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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

#91

Post by darknavi »

999900000999 wrote: post #35

I love Reddit, but the constant ads are getting worse. It's like they have no internal controls here. Would someone really be interested in He Gets Us and Seeking Arrangements at the same time. I'm also a bit confused as to why Reddit would target 3rd party apps like this. Most people, myself included don't bother with 3rd party apps. Unless the adds are going to get even worse soon...

> I'm also a bit confused as to why Reddit would target 3rd party apps like this.

They are trying to extract as much value before their IPO as possible.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#92

Post by bottlepalm »

zerotheliger wrote: post #12

this is why reddit shouldnt go public either every company that goes public ends up going to shit for the user experience. someones just trying to get rich off our fuckin backs for creating content they profit off.

Is posting a cool link you found 'creating content' ?

What percentage of posts are actually the creators themselves?

And is it not a fair trade? You're not paying anything to post a link and return the content creator gets massive exposure.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#93

Post by ahahahahah »

bombcar wrote: post #40
haunter wrote: post #13

>users revolted tbh right now it feels like mods, and especially power-mods (who are moding several high traffic subs), are revolting. I actually enjoy this blackout because a lot of small subs became active refuge for people who doesn't really care about the whole drama. Honestly I'm curious how this will play out but I can see subs just "naturally" replacing themselves with new ones. fyi 92 of top 500 subreddits co…

https://old.reddit.com/r/wholesome/comments/148aw58/radvicea... - https://archive.ph/3qMMA The worm is turning and the top power-mods are going to get Caesar'd.

Is that case really a "power-mod"? The head mod was inactive for a year and then came back and shutdown a subreddit against the wishes of the active mod team.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#94

Post by ahahahahah »

MarkMarine wrote: post #20

From what I can tell, it’s not the users that revolted. It’s their unpaid moderator workforce striking in solidarity with the workers that used Apollo to improve their experience. I’m very curious to see what the resolution will be from Reddit’s side, but heading toward IPO while you’ve got a huge chunk of unpaid labor that makes your site work striking can’t be good for the strike price. The workers have the company…

> It’s their unpaid moderator workforce striking in solidarity

It's a small subset of their moderator workforce. Most of them are, in solidarity I guess, continuing on as normal.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#95

Post by Mistletoe »

redmerchant2 wrote: post #90
paxys wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth Are you implying that a user is worth $0.125/mo to Reddit? Because that is laughably inaccurate. Mature platforms like Facebook extract up to $60 per user per quarter in advertising revenue from developed countries. Reddit itself made an estimated $500M+ from ads last year. ~$2.50/mo is already more than fair. Thinking that Reddit owes full data acc…

Many financial sites have reported Reddit users are worthless. CNBC estimated in 2019 that FB’s ARPU monthly is $7.37 per month but Reddit’s monthly ARPU is $0.30. (Though even that number should be revised down as revenue is slower than growth of users). Again the devs are willing to pay some multiplier on this.

Sign me up for this long awaited IPO…

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#96

Post by gs17 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #53
gs17 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.

Makes me wonder why even bother in that case to introduce phony pricing.

IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side.

The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#97

Post by Larrikin »

Domenic_S wrote: post #23
mbStavola wrote: post #9

I 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.

I'm looking for rechargeable batteries and monitor shopping right now, and my typical research process involves searching for reviews on Reddit (google: "$item review reddit") because of how many absolute garbage Amazon affiliate link-farms there are these days. It's been tough to stay off Reddit for that research. I've also decided, screw it, I'm taking an Amazon break as well (because they enable the above behavior…

https://www.rtings.com/monitor is where you want to look for monitors over random people on Reddit.

Rechargable batteries seemed to me to be a complete commodity at this point that they really aren't even worth researching. Anker is my go to for anything USB chargeable related and regular batteries have been totally fine using generic brands in my remotes. I've actually had more problems with brand-name no rechargeable batteries corroding in my remotes.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#98

Post by d3nj4l »

CharlesW wrote: post #32
dabluecaboose wrote: post #5

I'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……

> I can't imagine anyone seeing this as a surprise… It was a surprise to him because (1) his relationship with them was based on Apollo, and (2) Reddit had previously placed him on the "friend" side of the frenemy line based on the community's love for Apollo and the engagement it drove. Naive people don't record every phone call.

> Naive people don't record every phone call.

This is the most important thing. Obviously in interviews he says "Oh I think they're nice people, if they want to patch things up I'm ready", but judging from how all of this has played out I think it's obvious that he's somewhat savvy. He's coming off as the good guy in this fight all while reddit continues to burn any goodwill they have from a not insignificant portion of their user base.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#99

Post by flutas »

spiderice wrote: post #37
causi wrote: post #8

I 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?

The obvious places to start are: 1. Do charge for API access. But be reasonable. Nobody is calling for free api access. Charge like 2-5x their cost of operation. Not 20x. 2. Serve ads to third party apps through the API. This is a no brainer. The fact that they aren't doing this speaks volumes about their true motives with this move.

IMO the best solution is to disable 3P API access, but allow it with a reddit gold sub. Similar to what Spotify does (or did?).

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#100

Post by ekanes »

neilv wrote: post #74
tedivm wrote: post #2

It 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 reputa…

Devil's advocate... From the bits of transcript I saw, a plausible interpretation is that the Reddit person immediately felt like it was a shakedown, then Selig said it wasn't that (maybe true, maybe not), and then the Reddit person said words of apology but it is plausible that they still felt like it was a shakedown, and were only trying to deescalate/steer/negotiate . If they still thought it was a shakedown, it w…

If you listen to the audio, it's much clearer. You can hear the dynamic / emotion etc in their voices.

Christian's post: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Audio clip: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...

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