The reach of contrived political philosophy, fiat economic hustle, and pop culture gabber can be constrained; the obsolescence of /. , MySpace, and the like did not destroy reality. Now we know the outcome of the social media experiment. Utter dumpster fire.

It occurs to me people made a whole lot of small business work before handing sacks of cash to cloud SaaS

We need less adminisphere in all contexts so we can screw up again, let the wrong people helicopter us with banal AI bots, make lizard brain m sedate until it gets bored with AI bots. Then we’ll trot out a new copium for the masses and they can lean back again, super proud of their commitment to whatever hallucinated ideology they believe they’re serving.

All while waving off the ecological impact, because reality is just a big graph, mmmk

It's the normal users that suffer. Hopefully that suffering will hit Reddits usage/cash flows enough to make them u turn.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Exactly! I can comment on a post and have real engagement with someone which hasn't happened in years on Twitter.

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.

Further I wouldn’t be trusting a hot take from ~100 points GuestXXXXXX at this point of the PR dumpster fire cycle.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Also, what things are priced at is not what they cost …

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 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".

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

[1]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/an-update-on-microfiber-po...

Not a perfect company, I mean almost all of their iconic garments are plastic, but they're doing far more than other technical outerwear companies.

I would assert that there does not exist a company which is both larger than Patagonia, and more moral than they are.

I'm gonna use that statement from now on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate...

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.

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.

The more I talk to people the more I feel like people just like to party/waste money more than work.

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.

Apollo already has monetized users with subscription costs.

Well, had monetized users.

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.

Even if they could only get a quarter of that from users, they'd be rolling in money after a year or two.

> and then 20M/yr

The servers don't cost anywhere near that much to run.

They claim that they would.

Do you think anyone believes that to be true?

Then again. I hate using my phone in general, so I always think that any content creators would use desktop and maybe old reddit.

Imagine a free music festival with zero security. It would be chaos and the volunteer artists would stop performing.

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.

Joke was to offer the app for half the price if the pricing was legitimate, and keep the users.

Steve Huffman is not a good person.

>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.

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.

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.

Regardless, if they wanted to create a better app they'd do it. They don't want to.

I would love to see someone state clearly:

1. What was Christian actually offering to do in exchange for $10M?

2. What did the Reddit person think that Christian was offering to do in exchange for $10M?

3. How are (1) and (2) different?

For example, I had a boss once that would interpret everything I said as a threat (I had a friendship with the owners of the company).

It's just, stupid, and insulting.

yes, that is the threat. Yes, it is also a business transaction. The two are not mutually exclusive.

black·mail:

demand money or another benefit from (someone) in return for not revealing compromising or damaging information about them.

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.

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.

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.

Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.

https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/

HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.

The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.

Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.

Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.

I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.

If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.

There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric

But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.

What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.

In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.

Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.

In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?

Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.

So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.

Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.

they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.

I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.

I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.

That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...

is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.

Hmmm ...

But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!

> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.

Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?

edit: just read that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248834

> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.

> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...

Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).

Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.

Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.

The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.

A coordinated blackout on Reddit to protest the new Ugandan anti lgbt legislation wouldn't make as much sense or be as effective. There are regularly posts voted to the front page of reddit about these new laws and other human rights issues and what you might be able to do to help if interested.

These different issues don't have to be in competition and aren't analogous to each other.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand, and to be frank, I get enough LGBTQ propaganda firehosed at me every other which way, thank you very much.

That's an effective end-run on Godwin's law. Well played, sir.

You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.

My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.

Nuke reddit (only on the edge extension store it looks like) is giving their frontends a workout.

In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.

I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.

You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.

If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.

And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.

> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million."

> Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."

In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.

It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.

The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.

To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.

I just listened to your audio link several times, and I totally disagree that it sounded like a threat.

Also, the call was not with Steve, as Christian explained:

> Have you talked to CEO Steve Huffman about any of this?

> I requested a call to talk to Steve about some suggestions I had, his response was "Sorry, no. You can give name-redacted a ping if you want."

I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...

Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.

"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."

That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.

It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.

Of course this was a threat. It wasn't a language issue. And the post-hoc explanation was nonsense. It was an obvious and indisputable threat.

Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.

I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.

10 years too late.

BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.

But Reddit is and always has pretended to be a "big name" company like Youtube, Facebook, etc.

They would even feel good about it because they have managed to obtain an unfair advantage and get away with it.

Now, even if they backtrack on this later on in a few months or years, they burned the good will, so I doubt developers are going invest the time to make a good Reddit client after this.

Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.

So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.

In that case, app developers have several options:

* start showing users ads, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit

* start charging a monthly fee for the app, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit

* some combination of these two (e.g. pay a subscription for ad-free use)

Sure, Reddit could make this easier for app developers, but isn't it all basically the same thing at the end of the day? Reddit wants (or needs? I have no idea what their financials look like) to make a certain amount of money per-user or per page view. Apps take home ~100% of their profits currently, and make Reddit ~nothing. So Reddit is pricing in a profit rate into API access.

I mean, just to look at Apollo, they have 166K ratings on the Apple App Store, and surely far more users than that. Reddit wants $20M a year from them. That's high, maybe too high, but how does it compare to the value of (say) a million users a year on the official Reddit app? If Apollo switched to a subscription model on which they charged $1 a month to users, would they be able to pay Reddit's API fees? (Assuming those API fees would drop by at least 50% after non-paying users quit using Apollo.)

A text website is easy to run.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...

I don’t really understand how they could make that hire or why they would have thought that person was a good choice…

"By way of illustration:

If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."

There's nothing obviously improper about a site replacing a free API with a paid API even if it causes problems for those who relied on the API being free.

Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs, which Reddit was not under a legal obligation to continue providing at historical rates that Apollo had based its entire product around, despite long-standing advice not to do so.

I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing.

Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?

But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:

* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.

* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"

That's been the economy in the US for two decades now.

Voting rights are relatively irrelevant for minority holders. It's all the other rights, granted by contract and more importantly law, that tech employees can be generally regarded on to not exercise (or bullied into not exercising by management).

Well, no, options don't make them shareholders unless they're exercised. RSUs don't make them shareholders at all, because they're not actually stock (they're stock units).

Reddit's cap table is probably a mess at this point, so I imagine that some current employees are also shareholders, but I don't know if all are, and RSUs don't make them shareholders.

We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.

Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.

This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.

The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.

Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.

HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.

That's entirely on Apollo...

Right - and in 10 years everyone will still be using Reddit, Apollo will just be a distant memory, and nobody will give any thought to the API pricing model.

Just reality...

It's all clown college over there and this latest saga is their new graduate degree program. I'm afraid to see what the doctoral program will bring.

However, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. For generating more ad revenue here IMO. The sort of ill-will they’re creating will probably drive away the top-posters and moderators that make the site worth visiting.

Is ad space on a site that’s contracted by 1% of its users going to tank in value? No probably not. But is the 99% going to stick around when the content they came for is missing or not moderated? Ehhh…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

> need to show reddit ads

I've always thought about this too but I've heard this is a non starter for advertising companies, most companies want to know exactly where their ads are being served before putting money on the table.

I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.

Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.

You need enough power users to sustain interest, post content, and launch it.

The goal shouldn’t be to replace Reddit as it exists today, because if you go down that route you are doomed to repeat their mistakes of constant growth at the cost of everything else.

Tha dam will burst, it's not a question of if but when. It's a guarantee from the ever declining quality of reddit.

Hopefully for the owners’ sake they manage to finish their IPO before that whole situation explodes.

This was probably the best-case-scenario Reddit was hoping for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Yes, $10M is a fantastically low price even if they throw it away in a year.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5yq7q/judge-affirms-jack-do...

I still feel no matter how natively one tries to build products - they cannot build everything. You cannot create CI/CD, monitoring, frontend, containerization, and cloud services just for your software or service. Those depend on some platform API which you won't create just for your product. Short or long business value - unless one becomes a major player with several software engineering teams building a product ecosystem - other people's APIs and frameworks will be used. And that is perfectly fine. That is how good products should be -using nice building blocks. No need to reinvent the wheel everytime.

Again, the insinuation was that if anything was actually costing them the absurd $20,000,000 per year for multiple years then they would have had equally absurd ways of dealing with it, like paying a ridiculous $10,000,000 for Apollo and still saving tens of millions of dollars, which would have made more sense to do than what they did (let it go for years). The most obvious interpretation of this is "So obviously it's not costing you that absurdly, and we all know it. Now stop jerking me around on this API price being 'reasonable'." not "And that's why I'm asking you to actually pay me $10,000,000 to go away".

This method of pointing out how absurd the API pricing is came from a user, prior to the call: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/... (the "/s" means sarcasm, in case you were thinking they were being serious as well).

> Also weird to release audio publicly based on hear-say, the Steve guy didn't accuse him publicly of anything.

It's not just private hearsay, the two quotes attributed to Steve are from the moderation call transcript which has been shared and verified.

> I'd be very careful to be on the phone with this Christian guy, because, I might also "miss" (did he mention it at any point to the other guy?) that he is recording the conversation.

I'd be worried about talking to someone who feels the need to be careful when they know the call is recorded.

He said a much more reasonable thing would be to cut the price in half and give a 3 month transition period to make it "feasible for more developers, myself included."

> However in a perfect world I think lowering the price by half and providing a three month transition period to the paid API would make the transition feasible for more developers, myself included. These concessions seem minor and reasonable in the face of the changes.

What that would likely mean is removing as many API calls as possible and removing features as a result. Which means fewer users would want to pay for it.

> I was just spitballing that doubling his revenue would mean he could manage the price Reddit is asking (since he said he could make due with half).

Also, as a tidbit. His current subscription pricing is $5/mo for ultra.

If we want to take that as his revenue for an ongoing subscription to double (since API access is going to be monthly), then the app would be $10/mo or $120/yr.

Maybe it's unlikely or uncommon though.