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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing with negotiations of this level. He clearly has an awesome product if you look at any of the HN/Reddit comments.
He probably could have walked away will at least a few million vs shutting it down if there was a small level of negotiation that took place here. I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call but strategic accounts normally get pretty seasoned sales folks assigned to them. They are used to having hard conversations around pricing and pissed off customers. That's all part of negotiation.
That call was brutal to listen too.
Or, is saying you're shutting down part of negotiation too? This likely took it too far if it was, in that you're making reddit look like the bad guy very publicly now. So, it's probably worth it for reddit to cut ties and force people into the reddit app.
No winners here:
* Apollo the company is gone.
* Apollo users are gone.
* Reddit has no customer paying money.
* Reddit cannot reference them.
* Reddit users are ticked off.
This is a case study in bad negotiation tactics on both sides. Reddit tried to squeeze them pretty hard right off the bat. Should have tried a 3 year contract or something with heavy discounts. This is wild.
It's certainly a strange call. Hey, you want to charge me $20 million per year, so why don't we make it easy and you just pay me $10 million to go quiet?
It's really confusing. He wants Reddit to pay $10 million so he isn't "loud" with API usage? He wants them to buy and takeover the app? He's wants a payment to shutdown? Is he even serious about any of this? I get the impression he lacks the confidence to ask for a $10 million acquisition, so instead he approaches the subject casually as a joke, and the entire conversation spirals into confusion due to the lack of clarity.
Either way, that's not a great deal for Reddit. They might as well charge the $20 million, and if he can't find a way to pay it then Apollo shuts down and the majority of users return to the official Reddit site/app for free. There's no benefit to paying $10 million.
The call was a failure between the two parties and likely destroyed any future negotiations. I think the best suggestion was from another user here. Only allow Reddit official subscribers to use third party apps. Reddit can charge users whatever they want, and app developers can monetize their apps however they choose.
It's not strange at all. At least the Reddit CEO heard and understood perfectly well what the Apollo dev said in that call and there's a recording to prove that.
Your first sentence misrepresents what the Apollo dev said. Actually, it's the exact same misrepresentation that the Reddit CEO knowingly made in public.
First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.
The CEO, in contradiction with publicly available data, claimed that Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year in lost opportunity. So the dev jokingly offered to sell Apollo for half that price. Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.
> First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.
I disagree, I think the Apollo dev would have happily taken the $10 million.
> Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.
The $20 million price is irrelevant here. Reddit doesn't need to pay to acquire these users. They are Reddit users (they're registered there, and Reddit knows everything about them). They can close down Apollo and they'll get almost all the users back for free.
If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition. But, that's not the case here.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not siding with Reddit and I think both sides are losing here due to their poor management.
> I disagree, I think the Apollo dev would have happily taken the $10 million.
That doesn't mean he was demanding money.
> If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition
I do agree it's difficult to calculate the value of a user in this case.
Yes, Apollo users are Reddit users, but they are specifically Reddit users who don't use Reddit's official clients. The question is how many of those users will move to Reddit's official app after June 30, and how many will look for alternative platforms that aren't so manipulative and abusive. I for one have deleted my Reddit account and won't be going back.
> The question is how many of those users will move to Reddit's official app after June 30, and how many will look for alternative platforms that aren't so manipulative and abusive. I for one have deleted my Reddit account and won't be going back.
I think you're in the minority. If there was a well known Reddit alternative at the moment, I could see Reddit having their Digg moment and losing a large part of the community. Subreddits could blackout and threaten to leave to the other website. That is something that would be taken seriously. Dozens of subreddits with 1-50 million users potentially jumping ship at once. If you had the right platform, with the right attributes and reputation, the stars would be perfectly aligned to take in a mass number of Reddit users. But, no one is in the right position to catch the ball at the moment (I don't claim it's an easy position to be in). It's actually unfortunate, because these moments don't come too often and I believe it allows Reddit to make these changes with little repercussions. Fans of old.reddit.com better watch out, I bet it's on the chopping block within the next year.
I'm also only one datapoint but I won't use Reddit from 30th on. I guess all these big cooperation and some users are overestimating the power of their platform. I (and I know some other people from my inner circle that are not "in tech") left these platforms before and never looked back.
It was the same with Facebook: You want me to use my real name? I'm gone. Never used Facebook again. Specifically in Germany (where I would argue the population values privacy more than in other nations) that was a deal breaker for a lot of them when they started enforcing that policy.
(This example is not about a platform but more of an example of quitting a product because of "bad" behavior) Mobile games getting more and more P2W and have a half-life of ~1 year? Yeah, count me out. Especially with that example I know a lot more people that said "fuck that" and won't touch mobile games with a ten foot pole anymore.
And honestly it will be the same with Reddit. It's not like it's essential. I'll be good without it and I would guess many more people too. The two examples I gave made my life better (less screen time) and the Reddit move will do the same.
As for how it'll play out for the majority of people: I guess we'll see. But looking at Reddits latest track record of bad decisions I would argue it won't be the last one and there is a lot of potential to create a new Digg moment.
I don't have a real name on Facebook not have any of my friends. There are also a lot of fake/troll accounts on Facebook. I don't think they ever enforced that policy.
If true I don't know how that happened but two of my friends + me got their account suspended and were asked to provide identifying information to get it reinstated - at the same time.
Given the mishaps of the past such as stealth editing comments of other users, I would not at all be surprised if these comments were made by alt accounts of u/spez.
My understanding is that Reddit is saying that by not charging for the API they are losing $20M per year. So he said, well you can buy me out, and instead of doing a multiple of that $20M to be like $100M, he’s only asking for half of only one year’s worth of what they would lose. Clearly they don’t want to do that deal because the $20M figure is complete bogus.
but there’s no incentive for Reddit to pay any money, they either start charging for the API and recoup the costs or the app shuts down and it starts costing Reddit absolutely nothing
The cost for reddit as stated in another part of the call is an opportunity cost. By acquiring Apollo instead of shutting it down they would seamlessly acquire a lot of users who would have a hard time adjusting to the native app and potentially leave the platform, so this call is still a cost to them.
The app shutting down does not automatically cost nothing. If all users move to the official app the server resources still are used but the users would at least see ads.
I quit Reddit today in part because of this event and I had never used Apollo. I started reading it more regularly 5 years ago because a friend had ranked in their top twenty and got me curious about what he spent his time on. I loved observing a couple of communities passively, but it’s just not worth the risk anymore. They might eventually also remove old.reddit.com so I don’t see why I should bother with content that might one day disappear completely.
I’m also looking to migrate off reddit because of this. I have a couple sites for my hobbies I’ve already started to visit, but the big loss for me is the ability to find reliable information on niche topics — ie, what rain pants to buy for fishing, where in a city to get the best perogies, looking at how user opinions change over time on political topics etc. Also great are any of the discussions on movies or TV shows. I really see no alternative but reddit for these things. Does anyone have recommendations? Or do I still need to go to reddit for this.
I deleted my 8 year old account yesterday. I modded a few subs.
I don’t know if I’ll quit Reddit entirely, but I’m certainly done engaging at the level that I use to. I no longer trust how Reddit will decide to use my data or how they’ll pull the rug from me. They’re pre-IPO and already getting desperate. Shits going to hit the fan when they IPO and investors expect constant growth.
I might have agreed with you if not for the fact that Reddit was effectively born when we all left Digg en masse because of a major, unpopular change just like this. Piss off enough people all at the same time and things actually happen. Reddit has been boiling this frog for so long I thought they had learned their lesson but apparently not.
Reddit existed as an equivalent just slightly smaller alternative to Digg at the time. There is nothing like that for current Reddit.
Any thread about Google Search on here is filled with people saying they have to do "site:reddit.com" to get accurate results. I've never seen another site used in that example. I'd love to be proven wrong on this because it means there's some great internet resource I've been missing out on.
> Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history.
> ...
> The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of authoritarian communist states, such as the People's Republic of China, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Additionally, tankies have a tendency to support non-socialist states if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general.
---
Or a quick way - if you think of countries that have military parades with tanks rolling down city streets, those are supported by "tankies".
If you have a site that is espousing contradictory values to the main site, would the main site accept your content? or would they kind of shun you?
(alas, its shut down... but it used to be that if you looked at the 'moderated servers on a mastodon site you'd find parler in that list which was a modified mastodon instance that no one else wanted to talk to)
If your content is sufficiently shunned from the main instances/interchanges how discoverable would your posts be? Or would you go "ok" and accept the political or philosophical lean of the main site so that your content got syndicated/federated to others?
I mean that'll happen with literally any website, forum, BBS, subreddit framework out there. The idea here would be to create a forum stack where users can confidently contribute to knowing that no single entity has full control over all of its contents.
Obviously there's nothing stopping from some instances from creating closed or gated content, but the public facing ones with like 10-20 years of gardening input freely given by end users can never be taken away from the community, which is what's happening with Reddit and has happened with IMDB and countless others.
It's not a deal though. Reddit says the users are worth $20 million in lost advertising. So either Apollo pays the money, the users move to another app that pays, or the users return to the official site and app. Either way, Reddit gets their $20 million.
Apollo has no leverage here unless there is strong evidence most of the Apollo users will leave Reddit if the app shuts down. I don't believe they will. The other potential leverage is the upcoming subreddit blackouts, or hinting at taking the Apollo users to start a competitor. The developer said they are not going to build a competitor (that was a mistake, they shouldn't have revealed that card), so I think the blackouts are the only chance of lowering API costs.
The point here is, if Reddit thinks the user base is worth $20M per year, paying $10M to take over the app and implement ads on it, would be a steal. They’d return the money in 6 months. Usual payback periods are like 4-8 years. Clearly the $20M is BS because otherwise they’d done the deal on the spot.
They would only do the deal on the spot if that was their only option. But they have the option of spending $0 and having the majority of the users moving to the official app.
This is an example of the same thing being worth different amounts to different parties, and the equivocation leads to comments like this thread.
If Apollo's userbase was actually generating $20mm/yr, acquiring Apollo for $10mm is a no-brainer. But if that were the case, keeping Apollo running as it is would also work.
Obviously this is not the case. Apollo is confusing costing $20mm with generating $20mm.
If it were worth $20M in lost advertising, buying the app and adding adverts to it would be a no brainer. The author was trying to call their bluff on user value, but communicated it very poorly.
Also, people use Apollo so they don’t have to deal with the ads and terrible ux. They’re not suddenly going to go to the terrible official website or app.
There are a lot of users who have decided to delete their account once 3rd party apps are gone. Some may come back but they won't be getting that 20 mil
Not sure how people are misunderstanding him, he literally said he was joking… He knows it’s not a great deal for Reddit. His whole point is that the app isn’t actually worth $20 million a year, which is what they want him to pay. It’s not even worth $10 million. Not to him or Reddit or anyone else.
> His whole point is that the app isn’t actually worth $20 million a year, which is what they want him to pay. It’s not even worth $10 million. Not to him or Reddit or anyone else.
Right now there seems to be two options on the table.
1. The Apollo dev pays $20 million per year for API access.
2. Apollo shuts down and the users return to the official Reddit website/app for advertising.
If Reddit is refusing to lower their API pricing, doesn't this mean the users are worth $20 million? If the users were worth $1 million, then why wouldn't Reddit charge $2 million for the API and double their income on those users?
That being said, something else must be at play here. The users are not worth $20 million and Reddit refuses to take anything less than $20 million. If I had to guess, they want to boost metrics before going public and are willing to take a hit to their reputation to do so.
I’m just one Apollo user, but I don’t plan to install the official app. It’s terrible and riddled with ads.
It’s the same reason I don’t use instagram—seeing an ad every two images bugs the crap out of me. The difference with Reddit is there was a nice third party option.
Yeah this guy didn't handle this situation very well. I don't know if it would've been possible to save Apollo for reddit, but that call didn't help at all.
Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situation is probably incredibly stressful, but when you have 50k+ subscribers per year + millions of happy loyal users, you gotta start bringing in outside people to help with these things. He's just letting a lot of people down.
I don't mean to trash the guy, but I hope that the other third-party apps see this example and change their response to find a better outcome for their users.
Why should he be forced to do something he doesn't want to do?
He's made it abundantly clear why he doesn't want to do that, who are you (or anyone else but him) to say "No you're not allowed to have opinions, you MUST create your own alternative"?
> 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.
> But it’s bad from a negotiation perspective to let that out
It’s pretty clear that there’s no negotiating left, so I’m not sure what relevance this has anymore. A few days ago? Yeah maybe.
If the CEO is maliciously accusing you of threatening them, then there’s nothing left to negotiate. The relationship is beyond broken.
> Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.
He has already made it clear he’s not interested in building a competitor (the quote is literally right there in the comment you replied to), so, once again, what’s your point?
It’s plainly evident that Christian is done, and I don’t blame him.
The RIF and Sync devs are too, and I’m sure all the other apps will soon announce shutdowns at the end of the month too.
Yeah, Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour.
This should have gone like, "Hey, in a few months we're rolling this out and wanted to give you a heads up so you know before anyone else, since you're a major API user. We wanted to offer you a grace period and special pricing. When's a good time to chat we'll fly out.". Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.
This is all just my opinion based on what I've read so far.
It's clear that they don't want any of the third-party apps to pay them a cent. They want the third-party apps gone, and the users to move to the official app where they can be directly monetised by Reddit. There was never going to be a deal; if Reddit was interested in one they would have approached this differently.
> Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour.
If they wanted him to pay $20 million, they'd certainly have given him much better than a brief phone call.
But that's the point. They're revealing with their actions that they don't actually want him to pay the money. What they want is to shut it down. Charging a sum of money that they know he won't pay is just an easy way to do that.
'course it's not just him, but it's him and _everyone else_. i'm not sure what their overall intent here was, but it's been a shit show from start to finish, and they gotta at the very least start thinking hard about pausing the rollout till they can get their ducks in a row.
> Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.
I pay Apple more than a million a month and I don’t even have a contact email.
A shocking amount of people here are assuming Reddit is launching this API program in good faith. This was not a transition third party apps were meant to survive; 30 days is nowhere near enough time for any business, let alone ones by single random software developers, to see their costs increase into the hundreds of thousands or even millions per month.
You're assuming he can pay 20 million dollars. The point is that he can't, or even a fraction of that, so there's no point to wining and dining him at all.
Why don’t we all monetize our hobbies? Why don’t we market our personal lives? Why don’t we each have our own line of branded merchandise? Why haven’t we written a memoir?
Because some people don’t want to! And that’s okay.
Trying to start a new social network (or whatever you'd call Reddit) from the ground-up is not only very likely to fail, but it's also a totally different skillset than building iOS apps. Of course he'd rather just find another job.
His point was that there is a big difference between building a product and operating a service. I can understanding not wanting to do the latter, because it's a COO job and unless you like doing that it is not fun.
I thought he was pretty clear that he was done bargaining:
> ... I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.
If a bargaining chip is only useful in making a deal you've decided cannot be made, why bother holding onto it? Better to tell your fans outright that you're worn out and not interested.
> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?
Would you want to moderate Reddit? I get that Apollo is in a good position to take their users with them, but it's not like it's going to be easy to build a Reddit when what you've made so far has been a frontend for Reddit and some mobile widget spin-offs.
Many of us can make a frontpage for hacker news in a few hours, some might even be able to grow a userbase on it but that doesn't mean we can do what dang does.
Absolutely not, dang's work is nothing short of miraculous and I don't know of any other forumlike place that's this civil at this scale. Hope he keeps at it in this way for a long time.
The outcome of moderation here is very good, and changing policy has a high chance of damaging the value of HN. I would not risk secondary effects, myself.
But I would enjoy HN more with a soupcon of joking (currently considered zero-value). I benefit from my bread being leavened, I like programming tutorials with humour. So it's understandable why people might want to change the policy.
> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?
Yeah, what's the deal with this iOS developer not wanting to start a competitor to checks notes one of the largest websites in the world? Surely you just up and did that last week, it's no big deal.
I guess I should start getting used to saying "Jesus christ, HN" now that I won't be saying "Jesus christ, Reddit" anymore.
He can't start a competitor because he has no market power. Not enough will use the competitor product for it to be worth it. A past example of someone attempting to disintermediate Reddit was /r/changemyview which attempted to switch to changeaview.com and met immediate and total backlash. Reddit's SSO multi-forum user-generated experience is why people use it.
Starting a competitor involves doing all the things that Reddit is doing (having a legal team, servers across the world and staff to operate them, making policy decisions, ...).
That is not at all the same as building an iOS client using an API as a one man show (or 1-3) and directly selling that.
I don't know how serious he was about pursuing a sale in the calls, but he made it pretty clear in the post that he's done dealing with Reddit. This isn't an attempt at blackmail or otherwise an attempt to get Reddit to buy him out, this is him getting everything out in the open to head off lies that were being spread.
From the post:
> I bring this [audio recording] up for two reasons: ... It shows why I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.
> I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call
He mentions that it was spez AKA Steve Huffman the CEO of reddit. The call really does sound amateurish and the joke/negotiation tactic/money request/??? was really unprofessional but Steve seems to have completely misconstrued the whole interaction and blown up at him. I would say this is worse of the CEO to use this to spread slander especially when he already apologised for misunderstanding Selig and then privately walked it back
That joke about the $10M wasn't unprofessional at all. If Steve was honest about the $20M per year opportunity cost, he would've instantly agreed to a one time $10M. Then Reddit would gain an additional $20M per year. But it was only a joke because Steve was lying about the $20M opportunity.
Christian is acting in a surprisingly civil manner despite the repeated lies and smears made by Steve and others at Reddit. I see that as being professional.
Reddit specifically said that killing third apps wasn’t their intention, and wanted apps to pay a reasonable amount to cover the costs.
> Also, what things are priced at is not what they cost …
So if that’s the best argument in favor of Reddit, then it’s Reddit that’s being illogical. Or to be more straight, lying.
> Why go for $10m if there is no need to because you have already adjusted your own pricing upwards.
Because $20M is neither the amount Christian was earning, nor the cost that Reddit was paying to provide API access. Steve explicitly said it was a lost opportunity. There was simply no way that Christian could’ve paid that insane price. However, Reddit could’ve earned $20M themselves per year by acquiring Apollo. If the $20M opportunity was even remotely true, that is.
Steve appears to have assumed there is no recording, so he can represent the conversation dishonestly. Unfortunately, there is a recording, so we can all hear that it wasn't a threat and that the reddit representative admitted that on the call. The optics of ineptly smearing Christian look terrible for Reddit management.
If you read the section titled "Bizarre allegations by Reddit of Apollo "blackmailing" and "threatening" Reddit", he is directly addressing Steve. He starts with the transcript of the private mod call with Steve and then begins addressing Steve directly. The "you" in that section is the Steve Huffman he had calls with who heard the "threatening" bit
>it comes down to lack of experience in dealing with negotiations of this level
Yeah, the conversation is so cringe. Why is he beating around the bush so much ? He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout. It sounds easy to make that proposition. Instead, he uses terrible verbiage like, "go quiet, I'm joking, opportunity cost, Bob's your uncle, yada yada". Why is he so terrible at talking ? Nothing in the call resembles a sales pitch if he is actually trying to sell a product for $10M.
If he was even entertaining the idea of maybe selling his company, the least he could have done was get a negotiator with mergers and acquisitions experience. If he's making reasonably good money off of Apollo, he could have afforded a few hours of a good attorney.
This call was awful to hear as an entrepreneur. He is not at all clear about what he wants, and I think he's honest when he says it's "mostly a joke" - I'm getting the sense he threw out a strangely-worded scenario hoping that he could perhaps get some money. If he was serious about getting money, and he's primarily a software developer and not a negotiator, it would've been lovely if he had gotten proper counsel for this negotiation.
He wasn't expecting to float the idea! This literally came up during the call. He did not decide days before that he was going to offer to sell his company. He cannot hire outside counsel for something he is not thinking about.
Fair enough. It just isn't the slam dunk that the post makes it out to be. He made some extremely vague proposition that can easily be misinterpreted and it was ultimately unproductive.
The claim still stands, given that in the same call Reddit immediately and openly admitted that they misinterpreted him, only to later turn around and lie about it.
It’s not like the person on the other end of the line had no idea exactly what he was proposing. Even if the dev isn’t experienced at negotiating something like this you can bet the person on the other end of the line was.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's entirely clear to anyone on the other side (or even the world at large) how to value something. To a large extent, Reddit has drunk the cool aid and internalized that APIs are worth X. So going to a meeting with the implicit assumption that everyone knows that pricing is BS is not a safe assumption. They've already had the pricing discussion, so throwing more oblique references to BS pricing is not productive. It's like in a normal human argument. Once you are at an impasse, throwing more facts or presenting a logical paradox doesn't change the other person's mind.
He is asking for clarification, something you do when you have a good business relationship with someone.
> He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout.
He doesn't. He is saying that 20$M is clearly overpriced and that if it was true then reddit would come up with a ludricous number like 10M to make that API be turned off. He just uses quiet because reddit described the API use as Loud.
It's not an offer, it's calling someone's bluff out.
Think in poker someone says "my hand is worth 20 million" and you got pretty good cards you would tell them "go all in because I am gonna keep covering whatever you raise" and then they do not go All In, you got a pretty good case to think their initial comment was not true.
Bad negotiation because the other end owns the platform, has all the leverage. Apollo simply cannot stand up and leave the table, which is what reddit predictably did.
Let that be the lesson: don't sink your time (and money) into building OSS (or a business) on top of a platform. It's like building on sand.
This guy had a job he loved running his own business for 8 years. Yes, it can get taken away in an instant, but that doesn’t seem like a terrible deal to me in hindsight.
Not sure I agree. Apollo is apparently monetizing these users above and beyond what Reddit is/was able to accomplish. I’m confident that this represents value to Reddit > 0. So Reddit may have leverage, but not all the leverage.
I genuinely don't understand the "pay me 10 million to save half on 20 million of costs" negotiation tactic... if they wanted to save money, why wouldn't they just shut down the API access?
20 million/year is how much the Apollo users would bring in when served ads (the opportunity costs).
Reddit pays Apollo 10M, starts serving their ads in the app, and now rakes in 20M/year without any extra effort.
Conversely, now they need to convince all the angry users of Apollo to come back to use their shitty website/app, something that will never happen. A lot of people that aren’t even using Apollo are going to be angry at the mistreatment and leave the site altogether. On the whole it’s quite likely that Reddit’s losses will amount to more than the 10M they’d have to pay once to get a ton of money in the future.
That’s on Reddit. The exact number doesn’t really matter for purposes of this explanation, and I suspect it doesn’t really matter to the Apollo creator either. It could be 2M or 500K, the equations remain the same.
It's not a negotiation tactic. It is a joke because the numbers they are talking about are a joke. He's saying that if they think Apollo is can make Reddit 20 million a year then just pay him 10 million and they can keep the change. The truth is both sides know these numbers are b*llsh*t.
I’m a lawyer and listening to this call was absolutely painful. I like to think I’m a pretty decent negotiator, and agree that there was likely a few million here were this handled competently.
Don’t be afraid to bring people in when something is outside your area of expertise.
His app icon was showcased front and center at the WWDC keynote, something I always thought was bought with money, for (I assume) free. It has tons of users including paying users. I have a very hard time imagining being able to sell the app right now for less than 10 figures. All this fight has shown me is that people will gladly pay for this app monthly
If he's leaving all that on the table out of spite, well thats his money to lose. But he shouldn't call the world unfair
As he mentions in the post, the main issue is the 30-day timeframe to completely rethink the business model of the app and move enough users over to paying subscriptions to not go bankrupt when the first API access bill comes in. The suggested API fees also seem quite unrealistic and it's unclear whether enough users would be willing to pay the necessary monthly fees to cover them.
Reddit's actions here make it pretty clear that they just want the app (all third-party apps) to shut down — if they actually wanted a solution they could easily lower the pricing to something more realistic and/or give a slightly longer transition period.
When our app has been featured in WWDC moments, it's at the discretion of Apple. I don't believe that it's paid, but more Apple choosing what they think are quality examples of apps to motivate developers.
>something I always thought was bought with money,
No. Apple chooses this on their own. Their internal teams find new and interesting apps, songs, etc.
When they announced the iPhone X, they used a band without telling them before. They asked the band to send them some music samples and just a generic "this might end up on an Apple marketing material one day". The band was shocked when it turned out to be THE song on THE intro video for the iPhone X.
Apollo still have some value. If there is another online mass migration, like with Digg, he can connect Apollo to whatever comes next. Maybe he even can affect the decision with his user base. Lemmy could over night have a much larger user base if Apollo switched to them.
Well done to Christian for remaining calm, professional, and engaging with this process in an honest way, standing up for his users, but not attacking Reddit or its staff with emotion, just stating facts and holding them to account in a considered way. He comes across as a mature individual and one that I'm sure many would want to deal with in business or hire as an engineer or leader.
In a way, Reddit couldn't have asked for a worse outcome, they have come out looking terrible and he has come out looking great and defining the community discussion.
Read the post, listen to the audio of the actual context of that comment in the call. It wasn't blackmail, and was addressed in the submission. He also lives in a country that doesn't require all parties to consent to recording, and it wasn't until Reddit accused him of blackmail that he released his evidence.. Seems reasonable and level headed to me.
I thought I did??? Honestly feels like we're talking about that dress that's blue&black or white&gold.
> He also lives in a country that doesn't require all parties to consent to recording
Ok it's not technically illegal it's just extremely unprofessional. If a business did that people would erupt.
He threatened them three times. Pay him 10 million dollars and he'll go away quietly, or else he'll send the reddit mob at them. Which is exactly what he just did when they didn't pay. He tried as hard as he could to do it. The actual audio with his tone of voice is way worse than the transcript. He told them 3 times just pay 10 million dollars and: "I could make it really easy on you", "we can both skip off into the sunset", "Bob's your uncle", "And have Apollo quiet down". Later he says Oh haha just kidding, I'm a "noisy API user".
> Ok it's not technically illegal it's just extremely unprofessional. If a business did that people would erupt.
The CEO of the company spread a rumour, knowing its false, about him. That is Slander and it IS illegal.
Lying at the start of the year about how you do not have a short or medium term plan for an api payed model and then in June springing 30 day time period (when apple apps review can take two weeeks by itself) is extremely unprofessional but not illegal.
Explain? How does someone apologise 4 times for misunderstanding something and then turn around and pretend they never apologised behind that persons back and that the initial comment was made maliciously?
CEO of reddit is allowed to mishear things, he is also allowed to apologise and move on once things have been clarified.
What is illegal is to then go and say things that are demostrably false that affect someones reputation or chance of employment. If Christian goes to a single interview, meeting, sales pitch etc and someone even makes the briefest comment about "we don't wanna be blackmailed later", he can take Steve Hauffman all the way in front of a judge. Play the phone tape and collect more money that way than any number of years running Apollo.
The again Steve Hauffman changed someones comment on reddit which is a change in production which I am also sure its on very grey rea of legality, specially when people have their reddit account tied to their person, or business. If Retures europe posted about Ukraine and he changed their comment I am sure that would certainly be illegal, he only gets away because he did it to a private citizen and because the ethics board of reddit didn't fire him on the spot as they should have
The developer of Apollo is clearly asking for money. Even in the thread he made today he wrote "Why doesn't Reddit just buy Apollo and other third-party apps?" and then linked to a comment saying Apollo should ask for 100 million dollars. His ask for 10 million dollars wasn't a joke. He is thinking that while reddit is mad, he can get the money just to go away.
How can you say this, when the phone call is right there. You can listen to it yourself that is not what is being said. So much so that the Reddit person on the call apologises up to 4 times.
Would you apologise once, much less 4 times if you where being blackmailed?
Like this is just denial of reality, you have the phone call, we all do, what kind of nonsense attempt of gaslighting is this?
It's a good example of poor reading comprehension. The actual question is "If reddit wants to charge 20M, then why not buy out the app?". It's a valid hypothetical question and a valid possible business outcome. There's nothing threatening about asking that as a hypothetical, that many other redditors have been asking as well. The point of meetings is to address such concerns.
> Honestly feels like we're talking about that dress that's blue&black or white&gold.
We are but and it's a perfect analogy. The dress was objectively blue and black but some people saw it as white and gold. You're team white and gold here.
I don't know how anyone can reasonably come to this conclusion from the post and from his interviews. If you can elaborate on your reasoning I'm keen to hear it because this whole situation is wild enough that I feel like there should be two sides to it, but so far I've not heard anything concrete, only personal attacks, unsubstantiated and refuted technical criticism, and straw-man arguments about monetising the API, something he is clearly in favour of.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Here's a wild thought. What I would love to happen is that one of these apps (Sync or Apollo) release a version of their app where a user can enter their own API key. This would put the cost of the API usage on to the individual user instead of the app owner and the app owner can continue to focus on the app UI/features without worry. It wouldn't change how they made money off these apps either.
Let's see what that would cost the average user.
As mentioned in the post:
$0.24 for 1,000 API calls, average 345 requests per day per user
I have no idea if they prorate charges if you use less than 1000 calls so lets assume they don't, so the minimum daily cost for a user is $0.24.
$0.24 per day, for a 30 days is: $7.20
Hmm, I can't see many people wanting to pay that monthly.
Maybe if reddit had a lower tier (0.12 for 500 calls would be $3.60/month)
Here’s an anecdote. I was subscribed to ChatGPT Plus for a while, to get access to GPT4.
I stopped subscribing after after I got GPT4 API access because I developed a little personal app which used the OpenAI API to just read and write directly from plain text files and that suits my workflow better than the ChatGPT website.
But it sucks because I’m constantly thinking about how much I’m using, and how many tokens I’m putting into my query, because each API call costs me money. It was way nicer just paying a flat fee and using it “as much as I want”, even though this actually costs me way less because I use don’t use $20USD worth of API calls in a month, even with GPT4.
It would be a nightmare to use Reddit if it cost money to scroll down or post a comment. On the other hand, that might actually be a good disincentive to help me spend less time on it.
I had the same reaction when Kagi search changed their pricing to a fixed number 1,000 searches per month for $10. I couldn’t imagine trying to use search thinking “is this one worth searching for?”
… I now pay $25 for their unlimited option even though I probably use less than 1k searches per month anyways
Good news on that- they’re experimenting with lower cost unlimited right now; people who had an annual membership before the switch are back to unlimited searches for now.
My problem isn’t that I’m worried I’m spending too much, I know for a fact that I’m spending less than I did on ChatGPT Plus, I can check my usage regularly, and I do.
My problem is that before I send each query, I think to myself “is this worth a fraction of a penny?” and, when I have a bunch of follow up queries, I think “the previous query/response history is getting pretty big, should I trim some of it before I send my next query?” or “Should I skimp on this one and just use GPT3.5?”
This is the same reason I can't ever see microtransactions for news sites gaining traction. While I can't afford to subscribe to every news site I would like to, I also don't want to have to decide whether every news article I might read is going to be worth my penny before I read it. So I stick with the status quo of subscribing to a couple of key sites and skipping out when I hit a paywall. It's suboptimal for both sides but I can't see pay per article working any better realistically.
Don't forget that they're getting their tokens from an OAuth endpoint. In otherwords it's already tied to a specific user. Reddit could have simply said "third party api support is only for reddit gold users".
The main issue is there isn't enough time to implement such a solution. You have to develop this new system of handling API keys, communicate this change to customers, develop a process to migrate users, and figure out what to do with people who paid for an entire year of access 3 months ago. All of that is a herculean task for a small dev team to accomplish in 30 days.
That's not even dealing with the fact that this process would be difficult for users to actually use, and may run afoul of Apple's app store rules.
While that solution may be appealing to tech-savy end users, it's completely untenable for a popular app, especially given the tight time window required.
I remember Falcon Pro doing this 10 years ago when it hit Twitter's 100,000 user limit on its token. You could press 4 secret buttons in the corners of the login screen and it would take you to a secret page where you could put your own tokens.
> I have no idea if they prorate charges if you use less than 1000 calls so lets assume they don't, so the minimum daily cost for a user is $0.24.
The way these things work nearly everywhere is that $0.24 for 1000 API calls means your cost in a given billing period for N API calls during a billing period is 0.24 ⌈N/1000⌉ or 0.24 N/1000. The first is if they do not prorate, the second is if they do.
If it takes on average 345 requests per day per user, that would be 10 500 per month per user, which would be $2.64 per month per user if they do not prorate and $2.52 per month per user if they do prorate.
This is an interesting option. I'd assume the added friction for an average user will drop the Apollo user base drastically, but it would still allow it to stay alive.
I'm not a user of Apollo, and honestly have been perfectly fine using old.reddit.com on both mobile and desktop.
That said, while I realize it's just his side of the story, the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational (and he apparently has the receipts to back it up), while Reddit comes across as embodying typical corporate greed. On a related note, I think everyone should understand that, in the long term, "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations - the incentives are just too strong to prioritize short/medium term revenue growth over user experience.
In any case, while I don't think the people shouting "I'm done with Reddit" will make much of a dent in Reddit's overall usage numbers, I personally am deleting my account and blocking reddit on my devices. If anything I think this drama gave me a nice little push to take more control over my time that will make me happier in the long run.
Reading the transcripts and listening to the audio and seeing how Reddit is behaving is a fucking wild ride.
I use old.reddit.com on mobile and desktop so I'm not directly effected by these changes aside from the likely steep decline in moderation quality as longstanding mods lose their tools.
I feel compelled to migrate from reddit and only utilize it as a resource for knowledge when it's the only resource for some obscure niche thing or sub-culture. That last statement alone speaks volumes about the danger of centralizing communities as reddit has done.
Maybe a federated internet is back on the table for the future.
I second this. I’ve deleted all the social media, except Reddit. When I see an organisation acting like this - its toxicity. Deleting reddit. I look forward tothe hours of my life back.
1. From Marcus Aurelius, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit. I remove that pool of thought from my lived life and arguably my happiness ought to increase.
2. From Epictetus, "It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them." I'll admit do a lot of mindless browsing on reddit. In the past I've used site blockers to block loading reddit for me and I'd have the muscle memory of cmd+t then typing in "old" to load reddit. That all too common doomscroll of post after post, reading comment after comment, still has a pronounced grip on me. It would serve me well to reclaim that time and my unconscious self away from reddit.
This APIgate honestly, in an entirely self-serving way I'm thankful for it. For it to give pause to reflect on my own relationship with reddit.
If they're doing this, old.reddit.com is on the chopping block too, might as well get ahead of that sooner than later.
I know this whole situation is doing a lot of harm and there's a lot hurt over for folks, especially financially, but I'll take this as an opportunity to grow.
> There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit.
I think there's something weird that goes on with having a sub be a part of a whole and subject to the norms of the whole to some degree. Subs can keep things good, but it takes effort. There's some subs I'm part of where it's just super toxic all around. Part of that is because of the nature of the sub (for a game where the users constantly feel ignored and a little put upon by the devs), but that only partially explains how bad it gets.
also an exclusively old.reddit user - and my account is 17 years old...
But I deleted my primary account some months ago *after an admin hijacked my mod status* in a sub that has 2MM users...
EDIT:
>>I'm not a head mod for any subreddit. But I do mod a few. It seems to me that reddit could simply replace the mods on subreddits that close down and force them open again.
Was posted in that thread - and this is precisely what they did to me after being top mod for TEN YEARS
as far as I am concerned, /u/spez can go eat a dead baby as he so much stated in the early days of /r/cannabilism. Maybe reddit WILL be the dead baby he gets to eat.
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I have never used a 3rd party app - but everyone always spoke highly of apollo - but this post just shows that apollo's founder has more class than the entirety of reddit's staff (or at least c-suite) combined.
I imagine they got some sort of 'consultant' or some stupid MBA firm like McKinsey or something telling them their KPIs were failing...
They needed to increase the revenues from their API to pay the consulting fees for their 'experts'
And frankly - reading the comments from spez and other reddit respondents in that thread, read like the idiots in Succession when they went to LA
What browser do you use for mobile? I just tried old.reddit on Brave and Firefox mobile and it was.....not pleasant, relative to my current 3rd party app.
For desktop, it's the best, and I'll seriously consider ditching Reddit for good when it's killed, but it seems to be extremely poorly optimized for mobile (unsurprisingly)
I would not be surprised if they announce an end to support for Old Reddit soon. They are gearing up for an IPO and want to get rid of all the non-moneymaking cruft.
Essentially what they are doing is trying to reach equilibrium in terms of users and income sources so it all looks tight on the books. They won’t IPO until they can figure out final changes in user numbers, etc.
Patagonia is pushing polyester with its associated micro-plastics, instead of the renewable natural fibers that they were using before like wool. Good, evil, depends on who is counting.
Patagonia is clear about that decision though [1]. Microplastics are bad but not the whole story. They still offer natural fibers which have their own problems. I don't think this is Patagonia chasing short term profits, I think they are trying to remain true to their corporate goals.
Their statement sounds and looks good at first, but the actions amount to: you should keep buying our products, you should buy a new washing machine, you should buy a filter and we will keep thinking about it.
Patagonia do make high performance plastic products for activities where performance matters and in a better way than most, but have not been a performance focused company for decades. The original breakthrough of using plastic fleece in the wilderness due to it's non water absorbing properties doesn't really justify the size of their production with those materials today. They make most of their money selling plastic fleeces for people to wear to coffee shops. This segment of the market didn't realy exist before brands like Patagonia so they while they may offer a better alternative today, they are helped to create this particular problem.
And if you've ever seen their clearance lists, they're as bad as other fashion companies for overproduction - new colours every season which need to make way the following season.
Replacing plastics in their casual ranges and extending the lifecycles of the colours alone would make a bigger difference than a couple of research grants, but is risky for sales and less sexy. So take those statements with a pinch of salt.
I'm confused on what you think Patagonia should do differently. Should I boycott them for some reason? Should I feel bad about wearing their products? How bad are they environmentally on the scale of all apparel manufacturers from worst to best? Is Cotopaxi ok?
It seems to me the point is that they could do many things that would be better for the earth, but would impact short term or medium term numbers. And this is in contrast to the claim that Patagonia is somehow unlike other corporations.
They’re not. They’re also “evil” in this way. Perhaps less so. But it’s a property of money making endeavors to prioritize making money.
I have one of their “iconic” puffy jackets. I bought it cheap at a gear swap because it has a tiny rip. That has never worsened, which I believe is a property of the material. The polyester is quite durable.
I wear it about a third of the year here in Seattle. In the five years I have owned it I have washed it maybe once and possibly never. I don’t even wear it in the rain often because I have a rain shell which is also plastic and also doesn’t get washed.
I do also have some hemp pants from Patagonia. I wear those often. They made it about three years before they needed to go in to have pockets repaired from cell phone damage. Those fibers require farm land and water to grow. Repairs help mitigate that damage but it still exists.
I’m honestly not sure which garment has the most negative effect on the environment.
Chouinard is probably marginally better than your average billionaire, but it was almost certainly not done in a way that didn't also very clearly benefit him, and, more importantly, his family.
That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.
Reading that interview, it just sounds like a tax-optimized donation. It still causes him to give up wealth that he could have kept, but he's minimizing the loss. Is this not the case? If it is for pure personal financial gain, should we expect Jim Simons to pull a similar maneuver with Ren Tech at some point?
You do realize that I'm responding to someone that made the assertion, also implied in the NYT article, that this "donation" was "done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill." Right? What you're saying directly contradicts that, which was my point...
This was very obviously not done "for pure personal financial gain..." But should billionaires be able to donate billions, tax-free, to exert political influence, which, generally (though, with rare exceptions, like perhaps Chouinard), they will use to directly benefit themselves and their family? And, should they be able to do so in a way that maintains that political influence for their family for generations to come?
Maybe Chouinard and his family have good intentions, but, like the article said, "one doesn’t want a constructed tax system predicated upon everyone being like the Chouinards."
nothing wrong with benefiting yourself and your family - the problem is doing that unfairly at the expense of someone else, which it appears he has tried hard not to do here.
It's healthy to have a skepticism of "rich" people, but I think it's really uncharitable to view Chouinard's career as mere wealth accrual for wealth's sake. To not view him as a role model for how business can be ethical is, IMO, a missed opportunity.
Chouinard's goal was for his mission (the raison d'etre for Patagonia – to make high quality goods for outdoor activities, and to use the profits from this venture to protect outdoor spaces) to outlive his personal stewardship of Patagonia's control.
When that's your goal, the set of options available is rather narrow. You have to pass on control to people you trust, whom you've developed strong relationships with, and whom you trust to evolve and pass that mission down to the next generation. Most importantly, you want to avoid the kind of grifters that Patagonia has been allergic to in its history.
Plus, Patagonia already has a rich synergistic history of funding activism. It's not at all comparable to Gates, Carnegie, or Rockefeller who made their money and decided what "good" to spend it on in two discrete steps. For Patagonia, the most important thing is effective stewardship over an already-sailing ship
Chouinard has written a lot of material that you can read for yourself and form your own opinion on. He's remarkably direct and transparent, there aren't really smoke and mirrors to navigate.
That being said, anything he does with his "wealth" (itself an absurd idea, as he would never liquidate Patagonia shares and still never has) is going to rhyme with what other powerful people do with their wealth. You have to judge the people, not just the structures they're working within.
If you are an REI member, they often have stuff in the used (Garage) site that is in excellent quality and also less expensive. Patagonia also has worn wear that does the same thing. Win-win - awesome stuff, no need to make a new one for you, and less expensive!
- The guy who now has too many nanopuff jackets, but I will die on this hill.
Kinda ironic that the good deeds of Patagonia were written about on a website that we cannot even read because there is a paywall to access the information. Talk about seeing two sides of a spectrum haha.
That's the thing. A privately owned company can keep its morals if it has them, because the owners don't answer to anyone else. But as soon as a company accepts Venture Capital funding, or goes public, morals go out the window. The original owners no longer have control, and can't decide what the goal of the company is anymore. The goal is now to make money in whatever method is possible.
Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.
You are right, but as others have noted, I should have put a caveat on my assertion that the incentive mismatch is really there for companies with "outside owners", either in the form of a publicly traded company or large VC/PE investors.
If you keep a company private, and you don't take sizable outside funding, you can pretty much do whatever you want with your company.
> and reddit wouldn't have even survived this long if they hadn't
The parts of Reddit that people actually like – a single lightweight web app (old.reddit.com) minus all the fluff (constant redesigns, broken video player, live streaming service, overengineered mobile apps, avatars, NFTs, coins/gifts, social networking, chat, clubhouse competitor, expensive acquisitions) – would have survived perfectly well without VC money.
How so? It costs money to store & retrieve this content, at reddit scale (100m active monthly?). Ads clearly weren't paying enough of the bills, so what's the next best option?
Reddit made $500M in revenue last year, yet is unprofitable. The reason isn't its AWS bill, but the "must 5x every year no matter what" mentality of their VCs who are looking for their exit. This pushes companies to overhire, add useless features and waste money on user acquisition just to chase that growth chart and have a successful IPO roadshow.
Fashion companies like Patagonia and online social platforms like Reddit are radically different with how they interact with network effects.
Fashion benefits from exclusivity and brand identity. It behooves Patagonia to brand itself as "not evil" or "not capitalist" or whatever, it's ultimately a fashion statement.
Social networks suffer from exclusivity, and brand identity is an afterthought. I'd wager that most Reddit users have a neutral/negative view of the Reddit brand, but they use Reddit anyways because of network effects (everyone is there) and the brand doesn't really impact their favorite subreddits. There have been many attempts at "exclusive" social networks with carefully crafted brand identity, and they always fail.
There's a theory that social media also has fashion phases, but I don't think we have enough data to back that up. MySpace lasted about 6 years. Facebook is 19 and Twitter is 17 and both are going strong.
> the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational
honestly that's why Apollo is one of the rare apps I've actually fully paid for - iamthatis aka Christian is such a solid dude, always keeps his cool, no drama, gets his work done, cares about his users, like - it's a tragedy that Reddit is killing off his masterwork. They ought to be hiring him to do their mobile apps for them.
I think the users that will be leaving reddit are worth 100 normal reddit users in terms of content value. Drain them and the rest will swirl down quickly.
This is an interesting point. I use free Apollo, and realized when I tried to post, that its a paid feature.
So you have to figure that all the revenue is largely from contributing users and the dynamics on social media go something like 5-10% of people post all the content. Also, i heard it has great tooling for mods as well.
We'll see how big of a blow this is but yeah, you're right, a lot of Apollo users are probably high value reddit users.
There's been a great deal of talk about it on reddit after they closed i.reddit.com (Despite saying they wouldn't). It wont get announced officially, it will just vanish at some point.
It was still far more usable than the enshittified ‘proper’ version of the mobile web that does nothing but nag you to use the even more aggressively enshittified app.
FWIW there is suggestions that old.reddit.com is next on the chopping block. If that happens I dont think I could use the site anymore. The redesign is outright hostile.
I suspect as much too. Third party mobile clients dying saddens me for sure, but most of my usage is on old.reddit.com. When that inevitably goes away it'll be the true end for me. While I don't exactly look forward to the day, I'm oddly excited about the opportunity to put my time elsewhere. Maybe I'll finally start reading books again.
Yeah. I old.Reddit into specifics subs. Other than that it is too radicalized nowadays. Once you are starting out you care about user experience, but once you are too big to fail then you pretty much don’t care - see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube they all designed UI around how THEY want the user to use the platform instead of how user would actually want to use it.
I'm hoping at least we'll start to see some alternative communities to reddit pop up. I've been on the lookout for new smaller communities for a few years now, but the only interesting things I've found are a couple of Discord servers. While they are nice, Discord has a very different vibe from public anonymous forums.
There are plenty of old school forums. Example: I recently got into leatherworking. There are a couple of subreddits for it but also a large and active forum at https://leatherworker.net/forum/.
Reddit has discoverability and single sign on for a bunch of forums. It also has some fun nice to haves like a mixed feed of all your interests. But old school forums tend to be less commercial and sometimes can be a lot more tightly knit.
The biggest annoyance I have with old school forums is the single threaded nature of them. Reading through an entire 200 post thread to see if anyone actually responded to the one question that was asked in the third post is just incredibly inefficient and annoying.
For most corporations -- particularly the large ones -- I agree with you; however, there is also the B corporation route. Now, I have no idea if Reddit ever considered this path back in their earlier fund-seeking days, but it would have been an intriguing path had they done so.
I enjoyed the .compact version of old.reddit.com until they recently got rid of it. Since then my engagement has plummeted, which is probably a good thing...
I just logged into old.reddit.com w/Safari on iOS. The difference between that and Apollo is the difference between using reddit on my phone and not.
That said, I have to think something is wrong: I seem to have been served the desktop version in Safari. I do have 1Blocker and AdGuard running in Safari.
It’s why I like working for privately owned companies. They’re mostly about enriching the owner, but for that to happen optimally the company has to actually be functional.
I'm sorry but how exactly is it being evil to shut down 3rd party clients that use your content and your bandwidth to make (huge amounts of) money off of you?
Reddit owes absolutely nothing to those developers. This guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions, meaning he made millions, if not tens of millions, off of exploiting the API while not displaying Reddit's ads.
Poor Apollo developer, he's going to have to wipe his tears with Benjamins and blow his nose with his silk disposable tissue.
1) Apollo exploited nothing. Reddit offered their API for free for years.
2) Sure, he made a ton of money running Apollo, doesn't make what Reddit did less scummy.
3) No requirement, but it's largely accepted as courtesy to notify developers of any changes to the API policy, especially when it comes to pricing. Giving the developer only 30 days to rework their business model, change app architecture/design/code, pass App Store Reviews with Apple/Google, migrate subscribers to a higher-priced tier to afford the increase in pricing, and more is tantamount to spitting in their face. Especially when it's a drastic change from 8+ years of more or less the same.
4) Even if the developer did update pricing to be able to afford the new API rates, the developer himself stated he would have to be $50,000/month in the red for months while he waits for current subscription holders to have their subscription terms expire and renew at the increase rate, and that doesn't count lost subscribers who just decide to not renew.
5) Reddit admins and their CEO slandered the developer in interviews, outright lied, and got caught as the developer recorded the audio of all of their calls proving those lies. Reddit has done this stuff before (Back in 2016 the CEO was caught editing comments critical of him in the production database).
6) Reddit has every right to do what their doing, as Apollo has every right to call them out on how shit this whole thing is, when just back in January they said they had no plans to change their APIs in the short or medium term.
Bad situation all around, but Reddit knows they're doing this to kill third-party apps. They just have to lie that they're being reasonable to save face so investors will buy them up when they go public in a few months.
> 3) No requirement, but it's largely accepted as courtesy to notify developers of any changes to the API policy, especially when it comes to pricing. Giving the developer only 30 days to rework their business model, change app architecture/design/code, pass App Store Reviews with Apple/Google, migrate subscribers to a higher-priced tier to afford the increase in pricing, and more is tantamount to spitting in their face. Especially when it's a drastic change from 8+ years of more or less the same.
Doubly so if you've been repeatably telling developers you're not changing it & that developer has reach out specifically to say I know you have an IPO soon. Anything we can do on our end.
If you read his post, he presents all the information you need to know that this isn't true. Reddit themselves admitted that the cost isn't about server/bandwidth usage but opportunity cost per user on 3rd party apps. And it's not exploiting the API if you are using the API within the terms of service agreed to when registering the API token. Apollo wasn't exploiting or abusing anything.
Reddit had no mobile app for years, and yet a ton of mobile users on 3rd party apps. Their own mobile app used to be a 3rd party app that they bought out. So without even getting into other creative uses of the API, they definitely owe some of their popularity to 3rd party mobile app developers. How much? Who can really say how Reddit would have evolved if it had no public API.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 hope Apollo's not overplaying their hand here, though it's super interesting hearing these conversations from the inside. It's clear reddit's got it out for the 3p apps, and I'm personally leaving reddit over this (longtime RIF user), but this post is a bit concerning.
It focuses on the "[apollo can] quiet down [for $10M]" topic in the conversation, and the apparent misunderstanding between Apollo and Reddit, Reddit taking "quiet down" to mean "go away quietly, without a lot of public noise", as a threat.
Apollo states that they meant "go dark", "reduce API usage", "reduce reddit opportunity cost". But for that position to make sense, Apollo would need some leverage here. They're using Reddit's API and platform behind the scenes - they have no leverage I can see. What am I missing?
> "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!
And it would have been a deal: 6 months of opportunity cost upfront to then turn into real profit. Instead they are permanently lose the [possibly] majority of that opportunity when those users lose access to Reddit.
Reddit would need to monetize those users, presumably by adding ads etc to Apollo, eventually turning Apollo into the Reddit app which already exists today (and which Apollo users don't want to use). Only the users willing to tolerate Reddit's enshittified UX would stick around.
Reddit can just force Apollo to shut down and accomplish the same for $10M less.
>And it would have been a deal: 6 months of opportunity cost upfront to then turn into real profit. Instead they are permanently lose the [possibly] majority of that opportunity when those users lose access to Reddit.
I dont think that is accurate. Reddit doesnt make 20M a year if they buy Apollo in this situation.
If something costs 20 million/yr to operate, buying it doesnt reduce that cost. You are just out 10M upfront and then 20M/yr.
The solution is not to buy it, but to make it stop.
This forces Reddit to say out loud that the reason they want to introduce payments is to make third party apps stop.
Reddit has to say that the pricing it has is reasonable which means that they have to say Apollo can earn (at least!) USD 20M a year.
If Apollo can earn USD 20M a year, buying it for USD 10M is indeed a steal.
Normally, if you think a company makes 20M a year, you have to pay at least x 5, so USD 100M to buy this money printing machine.
Claiming something costs you 20M/yr, doesn't mean that it can make 20M/yr.
>If Apollo can earn USD 20M a year, buying it for USD 10M is indeed a steal.
Not if you can get the same thing for doing nothing. Buy Apollo for 10M up front and make 20M/yr or dont buy Apollo and make 20M/yr. Does it really look like a steal when the alternative is free?
Opportunity cost essentially means lost revenue. They (Reddit) aren't referring to server/egress/cloud/etc. costs. Eliminating lost revenue = new revenue.
>Opportunity cost essentially means lost revenue. They (Reddit) aren't referring to server/egress/cloud/etc. costs. Eliminating lost revenue = new revenue
Sure, but that doesn't mean buying/owning apollo helps them eliminate that lost revenue. They eliminate lost revenue when Apollo stops existing, not when they buy it. What is the point of buying it if you dont want it to exist?
Take 2 options:
A> Buy Apollo for $10M, Apollo shuts down, 20M new revenue
B> Don't buy Apollo, Apollo shuts down, 20M new revenue
Spending $10M doesn't stop the losses, Apollo shutting down does.
I utilized a JavaScript script to delete all of my comments and posts from the past ten years. Despite adding delays between deletions, it took multiple tries over several days because some posts kept reappearing.
I guess I want to emphasize that despite not being 3p client user (I was using old.reddit.com), this situation hurts sites reputation enough to bleed me as an user, enough for me to go through the trouble of actually wiping the account, in stead of leaving my content with me under <deleted>.
It is unlikely they'll feel short-term traffic effects of this, but content quality will suffer for sure, will see how that'll pan out. (From the safety of HN comments, of course).
There's no hand to overplay here anymore - the app is shutting down, and the author made it clear that is the intention. While the verbiage could've been different, that doesn't really matter. In these kinds of conversations Reddit folks could've asked for clarification, not assume bad intent (which they did, but then misrepresented).
Apollo's leverage was "We help keep power users on your platform, and keep them happy." And, as it turns out, while their numbers are not necessarily large, they are also some of the loudest and with most influence (see how many subreddits joined the blackout). What the outcome of this will be is to be seen, but it's a very shortsighted take from Reddit, in my own humble opinion.
In the game of Apollo vs No Apollo, agreed, the game is played out. Even if there's some eleventh hour agreement, reduction in API fees etc, the direction is clear - Reddit's killing these guys, just a question of when.
But in the game of Christian vs Spez/Reddit Corp, I wonder about the wisdom of posting these recordings and going this nuclear on Reddit's brand. I suspect Reddit's got some good lawyers, whether you're in the US or Canada.
If Apollo keeps operating, it charges its users more and pays reddit $20 million for one year, and presumably continues paying that into the future.
If Reddit purchases Apollo for $10 million, then those customers now belong to Reddit. For the first year, Reddit would "only" earn $20 - $10 = $10 million, but after that those customers would continue directly earning revenue.
It's all about reasoning with the value of the app in terms of the api rates. Either the rates are unreasonable, or that would be a reasonable sale to Reddit.
I'm not sure that math is right? If the API access actually costs reddit $20m/year then charging Apollo users $20m/year just offsets those costs. So in the first year they actually lose $10m, and just break even in following years. It only makes sense to buy Apollo if the api costs are low.
Not at all. But it seems like the Apollo dev’s argument was “if it actually costs reddit $20m they why not buy Apollo for only $10m”, which doesn’t make sense.
This doesn’t make what reddit is doing any more reasonable though, imo.
Ah, that makes much more sense. But, it could be the case that reddit thinks someone will end up paying their outrageous fees, just not him. It doesn’t necessarily follow that they think Apollo is actually worth that much. Then again, if that’s the case it would be reasonable to work out some sort of discount that reflects the true value of the Apollo user base.
The post mentions that Reddit calculates a $20M/yr opportunity cost to allowing Apollo to continue running as-is. Apollo is trying to say that $10M one-time is a bargain if Reddit truly believes the users are worth $20M/yr.
I don't think Apollo is using this argument as some sort of leverage. Reading through the post, they seem well aware that they are defenseless. They only have the court of public opinion.
I'm also an Apollo user and plan to leave Reddit. Honestly, I'm kind of glad I'm being pushed to leave. Reddit has become a complete cesspool since 2016, and has only gotten exponentially worse since then. While I really enjoy the niche subs I participate in, the large subs are just a breeding ground for extremist views on both sides as well as some of the craziest conspiracy theories around. Good riddance.
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.
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.
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,.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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'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.
Reddit 16-year club member here. Reddit has made the the most tone-deaf decision in their entire 17 year history. This will be a future case study on how to self-immolate your entire community.
100% in my experience the people that use Reddit the most (~daily) are the folks that are more likely to be done with Reddit for their stupid decisions.
I’ve only been using Reddit for an about 5.5 years, but when I first signed up I just didn’t use it because I used the website. Then I found Apollo and I became a daily user and it was my main social media.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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...
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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.
> 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.
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”
> 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.
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.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435&p=4
For other recent threads on this topic, brace yourself and go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36251707.