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.
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.
Unfortunately Mastodon feels a bit empty, there's not many people on it yet.
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.
We can build a Reddit replacement… we just have to want to
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.
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Don’t be afraid to bring people in when something is outside your area of expertise.
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
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.
The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Third party apps representing less than 5% of Reddit's traffic, this is by far not "most people's" favorite app.
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)
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.
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.
However, it naturally stopped working when Twitter basically killed the free tier of their API.
It would likely still work on the "Basic" API tier, but I'm not paying $100 a month to use a Twitter app.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit for amusement is a blackhole.
For the best really to leave.
I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion.
It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.
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 only name drop the app because it has served me well for ad blocking and custom rules (like blocking Reddit).
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.
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.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
To be fair, this doesn't seem that bad, especially in comparison to the API price hike and their handling of it.
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.
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.
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 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.
Anyway, I quit cold turkey end of last year after being a daily user for those 15 years. Definitely right move.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
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.
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.
I stopped reading at that point. I probably would have laughed at the suggestion instead of taking it as blackmail though.
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.
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.
Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.
I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian's offer is for Apollo to "go away quietly", as in he personally won't make noise about it. I'm not honestly sure that there's another sound way to interpret this.
Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It's not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.
This 'clarification' that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will "go quiet", doesn't make sense, because Reddit doesn't need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.
What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that "Christian will shut down the app and go quietly" is the only answer that makes sense in context.
We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren't necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: "Vote for our initiative or else we'll stop funding you and fund your opposition"? No, almost certainly not. They'd say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.
Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he's offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It's not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. "Buy me out or else I'm going to cause even more public fuss about this". The way that it's communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recording his calls with them for over a year (legally I might add). Reddit has 0 wiggle room here.
EDIT: Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value? I feel like this is going to significantly reshape Reddit as moderators of large subreddits will be furious and quit if not destroy entire subreddits. Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...
EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
EDIT 4: #1 Reddit Android app "Reddit is Fun" is shutting down too https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...
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.
If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?
One day I looked at it, not logged in.
Turned out there was a post, "pinned by moderators", at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.
I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.
I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.
Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!
Bloody hell.
At that point I knew Reddit could not be trusted.
"We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps."
I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...
What is the employee culture like it Reddit?
I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite.
Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions based on personal relationships, rather than anything else.
Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.
§205 : https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-05-20-28/KAPITTEL_2-...
EDIT: See now that he was in Canada when it was recorded, and they have the same kind of laws.
This is *literally* what is expected of someone running a company with intitutional investors - anything other than this and investors are not interested.
What more proof do we need that there is nothing more important to a small group of humans that own all the money, than them getting more money?
Subreddits are run by volunteer moderators and are entirely at the whim of reddit. If any substantial subreddit tried to shut down or go dark permanently reddit would just remove the moderators responsible.
Oh please. Let's be honest, this is not financially going to hurt the company.
Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.
This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.
Guess no more bathroom reddit for me. 4chan still works.
Like, I can't remember a time that there _hasn't_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that's for sure.
I'm sure a few will but, I can't name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it's just a job and pays money. And pays well.
Why would he lose his job? Realistically, it's a smart business move to monetise their users. It's Reddit, them being pissy about having to pay is part of the course. There is a reason they're the lowest valued social media users.
>EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
What would he have a claim for? He wasn't paying for the API. He could pay for the API and continue to operate. You can't sue someone because they stopped letting you use their services for free. You sure can't sue a business for asking your for-profit company to pay expenses.
Realistically, these app users would have made tens if not hundreds of thousands a month if they just added subscription model to their app and only had paying customers. These apps could still exist and be extremely profitable for a one-man apps.
Simple maths $5 a month subscription $2.50 to reddit $1.50 to apple and $1 to the app developer. Say 10% of their users convert which seems very reasonable considering the reception a price increase to $6.99 seem to get on the Apollo subreddit. That would have been $100,000 a month profit. But instead, they shut it down.
Not against a private company, no. Reddit is still owned by Conde-Nast, I believe. What to do with it is up to them.
Also in general *employees* don't bring shareholder lawsuits. Even if you own significant stock, getting fired for suing your boss is usually a losing proposition.
It's my understanding that Apollo users make up a fraction of a percent of active users. Reddit almost certainly doesn't care. Fact is they've taken in over a billion in funding and aren't really returning a profit, charging for API access starts moving them in the right direction though.
I paid for the app years ago - it was $5 or so and I don't expect to get anything back. That's just how the game works.
I know he also had some sort of monthly subscription - it seemed quite absurd for whatever additional trivial features it provided, but then again there apparently was some sort of Apollo fanboy group who got a lot of excitement out of new app logos, which seemed to be the main updates in the last few years, even at the expense of serious bugs that lingered for months.
I'd assume those subscriptions would just stop being charged going forward. So again, who is getting $250k in refunds?
Furthermore, if he is refunding that much money, I wonder what kind of revenue and profits he was pulling in? I had kind of assumed he was making a very good living (deservedly - it was a good app) - maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but now I'm wondering if he was making a order of magnitude more than that...
Is there a running list of subs (over a certain high number of subscribers, to keep it focused) that aren't in the blackout list? That would be interesting to see. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, at least while the API is still free...
Tech employees are somewhat notorious for not enforcing their shareholder rights. Most companies, for example, ignore their books & records requirements under Delaware law, or force private sales to occur at terms favourable to management and the Board’s friends.
He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.
Those 3rd party apps are leeches that are playing surprised_pikachu.jpeg when the blood supply is cut.
The simple fact that this guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions shows the insane amount of money he made off of the back of Reddit.
How long will Reddit survive if they don’t do this? I have no idea. But I do know the CEO has to deliver more than happy users.
I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.
It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?
How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn't seem possible.
I mod a top 1% sub and one of our moderators exclusively uses Apollo for moderation work. Official Reddit app doesn't work well, and their workflow for modding doesn't involve a computer.
....what's that worth to Reddit?
Part of me thinks that one of the reasons they want to kill 3rd party apps is because they're embarrassed that they're all better than whatever Reddit has come up in the last decade.
Maybe they should listen to mods and users instead of trying to push whatever they want down users' throats, because it's not going to last much longer.
They shut it down two months ago.
What are good tools for erasing one's Reddit history? I just learned about redact.dev (but haven't tried it yet) for example.
UPDATE: react.dev seems to work well. It's deleted 1.5K+ posts as I type this at 0.65–0.85 per second.
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
> Wow. Because my memory is that you didn't take it as a threat, and you even apologized profusely when you admitted you misheard it.
Wow, I didn't know it'd gotten that bad.
Edit: Maybe keep an eye on what they say to catch them performing material securities fraud? Wayback early, wayback often!
Edit 2: Damage control mode: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce... (r/reddit: Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API [Locked])
I think the new API pricing model was developed with a single purpose: extinguishing third-party apps to improve the official app's install/usage metrics before their upcoming IPO.
(and dont forget that cannabilism was the sub ran by CEO /u/spez where he was openly talking about how much he wanted to eat a baby.)
I am not slandering him -- I am QUOTING him.
Hell you can't even browse Reddit without an account anymore!
>Abundantly. Unlike other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter who pay their moderators as employees, Reddit relies on volunteers to do the hard work for free. I completely understand that when tools they take to do their volunteer, important job are taken away, there is anger and frustration there. While I haven't personally mobilized anyone to participate in the blackout out of fear of retaliation from Reddit, the last thing I want is for that to feel like I don't support the folks speaking up. I wholeheartedly do.
>It's been a horrible week, and the kindness Redditors and moderators and communities have shown Apollo and other third-party apps has genuinely made it much more bearable and I am genuinely so appreciative.
>I am, admittedly, doubtful Reddit wants to listen to folks anymore so I don't see it having an effect.
Man this is just a bummer to read.
> Have just read your amazing, sad, comprehensive Reddit post about the end of Apollo.
> I was one of those long-ago paid-once users :-) and happily used Apollo for years. When I found out a few days ago what was happening to you, I actually deleted Apollo from my devices so I wouldn’t inadvertently cost you money through background stuff once Reddit’s API fees went into effect. Then, as I got really mad over what they’d done to you and the other third-party app devs, I spent hours deleting every comment and every submission I’d ever made to Reddit — because, of course, they don’t have a UI where you can do that easily — and then killed my account after seven years, just because all of this had made me no longer want any association with that platform.
This is the death knell of Reddit, and I hope that the blackout succeeds in getting them to revert their greedy plan.
Reference: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/141mdvt/apollo_o... (Video with timestamp: https://youtu.be/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=2780)
(In other news, TIL Youtube search seemingly looks through transcripts. Nice!)
I think the network effects of Reddit are a lot easier to undo than that of Twitter. There is little core functionality that didn’t exist in forum software from the Naughties.
I would say the 'social media era' of the history of the web has concluded in failure. When you consolidate everyone onto a singular platform, it creates a weird unhealthy community dynamic, and the business incentives do not align at all with users.
IMO this should be much more common practice, where it's legal. It would be cool to one day have built-in functions in our smartphones that automatically enable it when the detected location allows for it.
https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/call-recording-on-xi...
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-ends-call-recording-app...
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...
Someone should tell this dude about Excel.
Which I don't even have on my personal computer now that I think about it.
I was initally on Reddit's side in this particular matter (and I still think Selig's API pricing justifications are worthless), but I was shocked to learn Huffman is still the CEO, so his offhand comments about this situation and Reddit's general bad faith interactions with Selig in the past week are now very obvious to me.
Anyway, all the best to Selig.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...
Edit: Jesus Christ, that guy on the other end of the phone has just completely destroyed himself in the world of business by lying about the conversation he had with the Apollo developer: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
The users that don’t value the apollo experience enough to pay for it would switch to the reddit app, driving more ad revenue. The users that do value the Apollo experience would still keep providing their content to the platform, in addition to becoming paid, direct, subscribers.
This really seems like an amateur strategy.. kill the massively popular apps with ridiculous pricing and unfair timelines, and hope that the users of this massive community organizing tool you control don’t use it against you? Cut off (and piss off) a big segment of your power users in hopes that a sizable chunk of them move to the native app?
If Apollo's users (or a good percentage of them) moved over to an alternative platform, that would be poetic justice, at least.
Open standards, open-source based or decentralized platforms, or your own platform are the way to go (I'm talking here from the dev perspective, not from the end user perspective - but proprietary sites are equally annoying for end users when they get discontinued. Making a one-time exeption to my self-hosting preference, I had a blog hosted at Posterous until Twitter acquired them and they shut down).
I remember when my software career started in earnest back in 2011. There was a lot of positive energy in the air. A whole generation of people was discovering the joys of engineering and sharing their efforts and creativity through various forms of open access.
Now, it feels like that's all gone. The spirit of generosity and altruism in the tech industry is much diminished. It seems we have an odd combination of C-suite mental illness and activist investors to thank for that.
I didn’t think I was able to quit social media addictions, but I’ve successfully ignored Twitter since Elon took over. I’m confident I can do the same with reddit, although it will be much harder.
I suppose all I really need is like some sort of curated RSS instead.
Why not roll out these changes slower and ramp up fees over time? Why not give app developers time to adapt?
Apollo is written by one guy. Is it really fair to tell him to rewrite his business model and make significant changes to his app in just a month or two?
It's hard to see how Reddit can actually survive with this level of mismanagement.
After you shutdown, can you turn Apollo into a site-specific browser? Like request reddit html, write a custom transformer to make it less bad, render with a safari webview, and push nav changes as views on the stack?
I've always been shocked Reddit allowed this at all. No other major player that owns a platform- FB, instagram, Google, etc. offers this either.
I don't like it either but it makes perfect sense. You could even make the argument that not doing this would mean Reddit employees aren't doing their jobs, and aren't looking out for the company.
The OP says Reddit claims they were being blackmailed (which clearly they weren't) but it's the talk around opportunity cost that I don't understand, especially as related alleged blackmail.
1) It would cost Apollo $20m to continue operating, and somehow Apollo, not able to afford it and offering to just kind of walk away from the app constitutes Blackmail?
2) The $20m opportunity cost claims. I don't get this. The new actual cost to Apollo would be $20m, that's not an opportunity cost for Reddit. The opportunity cost for reddit is really just the resources & attention it takes them to keep the API system running, which is presumable far, far, below the sticker price they will be charging 3rd parties per 1,000 API calls.
3) In general, I don't understand how any 3rd party has leverage to threaten or blackmail Reddit. Sure some people prefer to use 3rd party apps & services, but I'm assuming (is this a bad assumption?) that if those apps and services went away that a large majority of of their users would simply switch to native reddit options rather than stop consuming & interacting with content they enjoy.
I've blocked 2 dozen accounts in as many days.
It feels like Reddit is about to implode.
Everyone boycotting reddit is all talk and no hat. They will still be on reddit.
If you listen to the call this Christian guy literally said: "if your opportunity cost is really $20 million, you cut me a cheque for $10 million dollars and we can both skip off into the sunset"
A joke, seriously? Why on earth would you say this in what was audibly a very tense, high-stakes call and negotiation for both sides? There is no excuse whatsoever.
Very funny, because one week later he dishes reddit and Steve the biggest shitstorm in the entire history of the site - which it would be even without all the blackmail call drama. Hello? Costing and causing surely 10s of millions in damage.
Can we appreciate that even if this Christian guy is just so genuinely ignorant, selfish and toxic without intentionally meaning any harm that at least Steve certainly was fully aware of all the implications, the seriousness and non-funny nature of the conversation?
He had and has every reason and right to feel blackmailed. The only interpretation one can take away from Christian's behavior now is that Steve had better taken him up on the "joke". Clearly, the PR disaster could have been avoided by paying up instead of accepting the cost and reacting exactly as Steve did - in the call Steve rejected the offer and notion of doing any deals. The way he apologised is what you do to save the other person's face and keep the door open for the relationship. It's not what you literally think and mean.
Steve was never going to go back to his team and say "silly me! I'm such an idiot for getting this idea into my head. That he's threatening us because he's about to shut down, cause maximum damage on the way out and stage a user revolt. When he was just trying to entertain us with a funny joke about us buying him out for $10 million. When we have no legal or moral obligation to do so. I love him, he's so funny, glad I apologised on the spot.".
If anything, one should pay some respect to Steve, not taking up the blackmail and steering head on into this mess. Good luck!
Consider the following: AOL instant messenger, ICQ, Paltalk, Tivejo, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, 11 different messaging apps from Google, Zoom, Go2Meeting, WebEx, Microsoft Lynq, Skype for Business, Slack, iMessage, CuSeeMe, Discord, …
A user looking superficially at those applications might notice very little difference or progress between them, the one thing they have in common is they are not compatible with each other, many of them are tied into a proprietary ecosystem (AOL, Facebook, …) and a major difference is they are tied into different proprietary ecosystem.
Such an app always follows a scenario like “You should install Skype and contact me, unlike Paltalk it really works these days”. You try it and you’re like “Wow! This really works!” but after a few years it becomes less reliable and buggier than it was when it started. Some new application comes along and is in a honeymoon period where it knows it has to actually work in order to add new users while the old broken app can coast because they figure nobody can disrupt their two-sided market. History shows that the old app really will deteriorate to the point where the incumbent advantage is lost and a new app will be better…. For a while.
What amazes me is that everybody from users to the app makers are stuck in this cycle and seem to have very little insight into it.
It’s a reason why you need a service that is separate from the client and have to have competition for both. Unfortunately users seem to violently opposed to this and open messaging platforms like XMPP have only caught on with military and law enforcement users.
The “fediverse” is a light of hope in this respect, what you learn when you get involved is it is not just Mastodon but there are many different systems that are inter operating. I wish the EU would take the problem seriously and just legislate interoperation between messaging apps, I mean, you can call an Android user from an iPhone, a Verizon customer can send a text to an AT&T customer, it is long past the time when you should be able to send a Slack user a message from Facebook messenger.
I'm not a client-facing person (a developer) so I might have been tongue in cheek myself as well. Not sure how any of that sounded threatening though...
Assuming the website is public, allows login using standard JS/HTML and provides results in JS/HTML/CSS: with all the hype around GPT4 etc, wouldn't it be 'easy' to catch the bullet using some converter? And keep deploying a machine to catch up with another machine that keeps changing its "API" (i.e. the look and feel of the website in this case)
I am only partially joking.
I asked Bard and this is what I got:
Reddit has not publicly released its financial information, so it is difficult to say exactly how much profit the company earns. However, we can make some estimates based on the company's revenue and expenses.
In 2021, Reddit generated $350 million in revenue, primarily from advertising. The company also has a premium membership program that generates around $17 million in revenue. Reddit's expenses are estimated to be around $200 million, which includes costs for salaries, marketing, and operations.
Based on this information, we can estimate that Reddit's profit in 2021 was around $150 million. However, it is important to note that this is just an estimate, and the actual amount of profit could be higher or lower.
Reddit is a growing company, and its revenue is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. This growth will likely lead to an increase in the company's profit. However, it is also possible that Reddit's expenses will increase as the company grows, which could offset some of the increase in revenue.
Overall, Reddit is a profitable company, and its profit is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.
I started using the mobile site after Reddit bought Alien Blue, and I saw how the user experience gradually deteriorated to push their mobile app.
I occasionally used Apollo as an alternative, and I can understand the sentiment of the users. As a reluctant iOS user, Apollo was one of the things that kept me on the platform.
Seeing the direction thar Reddit has been taking, I hope a new platform comes to take its place with the focus on discussions/community.
>Probably not. Maybe if the perfect buyer came along who thought they could turn Apollo into something cool
I get that it's something he built and loves, but if someone shows up with $1m and the alternative is to shut it down and get nothing. Then take the money even if it's not the "perfect buyer" and it won't be "cool".
1. When I click a post, sometimes it goes to a different post's detail page. The only way to remedy this is to refresh and visit the sub directly via Reddit search function, or restart the app.
2. Video player sometimes just doesn't play the video no matter how often you click "play", similar fix as above.
3. Google search is better at searching Reddit than Reddit search.
Very annoying, but I still use it and never felt the need to use Apollo. To slightly defend Reddit, Apollo is just a client, and I assume they bring nothing else to the table. Apollo team should have had the foresight to see this coming years ago. Reddit can't be blamed for trying to monetize their data. If I had to choose between Reddit and Apollo, obviously I'd choose Reddit because Reddit is where the data lives.
Then leave the app a review based on how well it compares to the system's accessibility font sizes which should go up to 310%.
So far so good. Speaking facts, no opinion, no bias.
> The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year.
No bulk discount?
I guess it's in Reddit's best interest to have people on the official Reddit app in the first place.
For the Redditors that laughed and criticized Twitter when they capped user counts in third party apps and raised their API usage fees, karma was waiting with patience to return the favor.
I view what Reddit did as an opportunity. Even though Mastodon was a spectacular failure, I could see a Reddit alternative that uses the federated model that Mastodon does.
* https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-...
Also I see no evidence that he was accused of blackmail. A linked comment in the Reddit thread states:
>Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.
The linked comment is from "BuckRowdy", apparently not even an employee of Reddit and that is not "blackmail". To me that's "hey, acquihire me and my company for 10 million and then you don't have to do the work!"
I deleted twitter a couple of months ago.
This feels like a positive move for me.
Over time Apple could then perhaps make the Reddit clone.
On the web I still use old.reddit.com but I can see them killing that off sooner or later.
How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
The outcome was unsurprising and it is unfortunate. But this is why third-party apps are always at a disadvantage. The same happened with Twitter and they made that clear and now so did Reddit.
Like I said before in [0]
"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."
Some RSS readers pull data per user. Others aggregate across their entire userbase, so that the most popular feeds are only read once (or once per data center)
This isn't the first story like this but the prices that are being calculated are absolutely outrageous.
I have a feeling Redit just figured they have cornered this market already and the AI training that's being done is definitely a good reason to start paying for the API.
But there are ways to offer "genuine enrichment integrations apps" a particular license.
This flat rate is just not tenable for most if not all!
But now, partially because of this (and partially because they've intentionally made the mobile web experience unusable over the last few years), I decided to quit Reddit a few days ago.
And it feels great. I've spent the time that I would have wasted on Reddit tackling my TO-READ list of books instead. And I feel much happier for it.
Wow. Now I know why reddit is tightening the noose. Third party developers making bank feeding off of the firehose that is reddit API.
So that fixed my Twitter addition - I just stopped using it.
The same will likely happen here - Reddit is going to find out that I'm happy querying for other users's content (from Google/Duck queries) but without Apollo, I'm probably not going to contribute.
Maybe we'll finally get some reddit competitors that aren't dominated by alt right blowhards.
Anyway, this will probably stop my Reddit consumption altogether.
Already deleted my account a while ago, because some discussions became too toxic for me. Stil enjoying to read there and Apollo made it really enjoyable, even better than rif is fun on Android.
Is there a good archive of previous Reddit content until now?
Was this always a thing? I cannot remember if this was in the case in the past, and I don't really have a Reddit account that I actually log into ever.
Next time this kind of situation comes up, I highly recommend using a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets.. (cough, cough)
Spreading the controll of subreddits over multiple domains and communities is probably the only insurance against ending up in a situation like we are witnessing with Reddit now.
So excited to have all that time back to be honest.
Though my excitement about that does make it sound like I'm excited about Reddit's API changes... Social interactions are hard :/
I refuse to use their AWFUL first-party app.
This is straight-up villainy.
Account deleted, noted the slander as the reason.
Many OpenAI apps or services ask you to config your own key. Does this solves the API price problem?
Piss off those people and you don’t have a business anymore.
r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249958 - June 2023 (233 comments)
Sync will shut down on June 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248234 - June 2023 (88 comments)
Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246937 - June 2023 (73 comments)
Reddit is Fun will shut down on June 30th in response to Reddit API changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246398 - June 2023 (129 comments)
Reddit will exempt accessibility-focused apps from unpopular API pricing changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36238630 - June 2023 (115 comments)
Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285 - June 2023 (36 comments)
Reddit's Recently Announced API Changes, and the future of /r/blind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231016 - June 2023 (288 comments)
Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225583 - June 2023 (134 comments)
Reddit to lay off about 5% of its workforce - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36223466 - June 2023 (30 comments)
Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36218281 - June 2023 (100 comments)
Reddit Laying Off About 90 Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36218090 - June 2023 (56 comments)
Reddit permanently bans account of user advocating Lemmy migration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36215914 - June 2023 (298 comments)
Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36210805 - June 2023 (494 comments)
Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610 - June 2023 (230 comments)
iOS Reddit App Apollo's Developer Surprised by WWDC Callout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203277 - June 2023 (27 comments)
We're joining the Reddit blackout from June 12th to 14th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202277 - June 2023 (54 comments)
Ask HN: Reddit alternatives (that aren't Mastodon) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199403 - June 2023 (30 comments)
Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36196343 - June 2023 (213 comments)
Tell HN: My Reddit account was banned after adding my subs to the protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192312 - June 2023 (218 comments)
Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36187705 - June 2023 (172 comments)
Don't let Reddit kill 3rd party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179853 - June 2023 (260 comments)
How Reddit became the enemy [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36177876 - June 2023 (154 comments)
Update 3: Reddit effectively kills off third party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36170143 - June 2023 (23 comments)
Reddit sparks outrage after it demands app developer pay $20M/yr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166236 - June 2023 (76 comments)
Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 - June 2023 (416 comments)
Fidelity has cut Reddit valuation by 41% since 2021 investment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36157829 - June 2023 (85 comments)
Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36153565 - June 2023 (149 comments)
Teddit – An alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144211 - May 2023 (93 comments)
Historical code from reddit.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142971 - May 2023 (64 comments)
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 - May 2023 (1292 comments)
Reddit's API Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085422 - May 2023 (25 comments)
Why is the third-party app vendor (and not the users themselves) paying for these API calls?
1. Download Apollo
2. Go to Reddit.com
3. Open your user settings
4. Generate a client_id and client_secret
5. Paste that into these two places in Apollo
6. There you go
Sure it's not strictly to OAuth2, but it's going to work just fine, right?
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of trying to monetize a service that either a) isn't something people want to pay for, or b) monetizing it in a way that kills the spirit of the service. A common problem with the internet, sure, but also smacks of a complete lack of creativity on the part of the suits. If this were an issue of maintaining Reddit's longevity, they could find a way to have their cake and eat it too. No, this is a clear attempt to raise their value before their IPO, so that a few suits can jump ship when the value is at its highest, as we've seen time and time again. And they're too stupid to see that their efforts fly in the face of their obvious goal.
Reddit got popular for lots of reasons; a big one was that it was fun and still felt freewheeling in a way that the increasingly corporate internet wasn't. It was still anonymous (if you wanted it to be), weird, communal, much like the early internet that was seemingly disappearing before our eyes, and yet still decently mainstream albeit in a nerdy way.
Something changed when people started referring to it as "social media." I've always been confused by that label. It's "social," yes, and I guess it is indeed "media," but it's not "social media." It has little in common with Myspace or Facebook or Instagram. It has much more in common with internet forums, albeit with an IMO better interface (the tiered comments design is simple and brilliant, much easier to navigate and keep parallel conversations going than your standard in-line forum). We don't call forums "social media" -- that label is quite loaded and comes with a number of connotations.
But alas, they tried to monetize it via the same model that all other "social media" is monetized -- with ads, clamping down on the weird, etc.
This kills the Reddit. Remember Tumblr?
My prediction? Reddit is going to limp on, but as even more of shadow of its former self than it's already become. It will become the Facebook equivalent of this kind of "social media" -- a distinctly non-hip, safe, boring, corporate place, with an ever-aging user base. One day it will be sold for a comparatively measly fee to someone social media giant that doesn't even exist yet.
Those who long for the Reddit of old will go off to other places. I myself already spend most of my time on HN anyways -- it's basically everything I want from Reddit and none of what I don't. It's got the "old.reddit.com" interface, doesn't require a mobile app to use on a mobile browser, is information-dense, clean, fast. Content-wise HN and the tech-related subreddits I frequent have a huge amount of overlap both in terms of content and I presume users. For everything else...meh, I can take it or leave it. The hobby subreddits are great, the /r/all comment threads for huge events are great, but all that was the cherry on top, not the cake.
I'll probably just continue to mostly spend my time here, and check out, say, the various fediverse clones of Reddit. But just like Mastadon with Twitter, it'll be too fragmented to truly replace what everyone is jumping ship from.
It's sad, but I suppose this is the way of all things. It's new, it's fun, it matures, it's stable, then it decays. So it goes.
Christian should have had a lawyer sit next to him on that call.
But also, dude just raise your prices. I read the whole announcement and truly don't understand why Apollo can't be $20/year. I don't know anybody who attributes a meaningful difference to $10/year and $20/year. I'm not a user but if I was faced with that type of price change and some language around needing to adjust pricing because Reddit is now charging for API access, I'd not give it a second thought.
It really really seems weird to want to die on this hill when you don't need to. Maybe it is the harbinger of the end for Reddit and we're just overdue. But I see no reason the founder of a popular Reddit reader couldn't secure some temporary funding to weather the transition, or simply negotiate a longer lead time rather than spending all the time in talks and ugly back and forth.