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.
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.
Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.
Reddit from 2017 or so is open source!
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.
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.
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.
I pay Apple more than a million a month and I don’t even have a contact email.
Just saying, a Christmas card would be nice.
Because some people don’t want to! And that’s okay.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
In addition to what everyone else has said, he really has 1 month if he has any chance of siphoning off reddit users.
I suspect that both reddit and apollo know that most of the content generation happens on Reddit controlled properties.
Apollo users probably do not generate enough content to sustain a reddit-like website.
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.
