latest on navigation. Could Apollo not check for messages as frequently? Sure.. Reddit is Fun used to check for messages on any refresh it seems, and they sometime somewhat recently seem to have changed that and for game day threads which I frequently use it for, I often miss responses to my comments for a very long time because it seems to only do it now every so often.
> ...
> Edit: it was brought to my attention that Apollo does push notifications for messages even when you aren't using the app. This is almost certainly the main discrepancy between it and other apps API usage. And it could have been a back end change then related to the polling for those notifications that caused a reduction in API calls
Some of the architecture for that is described https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...
> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so...
Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say.
The relationship is broken.
Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.
HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.
That's entirely on Apollo...
Monetisation of social networks only works via ads/tracking.
You're just being an unconstructive critic.
And you have no evidence it's temporary.
Right - and in 10 years everyone will still be using Reddit, Apollo will just be a distant memory, and nobody will give any thought to the API pricing model.
Just reality...
The 30 day window was not enough time to rectify that and would cost him 50k in the first month to cover the diff. The author suggested he needed at least 3 months to implement changes and switch at least some portion of yearly subscribers to a higher price.
If they came out with a reasonable set of conditions to do API access, people would be a lot less upset. But they didn't. And those API fees are guaranteed to go only up, up, and further up.
Time to get out of reddit when the gettin's good.
https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
Well, no, options don't make them shareholders unless they're exercised. RSUs don't make them shareholders at all, because they're not actually stock (they're stock units).
Reddit's cap table is probably a mess at this point, so I imagine that some current employees are also shareholders, but I don't know if all are, and RSUs don't make them shareholders.
What? As the grandparent implied, when RSUs vest, they turn into shares of stock, which makes the employee a shareholder.
Most RSUs for private companies (especially those issued by companies as old as Reddit) are double trigger, not single trigger. They don't turn into stock at vesting because that would be a taxable event. They turn into stock after the second trigger, which is a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition).
Yes, I said that in my original post.
Those 3rd party apps are leeches that are playing surprised_pikachu.jpeg when the blood supply is cut.
The simple fact that this guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions shows the insane amount of money he made off of the back of Reddit.
Hypocritical much?
Are shipping companies leeches in your worldview?
Correct.
He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.
Like, I can't remember a time that there _hasn't_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that's for sure.
I'm sure a few will but, I can't name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it's just a job and pays money. And pays well.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/zynga-to-employees-give...
Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.
This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.
So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats & Reddit getting the approaches covered, & this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content & in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.
Oh please. Let's be honest, this is not financially going to hurt the company.
It would definitely impact my view of the company as an investor.
An old-school investor would be fuming right now, but VCs only care about IPOs and they probably blessed this strategy already.
That's been the economy in the US for two decades now.
Guess no more bathroom reddit for me. 4chan still works.
Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.
§205 : https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-05-20-28/KAPITTEL_2-...
EDIT: See now that he was in Canada when it was recorded, and they have the same kind of laws.
You can sue anyone for anything anywhere, but I cannot imagine the Canadian police being interested in a citizen doing something lawful in Canada if the California (or wherever) cops call to complain be broke a Californian law.
And I can even less imagine a civil action demanding damages or court actions in Canada for doing something legal there. It would be like a Saudi company suing a US driving school that teaches women.
I don't think there's a there there as far as liability or worry. IANAL, of course.
Reddit has never provided access to its ads to third-parties, and now third-party apps are banned from showing any advertising at all.
Why?
You are right that there is no agreement of course, but the way they're treating the dev sounds, in the most charitable explanation, extremely disorganized and a bit rude.
Like Apollo. He could build a backend himself.
Subreddits are run by volunteer moderators and are entirely at the whim of reddit. If any substantial subreddit tried to shut down or go dark permanently reddit would just remove the moderators responsible.
There are lots of permanently dark/private subreddits out there that have been "lost" to some dispute or another.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/144jp3w/_/
I'm not throwing in the towel like most people are, but I will just relegate myself to viewing it only in a desktop browser. We'll see how long old.reddit.com lasts after this
One day I looked at it, not logged in.
Turned out there was a post, "pinned by moderators", at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.
I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.
I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.
Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!
Bloody hell.
At that point I knew Reddit could not be trusted.
*their sub.
It's my understanding that Apollo users make up a fraction of a percent of active users. Reddit almost certainly doesn't care. Fact is they've taken in over a billion in funding and aren't really returning a profit, charging for API access starts moving them in the right direction though.
Why would he lose his job? Realistically, it's a smart business move to monetise their users. It's Reddit, them being pissy about having to pay is part of the course. There is a reason they're the lowest valued social media users.
>EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
What would he have a claim for? He wasn't paying for the API. He could pay for the API and continue to operate. You can't sue someone because they stopped letting you use their services for free. You sure can't sue a business for asking your for-profit company to pay expenses.
Realistically, these app users would have made tens if not hundreds of thousands a month if they just added subscription model to their app and only had paying customers. These apps could still exist and be extremely profitable for a one-man apps.
Simple maths $5 a month subscription $2.50 to reddit $1.50 to apple and $1 to the app developer. Say 10% of their users convert which seems very reasonable considering the reception a price increase to $6.99 seem to get on the Apollo subreddit. That would have been $100,000 a month profit. But instead, they shut it down.
This is the inevitable outcome of a human who has never been told no or punished for their misdeeds. This is what it looks like for a spoiled child to run a company.
We have a lot of that lately.
Tech employees are somewhat notorious for not enforcing their shareholder rights. Most companies, for example, ignore their books & records requirements under Delaware law, or force private sales to occur at terms favourable to management and the Board’s friends.
Voting rights are relatively irrelevant for minority holders. It's all the other rights, granted by contract and more importantly law, that tech employees can be generally regarded on to not exercise (or bullied into not exercising by management).
Is there a running list of subs (over a certain high number of subscribers, to keep it focused) that aren't in the blackout list? That would be interesting to see. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, at least while the API is still free...
I paid for the app years ago - it was $5 or so and I don't expect to get anything back. That's just how the game works.
I know he also had some sort of monthly subscription - it seemed quite absurd for whatever additional trivial features it provided, but then again there apparently was some sort of Apollo fanboy group who got a lot of excitement out of new app logos, which seemed to be the main updates in the last few years, even at the expense of serious bugs that lingered for months.
I'd assume those subscriptions would just stop being charged going forward. So again, who is getting $250k in refunds?
Furthermore, if he is refunding that much money, I wonder what kind of revenue and profits he was pulling in? I had kind of assumed he was making a very good living (deservedly - it was a good app) - maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but now I'm wondering if he was making a order of magnitude more than that...
I bet he was making enough that he didn't need another job but not significantly more than that.
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
> Wow. Because my memory is that you didn't take it as a threat, and you even apologized profusely when you admitted you misheard it.
Wow, I didn't know it'd gotten that bad.
Edit: Maybe keep an eye on what they say to catch them performing material securities fraud? Wayback early, wayback often!
Edit 2: Damage control mode: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce... (r/reddit: Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API [Locked])
lol
Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.
> need to show reddit ads
I've always thought about this too but I've heard this is a non starter for advertising companies, most companies want to know exactly where their ads are being served before putting money on the table.
~current Tilderino
I assume someone already snapped it; since no permutations of the above work
Maybe fewer global social platforms and less time spent on them will do a lot of people more good.
I'm guessing Reddit gets less global and ubiquitous, in the same way Twitter is more of a slice of a niche crowd now too. Maybe that's okay.
As in: Maybe Lemmy has bad UX which is why it craters adoption.
Spending some resources on an Apollo version with Lemmy support sounds like a good idea assuming the dev time can be recouped.
Since Apollo is a paid app I think there's a more direct path to financial relevance than number of eyes in ads. :)
So far, there's been attempts to spin up new servers to mitigate issues on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml while others are looking to Kbin which also federates with Lemmy but uses separate software.
You are free to use what ever you want, and that’s the point. This removes everything but the Reddit app.
- Half the time, clicking on a push notification takes me to the front page instead of the post that was interesting enough to click on. And then the notification is gone, and I can't get to said post easily at that point
- Sometimes, there's two articles that show up on the main screen that I want to read. I have to pick which one I want to read more, because there's a 50/50 shot that when I hit back, I will get a fully refreshed home page instead of being taken back to where it was.
- Overall it feels less natural to navigate through than the Reddit web interface, let alone the 'classic' (old.reddit.com) user interface.
- Probably not related to the design of the mobile app, but the hostile behavior of web reddit on mobile, constantly trying to force me into their subpar mobile app, is also irritating and painful.
I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.
Steve Huffman is not a good person.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
It is always remarkable to see what an absolute bankruptcy of ethics some corporate leaders are burdened with, and a relief to see the consequences hit them in the face.
No spez you utter cunt. The data is not yours. It's my posts on your website. Your own fucking terms say I grant you a right to copy it, not that it's fucking yours.
> We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrow
Is that a threat, lol?
>Blackout
> We respect your right to protest – that’s part of democracy.
>This situation is a bit different, with some mods leading the charge, some users pressuring mods. We’re trying to work through all of the unique situations.
>Big picture: We are tolerant, but also a duty to keep Reddit online.
>If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue. That’s a loss for everyone.
AKA: If you protest we will remove you from the mod team for that sub, and force the sub back to public.
What's the definition of a mod tool?
If a mod uses Apollo to keep up with the posts on their subreddit, is Apollo going to be exempt?
Or should Apollo pivot, add more moderation features and rebrand itself as a mod tool?
https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
It just makes no sense otherwise.
At least have your facts straight.
I can buy that Selig's words may have been intended, at some level, as a jokey hypothetical to draw a point into contrast. That is, he meant it as (fleshed-out sympathetic rewording): "If this really is just about a $20M drain to you, it'd be a dead-simple & efficient solution to pay $10M to make me go away quietly forever. But of course I wouldn't ask for that & you wouldn't do it, thus this isn't really just about solving your $20M/year cost center, but other mutually-agreeable futures."
But Selig's actual wording in the clip is exactly how people coyly/semi-deniably imply that they be handed various kinds of "go-away" or "hush" money. (That includes arrangements that might not technically be "blackmail" as a legal definition, but feel like vernacular 'blackmail' to laypeople or business-negotiators.)
Selig's opening words, of this audio clip, absolutely sound like an actionable offer "pay me this specific cash amount & your troubles – both technical/competitive & in terms of any ruckus I can raise in public – go away." I mean, here's Selig's exact words:
"Uh, hey, I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20M a year, you cut me a check for $10M, and we can both skip off into the sunset. 6 months of use, we're good. That's mostly a joke."
Until "that's mostly a joke", & depending on earlier context/levels-of-mutual-trust, that sounds like a specific offer to do whatever eases things for Reddit in return for $10M cash.
And even after "that's mostly a joke", the 'mostly' leaves open that maybe something of this shape is legitimately in Selig's mind as a resolution.
Wait a second, isn't that exactly what Reddit is doing by charging for API access with thirty days notice?
This is an offer to sell Apollo. The opening stage of a negotiation. There’s nothing wrong with saying this, at all.
The word choice, to my ears, more implies a "just gimme cash to make me shut up & disappear" attitude, or at least openness to torpedoing every other goal as long as the cash prize is big enough.
I further think Selig's rush to qualify it as "mostly a joke" is evidence that he noticed, in the moment, that what he just said sounded a bit brutally grubby. Maybe by this point he was getting angry his other hints that he mainly wanted an attractive buyout weren't being met by serious offers.
As I mentioned, such a tactic could be far from what the law declares as actionable 'blackmail' but still feel like a tough, "play ball or else" shakedown on the other side of the negotiation – the sort of thing people commonly describe, though somewhat figuratively/hyperbolically, as 'blackmail'.
Is there anything "wrong" with that style of making joking payoff offers to "skip off into the sunset"? Well, in negotiations, as long as you're not breaking the law or sabotaging your longer-run reputation, what's 'right' is largely what gets you what you want, both for now and in enduring relationships.
Did Selig get what he wanted? Does he come off as a desirable & trustworthy counterparty in other future collaborations & negotiations?
I think he's got a legitimate beef with Reddit in many dimensions, but at the same time this audio clip doesn't make him seem super clear & fair in his communications.
The Proposal was to have reddit by Apollo and monetize it, all the talk about going quiet doesn't make sense.
Really a thinly veiled attempt to ask for a buy out. The guy only needs to charge his users 2.50 more to make up for lost ad revenue, but instead he chose to burn down Reddit.
TBH that doesn't sound menacing to me...however you misinterpret it, it feels more like making a deal than blackmailing. Granted, even taking money to let a publicly discussed issue go away is more akin to a settlement.
1. You avoid all of this drama. Christian makes a post that says, "Reddit offered me a lot of money and I said yes because I want to have a lot of money. It's been a pleasure working with them and it's been a pleasure developing Apollo for you. Peace out." Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
2. Reddit could rather enshittify Apollo gradually, and/or fold Apollo's subscription model into Reddit's own model to maintain a premium power-user experience. It is an absurdly well-polished app, even if you added advertisements to it. It is a better user experience if the app gets worse slowly than if it disappears all at once and forces everyone to migrate to a new app. Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
[1]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
edit: I still think it was the wrong way to approach the situation. Consider this from reddit's perspective, it would only make sense for Reddit to pay for the traffic if they think they would lose it if it Apollo went away, but then it's not opportunity cost.
It doesn't make the change any better of a look for reddit, and you can certainly question whether it's true that Apollo users would just use reddit, but if you accept that then I don't think you can claim the moral high ground if you offer to accept payment to "make it go away". The developer should have approached this from the perspective of the value that Apollo offers users and reddit instead of the cost to make the problem go away. I imagine the dev doesn't accept that Apollo users would just switch over, but they shouldn't have made their statement in those terms then, and I think that was a mistake.
Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.
I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian's offer is for Apollo to "go away quietly", as in he personally won't make noise about it. I'm not honestly sure that there's another sound way to interpret this.
Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It's not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.
This 'clarification' that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will "go quiet", doesn't make sense, because Reddit doesn't need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.
What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that "Christian will shut down the app and go quietly" is the only answer that makes sense in context.
We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren't necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: "Vote for our initiative or else we'll stop funding you and fund your opposition"? No, almost certainly not. They'd say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.
Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he's offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It's not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. "Buy me out or else I'm going to cause even more public fuss about this". The way that it's communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
yes, that is the threat. Yes, it is also a business transaction. The two are not mutually exclusive.
black·mail:
demand money or another benefit from (someone) in return for not revealing compromising or damaging information about them.
They're buying Apollo. Then they can shut it down and make the app stop making API requests.
That means Reddit entered in bad faith - at that point you can't fault Apollo for reacting to that bad faith in any way really, as long as it was legal. You can't be expected to act in good faith if the other party isn't.
So, I still see no blame for Apollo folk (I don't use the app or know who they are before today)
It's bad all around, my friend.
Apps cost them money they could be making in advertising, So they want big money or will cut the apps off. If apps could offer more money than reddit thinks they could make without them, then everyone would be happy, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
If we are being real, Reddit wants Apollo gone. The only definition of fair would be terms both reddit and Apollo mutually agree to, but that isnt going to happen.
Apollo had a good run while it lasted, and I hope the devs walk away with some money to show for it.
Why piss off your userbase by trying to force them back to your inferior option when you could just buy the thing they've clearly shown they prefer and give it to them yourself?
Because Apollow doesnt bring in the revenue but Reddit's user hostile platform does.
The goal isnt to make the users happy or their preference, it is to make money.
If you run a restruant, and the restruant next door gives food away for free, of course diners will prefer it. The problem comes if the place next door is using your kitchen and supplies. Buying the restruant next door doesn't help your problem.
On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it "blackmail" - meaning they're losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can't they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo's costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?
When I negotiate the price on a piece of real estate, I often will include things that I want the owner to fix before closing (this is very common). The implication is "fix this or I won't buy the property".
Is that "blackmail"? Apparently according to Spez it is.
Joke was to offer the app for half the price if the pricing was legitimate, and keep the users.
Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...
Basically, the whole post hinges on the claim that spez was telling internal employees that Christian was making threats. But neither the calls nor the transcript seems to give any details about what exactly spez said. I'm inclined to take Christian's word, but we should all be aware that we are in fact taking him at his word, rather than the claim being proven.
It seems really hard to believe that spez would apologize for misunderstanding him and then immediately tell employees that he was threatening Reddit. This feels like a misunderstanding rather than malicious intent.
> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
This doesn't sound like a transcript. I don't know what it is, but that's not how anyone in a work call would behave. Supposing Apollo did threaten Reddit, why would spez even mention that to the mods? Something's weird.
He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators. He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place. Both are in the OP reddit thread here. Just search for "transcript" in the page.
It's the sort of thing you'd say to mods if you think it will get them off your back.
The part I pasted, right?
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
That's not a transcript. That's a sentence devoid of context. We're now two steps removed -- not only do we need to believe Christian, but Christian needs to believe whatever mod sent that to him. Who's the mod? Why is the mod telling Christian anything? Why was Steve talking to mods about Apollo's threat? None of this makes any sense. I don't think anyone has malicious intent here –– bet you $50 that it turns out to be some weird miscommunication. After all, there's zero benefit for Steve to be doing any of those things, and a whole lot of downside. Ins't a miscomm the more plausible theory?
Ironically, if Christian's claims are unsubstantiated, then he's slandering Steve. But Steve slandering Christian to internal employees is precisely what Christian's so angry about. But why would internal employees break ranks and go tell Christian?
There's something more going on here. I'm not sure what.
> He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place.
That's the point -- all that he's posted is a transcript where Steve says mea culpa. Then he posted some other person's two-sentence "transcript" of Steve badmouthing him. But it's not a transcript; it's weird.
> Me: No, no, I'm sorry. Yeah one more time. I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that's a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too. As is, it's quite difficult.
> Reddit: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think it's… I don't know what you mean by quiet down. I find that to be-
> Me: No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-
> Reddit: I'm going to very straightforward to you too, it sounds like a threat. And I'm just like "Oh interesting". Because one of the things we're trying to do is say "You have been using our API free of cost for many, many years and we have absolutely sanctioned - you have not broken any rules." And now we're changing our perspective for what we're telling you - and I know you disagree with it. That hey, we want to operate on a thing that is financially, you know, footing. And so hopefully you mean something completely different from what I said when you say like "go quietly", I just want to make sure.
> Me: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> Reddit: Oh, like, because you were like, "Hey, if you want this to go away".
> Me: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
> Reddit: Oh, go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry.
> Me: Like it's a very-
> Reddit: Yeah, that's a complete misinterpretation on my end.
> Me: Yeah. No, no, it's all good.
> Reddit: I apologize. I apologize immediately.
> Me: No, no, no, it's all good.
> Reddit: Because what we're hearing in some conversations is folks are, you know, like in other- making threats, and we're like "Hey, that's not a conversation that we want to have". So I immediately apologize.
> Me: Oh, no, no, it's all good. I'm sorry if it sounded like that.
Link to audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
I'm talking about after the call, which is what the central claim of the post hinges on. The claim is that Steve went to internal employees and said that Christian was threatening Reddit. Where's that transcript? There's only two sentences, and those two sentences came from some third party moderator that wasn't even introduced in the story.
Everyone is being hypnotized by the audio recording. But the audio recording doesn't say anything about Steve. The only one who said anything about Steve was the unnamed moderator, which we get no info about beyond two very weird sentences.
EDIT: Ah, https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c... gives the rest of the context.
That was posted 20 hours ago. And yeah, if I were Christian and saw that, I'd probably go nuclear too.
I thought Steve was badmouthing Apollo behind closed doors, and then someone behind those doors went to Christian. But that's not what happened. Steve publicly accused Christian of threatening Reddit – a council meeting counts as public.
Thank you to PrimeMcFly for posting that link! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246777
Well, that's awful. I don't know what Steve was thinking.
Steve, come on. Maybe Apollo shuts down, maybe you figure something out, but this whole thing becomes a lot easier to judge as an outsider if one group starts throwing mud like this. You should know better.
This is from the Apollo developer's own telling of the story:
> As said, a common suggestion across the many threads on this topic was "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal!
If someone said that to me, i.e. "hey, just give me $10 million and I'll stop making things difficult for you," I would interpret that as a threat, even if they denied that it was.
I would love to see someone state clearly:
1. What was Christian actually offering to do in exchange for $10M?
2. What did the Reddit person think that Christian was offering to do in exchange for $10M?
3. How are (1) and (2) different?
The reddit person seems to have thought that Christian was threatening them in some way??? I genuinely don't know what Christian could even have threatened them with. It seems to me they didn't understand the power dynamic at all of a small solo app developer talking to a massive corporation. Maybe they thought he was threatening simply shut his app down for that amount without telling anyone which might have avoided this ruckus? I'm sorry but I genuinely cannot fathom what they thought was going on
1 and 2 are different in that clearly the admin thought Christian was making a threat to their business whereas he was merely calling their bluff and possibly opening himself to business negotiations if reddit actually thought his app was worth that much. Through all this it feels like Christian did not communicate what he wanted effectively (though this seems to have been a throwaway line in a much longer call that got misconstrued gravely) and the admin was simply not equipped at all to handle negotiations
Reddit: If we had all Apollo's users, and showed them ads, we could make $20M/year more than we are making now.
What Christian meant to say: Ok, if that's really true, how about you buy my app and all my users for $10M? Then you can show them all the ads you want. If what you say is true, that's quite a deal for you. But my real point is that I don't believe your $20M number.
What Reddit heard: If you pay me $10M, you can have my app and all my users and I will stop making a fuss. Otherwise, I will badmouth you to my users and the press, encourage boycotts, and otherwise try to force your hand.
This read mostly makes sense to me. The only part I don't get is the part of the call where Christian says:
> I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
If Christian's intention was to sell the app and all its users to Reddit, then the load on the API wouldn't change, the only thing that would change is that Reddit would own it and the users would also see ads. So Apollo wouldn't "go quiet" under this scenario, and I don't understand the comment.
Of course, this is all a deliberate reframing by reddit. Reddit wasn't going to "lose" anything so much as "not get".
For example, I had a boss once that would interpret everything I said as a threat (I had a friendship with the owners of the company).
It's just, stupid, and insulting.
Apollo is fully allowed to make things difficult by complaining on social media that he thinks the pricing is unfair. What is illegal or even unethical about that?
I stopped reading at that point. I probably would have laughed at the suggestion instead of taking it as blackmail though.
Regardless, if they wanted to create a better app they'd do it. They don't want to.
For the scale of Reddit as a company, it's likely a trivial deal; whereas the cross-pollination of ideas and UI/UX learnings could easily be worth more than the cost of collaborating.
Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.
What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.
In retrospect, some of the accounts might have been intended to make the left look extra ridiculous, not sure, but I don't really believe that's true, I've seen people chase enough bad ideas en masse now that I think these were well-meaning people who believed that by participating in this infernal attention mill, they were doing things that would change the world for the better.
Reddit has likewise never been even mediocre at what it's purporting to be, these are all just what happens when people approach the internet, which is one thing, as though it was a super cool television, which is a whole other thing. The illusion of participation and having a voice is really what people are buying with all their attention, because actually having a voice on the actual internet means knowing html at a minimum. Not actually a tall order for anyone who has a couple days and a willingness to do a bit of mental labour, but why bother when you can just post on whichever corporate daemon you favour.
The weirdest thing of all to me, I don't even know how I found this place but it's got some of the best interactions I've had since Usenet died, and I didn't know know what ycombinator was or why it wasn't called hackernews.net or whatever. To learn just this week that the platform is just a service operated by the people behind quite a lot of this VC fuckery, I'm still integrating it, but it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts.
Anyways didn't come to talk about that, came to say, been using Mastodon the last month or so, and I am also having pretty high quality interactions there. Nothing remotely like the idiocy I encountered daily in my Twitter feed. Occasionally a thing that I don't care for, like, I really don't need all the furry porn, holy crap are there ever a lot of very dedicated people servicing the furry market and I'm gonna be looking into that cause I know how to make tails move. But that filters out easy.
I'm on the main instance and I'm looking around at others while I decide whether to just self-host, but I enjoy the scroll with the accounts and hashtags I follow, the quality ranges from boring to amazing, very little annoying, trollish, spammy, Mindset-infected trash comes through my feed, and like I said, the only heavy filtering I've done is the porn.
Best part: I loved Facebook when I first joined and when I started to get discontented was when the default feed stopped being "what you follow in the order they post," and that has never been around since, except notably on reddit I suppose. Nothing wrong with having an algo feed available for discovery, and Mastodon has that, but your feed is just what you follow in the order they post as a default. So you scroll down till you realize you've seen it already, and you know you've seen it all for now and you move on. There is no machine trying to hold your attention, there is just what you asked for. What a concept.
The tech genius hobos, burnouts, and weirdos come here to rub elbows with the Patagucci vest crowd. The guy who manages this place ("dang") seems to tolerate us unwashed types, as long as we don't post polemics. You're not necessarily in the wrong place, but I can see how you might feel outnumbered.
Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.
Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.
There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.
Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.
Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.
It's because of misaligned incentives.
Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.
First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.
First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.
1. "better is subjective" and what reddit's native app is trying to do is "better" for reddit's bottom line. 2. more importantly, there is a case of "good enough". As I'm sure we've seen over the history of the internet, the "better product" doesn't always win. this is 1000x truer for social media. Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives. it lets you scroll, look at pretty pictures, and maybe up/down vote quickly. Anything else to that user is fluff. You can skimp out on a lot of features, even core ones, if those 3 parts are good enough.
The problem with that, if it's true, is that those people are less likely to be the content creators and more likely to be people who come to read what the 'serious' Reddit users post. Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.
Ultimately, Reddit's main work is to serve a small core group of people who post new content, and that content is what draws the rest of the users. They'll need those users to be happy in the first party app. That might be the case already. If it isn't, Reddit are taking a huge risk.
I agree. I guess the gamble here (that historically, usually pays off) is that the casual userbase size is good enough to keep the power users around, who ultimately want visibility. That's the hardest part of the modern internet and why social media survive well past what would be downfalls for any other product.
I'm not going to say Reddit is too big to fail, but I don't think reddit's death will be by a thousand paper cuts. it will heal with new mods as fast as the old ones leave. Whether it whither and rots away over the years with that new modbase is the big question mark.
They are risking the relationship to their army of unpaid cops though. These people are absolutely crucial for maintaining the gentrification of that space. Without them, all the hard work to slowly change the tone towards an ad-friendly and ideologically compliant tune is going to be lost. It is not unlikely, but by no means guaranteed that they can recruit another batch of people wohnst willing to do this for free after ruining the relationship with those who got invested during a time when the company was masquerading itself as a community.
It's a natural consequence.
This seems like half the argument. The other half of the argument is that you could build a federated system of similar efficiency where everybody notifies/queries a central hub decided by convention.
The important-ish distinction is that you don't need as many resources (for polling) if you can generate enough trust that ~everyone is willing to push to you.
(I don't want to get up my own ass here, so to my mind the only thing that matters about "having enough resources to make a better product" is that you have all the content, presumably by crawling the entire network on shorter intervals than anyone else.)
I wouldn't phrase it like that.
I'd say 'The anti-federation reality has always been that centralized entities have the authority to more quickly evolve their product.'
Whereas federated models have always had a terrible time upgrading standards in a timely manner, even when upgrades are obviously needed.
However, products typically exist in distinct phrases -- rapid growth/evolution is eventually followed by stability/maturity.
Once the product switches to that latter mode, the evolutionary speed benefits of centralization dull.
Obvious example: AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ's initial popularity... before multi-client Trillian et al. became preferable... because the limited intersection feature set it supported already covered everything everyone wanted to do via IMs.
Reddit reached feature completion and maturity a while ago, which made it ripe for disruption via a decentralized clone.
However, they're just realizing the emperor has no clothes and their only remaining moat is their existing users, and users are a fickle moat.
All good things have to end but this was avoidable.
But don't worry, that's not going to happen here. You don't need a decentralized non-profit community, trust me. It's going to work out this time. Really.
With that said it's in YC's best interest to keep users happy, only change what is requested and generally keep the status quo. Unfortunately for a company like Reddit that is a social media site and has to make money with their social media product, keeping users happy at all costs is not in their best interest (though that has yet to be seen).
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...
I built HACK specifically to be able to be notified when people reply to me. That's one of my selling points.
I was spoiled by Apollo for Reddit and HACK has done the same thing for HN. Thank you!
And now I’m posting my first HN comment on this app to the dev hahah.
Note that all of these are still centralized, so still subjects to similar issues. Once again selfhosting is the best xay forward
But for the rest of us, there's always a choice to foster a new community. Whether there is enough for that, and if a server is ready for that load, are big questions to answer though
The reach of contrived political philosophy, fiat economic hustle, and pop culture gabber can be constrained; the obsolescence of /. , MySpace, and the like did not destroy reality. Now we know the outcome of the social media experiment. Utter dumpster fire.
It occurs to me people made a whole lot of small business work before handing sacks of cash to cloud SaaS
We need less adminisphere in all contexts so we can screw up again, let the wrong people helicopter us with banal AI bots, make lizard brain m sedate until it gets bored with AI bots. Then we’ll trot out a new copium for the masses and they can lean back again, super proud of their commitment to whatever hallucinated ideology they believe they’re serving.
All while waving off the ecological impact, because reality is just a big graph, mmmk
It's the normal users that suffer. Hopefully that suffering will hit Reddits usage/cash flows enough to make them u turn.
They still can, but most sites these days are fine going where the people go, and linking to their custom stuff.
The alternative is the god awful updated site or their app. I hope you like adverts.
Only if there was a way to host websites where no central authority ever owned the data and the people who ran relays got paid in some form of cryptographically secure crypto currency. Frontend clients that made requests would need to pay in the same token to avoid abuse.
Then musk took over, and he banned them from using the API and forced them to close down. What a stand up guy.
Unfortunately Mastodon feels a bit empty, there's not many people on it yet.
[0] https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
If Alice posted once the last months, and Bob 20 times, and they both post another post, then ... maybe Mastodon will promote Bob's post and demote Alice's because Bob has been more active? (I would have preferred the opposite, hmm)
Exactly! I can comment on a post and have real engagement with someone which hasn't happened in years on Twitter.
It's no surprise that can end up feeling like an echo chamber. It's getting better than it was when I first started using it about six months ago but some of the posts people catch heat for seem a bit too over the top.
One of my favorite examples was a user who posted a photo of their dinner. It was nothing crazy just like rice, veggies, and chicken. They were immediately accosted for not posting a trigger warning since some people have eating disorders. That's the type of community I have no patience for.
We can build a Reddit replacement… we just have to want to
To me it signals you're a fairly new entrant to the intertubez.
Third party frontends for a given backend have existed since time immemorial, with or without sanctioned access to the backend's innards.
Alternatives to Explorer and Program Manager for a Windows shell are one of the older examples, more contextually relevant and newer examples would be programs like Pidgin and Trillian which served as third party clients for AIM, MSN, YIM, ICQ, etc.
None of this in any general sense is going away, though specific examples might.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
To be fair, this doesn't seem that bad, especially in comparison to the API price hike and their handling of it.
The thread he changed the comments in was filled with users literally accusing multiple innocent people of being pedophiles who ate children, but sure, it's a bridge too far to change the user tag of comments literally threatening him rather than e.g. banning everyone who commented there or reporting the threats to the police which would have been well within his rights!
I'm just saying that it could be a dangerous thing to do, if only because it creates doubt and deniability.
However in this case...
He already admitted to changing post titles (in his own words to fix typos and other minor corrections). So he got the hang of modifying prod data with a "good cause" and once he had the know-how he turned around and sued it to edit someone's comment.
Had that not caused a big stir, maybe it would have become his new past time. maybe it has, maybe he goes back 5-6 years to comments you cannot reply to because the threads are locked and adds little jokes there, who knows cause he is now totally untrustworthy on this matter.
Only a founder would get reprimanded for manipulating production data, anyone else would get fired on the spot (as they should). I'm not here to argue which action is worse, I'm simply pointing out that this guy clearly has a control issue and poor judgment (which is common among CEO's, granted) and it's been obvious for years. Of course he's gonna distort his reality to suit his needs, that's what these guys do.
People don't learn when they get away with things like this, they just go bigger and crazier.
Absolutely not at any serious company; fucking with user data is a major taboo.
But the CEO? Who presumably presided over numerous discussions involving appropriate data access policies and risk to the company’s reputation? That’s shockingly juvenile and shortsighted.
I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.
That said, open sourcing the app would be great to archive it for posterity.
For a single user, the API is free. But every user would have to apply for a key, and there is no guarantee they’d get one.
Time for web1 bulletin board/forums to return!
On the web I still use old.reddit.com but I can see them killing that off sooner or later.
Personally, 1) is not really an issue and people are enjoying the outrage train, and that's ok and valid and whatever, but it's a third party app. It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make more money. At the mid term is a great incentive for Reddit to improve their shitty app experience ("but Ads!" yeah, ads of course, you're not paying shot for using it, it's an impopular but pragmatic business model)
But 2) it's the one that's really concerning. Hopefully they reverse this course for this point specifically cause this has a measurable impact on eyeballs, which ultimately means money.
inb4: "Apollo dying means less eyeballs too dummy", yeah as I mentioned before the outrage is the fad. Once it passes, will see how much people actually leaves (little to none alternatives for Reddit btw). My bet is that could result in a small hump, if anything, in the long run.
Cue people being understandably upset.
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhisto... covers the moderation side.
https://reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_recently... Talks about accessibility.
They could have simply said "Due to business pressures, we're going to stop offering our API in 1 year" and honestly, nobody would have blinked an eye.
Or they could have said "Due to business pressures, we're going to include advertisements in the API. Any clients found deliberately not displaying the ads will have their API keys permanently revoked."
Or they could have said "Due to business pressures, we're going to stop offering free API access. Users who subscribe to Reddit can use their own personal API keys with a limit of 1000 calls per day."
They did none of those things; they raised prices to a point that was completely untenable and gave app developers 30 days to FOAD.
Third party apps representing less than 5% of Reddit's traffic, this is by far not "most people's" favorite app.
Surely there is a reasonable business case to be made for this policy change. Attempted character assassination of a 3rd party developer with blatant falsehoods, not so much. I dunno, maybe they aren't worried and there's plenty of investors an wall street ready to hand over big bags of money to a demonstrated liar.
Why is this not an issue for user's protesting? I use Relay for Reddit on Android and I think it's absolutely the best way to view Reddit on mobile if you're a fan of old.reddit.com.
That app is going to die and I say screw them. I owe reddit nothing. If they want to turn the site into something that I don't want to use because it makes them more money that way. Good luck with that but I won't be around to see it.
I'd gladly pay for Reddit Premium (which has no ads) to continue to use 3rd party apps that I like. But it's not about the money or the ads -- it's about control.
I get the feeling that some people are trying to spin this into a crusade of sorts, I fully get this feeling from your words.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that I guess, but look a the big picture as well: you've used the services of a private company for years, paying zero cents. They made a business decision after potentially delaying it for years, and you rant about control. This outrage makes little sense, we don't own Reddit, never had. We're just making noise because some of us confused private property for their own.
In the end, it's their site and their decision to make, but it's understandable many people are upset by their actions and no longer want to use the site (which, btw, even if you were using it for "free" you may have been contributing in other ways via posts, comments, moderation, etc).
It also means losing potential customers - I would have been willing to upgrade to Reddit Premium to continue using Apollo, for example, but now I wouldn't even consider it.
But if they're profitability involves alienating me as a user then I'm going to be alienated and I'm going to act like I'm alienated. I think the outrage makes perfect sense in this case. I'm equally outraged at other companies doing things that manipulate their customers for a tiny bit more profit (like shrinkflation).
Ironically they could have turned this situation into profit from me as I'm happy to pay for Reddit if it was required to allow me to use it in the way that I'm accustomed. Instead of embracing me as a customer, they want me gone.
While that's not false, look at it the other way: I've provided content for a private company for years, taking zero payment. Millions of us have. Reddit lives and dies by user submissions and comments, and taking what seems to be a stance that's wildly hostile to users feels very foolish to me.
Can you realistically expect to have some sort of return, wether in control or whatever for that? It feels more aligned to a tantrum rather than a coherent argument. Have we consiously forget how Web 2.0 works?
The no-brainer decision would be to make your app a lot better than any third-party app instead of pulling the rug from under people whose work has made reddit better in the long-run.