Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
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Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#2It absolutely amazes me how badly reddit has handled this whole situation. From the years of broken promises to moderators, the complete lack of accessibility in their own apps, and then on top of their for their CEO to not only get caught in a major lie but for him to then double down on it. As much as reddit wants to make these developers into the bad guys, every move they've made in this mess has hurt their reputation while making the third party developers look amazingly reasonable.
Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community. Frankly, anyone who does business with any of these execs should see now that they can and will happily lie and mislead. I don't know how you come back from that.
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#3Is there a whole Mastodon like movement with Reddit that users seem to be moving to?
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#4IMO, he’s doing a pretty good job negotiating this as well. I know there’s a lot of words right now about broken promises and everyone not wanting to do business with anyone else, but from the outside to this uninformed observer it looks to me like this is a high stakes showdown that’s inching toward a commercial resolution.
There’s some dollar amount (representing either an exchange of value or avoided losses) where a compromise is going to make sense for everyone, and I think we’re going to see that before 6/30. My naive guess is that reddit acquires Apollo and runs that as a standalone business, but otherwise maintains the eye-wateringly high pricing on API usage.
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#5I've gotta say, Christian comes across as really naive in this piece.
> Well, it’s weird because prior to this, I almost always understood that Reddit as a company understood that they’re very community-focused, and they kind of didn’t do the bullshit corporate speak. And it was weird to kind of see this week, where they engaged in a lot more of that than I have historically ever seen them do. And it just went over… about as well as I thought it would.
I can't imagine anyone seeing this as a surprise given the way that reddit has been operating since at least before the redesign. They always make some corporate-PR-language post announcing unpopular changes, pretend to listen to everyone, then make the change anyway.
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#6Is there a whole Mastodon like movement with Reddit that users seem to be moving to?
There's kbin and lemmy, which are both fediverse software.
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#7They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher cost (2-3x) but over 20x is impossible. (2) That basic math was very conservative. The actually multiplier is much higher if you look at the calculations. It’s wild but it seems Christian is even willing to accept a 10x bump (albeit with a higher subscription cost).
Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint.
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#8I would like a breakdown of Reddit's actual costs vs their proposed fees. Why isn't Reddit profitable? Is there a way to make Reddit profitable without charging for API access?
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#9I can't say I've missed Reddit too much after I stopped using it. Twitter was a bit harder, but Mastodon filled that niche quite nicely. However, I don't even feel like checking out Lemmy or Kbin as a Reddit replacement, making me question how useful Reddit is for me personally. I wonder if anyone else is feeling the same during the blackout.
Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
#10They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…
Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.