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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

#211

Post by joshstrange »

ekanes wrote: post #109
kats wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear he is blackmailing them and the upset users are his leverage. After posting that "Apollo will close down on June 30th." he now says " Same as always : I love building Apollo, and if Reddit is willing to to talk I'm happy to as well." which of course was not what he always said. He was never joking about asking for 10 million dollars and is still hoping for an offer.

> Same as always: I love building Apollo, and if Reddit is willing to to talk I'm happy to as well. Got a source for that? He's made it clear that it's too late, and this can't be repaired. How can you trust someone that lied to make you look bad, and you have proof?

There is no source, it's a combination of a number of things Christian said in the article, a paraphrasing at best, a strawman more likely. From the article it's clear to me that Christian would come back to the table if Reddit lowered the price and/or gave app developers more time but as it stands now they haven't even replied to him in week(s). Hard to do any negotiating when the other side refuses to talk /and/ slanders/lies about you in public.

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

#212

Post by penguin_booze »

Maybe I'm missing something: why can't Apollo--or any other app--pass the API burden to the user? I get that this means the user experience via the app would effetively turn out to be paid service. But then, to match, Reddit could have also relaxed their policy to the effect that, up to n API access would be free; beyond that, Reddit would charge the user.

Microsoft, for example, already do this for many of their Azure services. Thus, if you're a moderate user on the free plan, you get essentially a free ride.

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

#213

Post by darknavi »

penguin_booze wrote: post #212

Maybe I'm missing something: why can't Apollo--or any other app--pass the API burden to the user? I get that this means the user experience via the app would effetively turn out to be paid service. But then, to match, Reddit could have also relaxed their policy to the effect that, up to n API access would be free; beyond that, Reddit would charge the user. Microsoft, for example, already do this for many of their Azu…

Probably possible but that would likely take their app's user base down significantly as most average users wouldn't go through the steps to register their own API keys and setup billing.

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

#214

Post by joecot »

willis936 wrote: post #172
joecot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth…

Being blinded by hubris and taking a hard left off a cliff on a potentially profitable venture are not things I would consider "smart". Saying it was "smart but handled poorly" is an excuse. It was a series of dumb moves because they did not see the actions they needed to take and in what order and on what timeframe to not capsize.

Correct. In general it's a good capitalist scheme. Start with a mostly open platform, court third parties into making tools that make it significantly better, get your user base. Then kill the third parties to consolidate power.

It worked for Facebook. It worked for Google Chat. It's failing for Twitter, and for reddit, for the same reasons. They did it too quickly and without the finesse needed to prevent a revolt. Instead of cranking the pricing, they needed to do what Facebook and Google did -- slowly degrade the integration system until it was unusable, start restricting features, add features incompatible with third parties, etc, until the third parties all give up and the API dies a seemingly natural death. reddit just doesn't have the foresight or planning to pull off most plans, including nefarious ones.

But it didn't work for Gmail. Despite Google's best efforts, email still exists outside Google. If we want to avoid playing this Fark->Digg->Reddit game again, we need an open standard that doesn't rely on a single company, like email.

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

#215

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

A medium-ish video game reddit that I participate in held two votes on whether to participate, and whether to shutdown for 24 or 48 hours, and in both users overwhelmingly (95%) voted in favor of shutting down, and for 48 hours.

There is a vocal amount of non-mods who are also participating.

Also "mods" are still users of reddit. When I'm an admin of a Facebook group, I'm still a 'facebook user'.

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

#216

Post by graphe »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #131
flutas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the solution is easy for any laywer to provide - just shut down the business. I don't really agree with that take. He's already talked about what happens now, and it includes refunds for unused subscription time. > I've been talking to my rep at Apple, and over the next few weeks my plan is to release something similar to what Tweetbot did (Paul has been incredibly helpful in all of this) where folks can decide…

I'm astounded that he was actually able to run a business pulling in $500,000 a year in subscriptions without ever having to pay the actual platform the users are "subscribing" to a dime. And he's been doing this for what? 8 years? No wonder he doesn't care about shutting it down. It was a free lunch the whole time.

ISPs are a scam because they don't even pay the internet or make it just connect to it.

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

#217

Post by neilv »

ekanes wrote: post #100
neilv wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Thanks, the audio clip helps. Selig's initial voice and language signals sounded all over the place (maybe he was nervous, or was speaking very off-the-cuff when broaching an acquisition), but I agree that his correction starting around 2m17s sounds sincere.

Devil's advocate still: the perception of a shakedown isn't necessarily dependent on mishearing something literally as "go quietly". What reason does Reddit have to pay $10M, rather than pay $0? Reddit leadership might even feel like it's a shakedown from their perspective, whether or not that's the intention or perception from some app developers.

Personally, were I involved, I would indeed be mentally tracking everyone's perspectives and honesty, since that matters a lot (e.g., a mutually better deal might be reached when you understand each other; or you might get a contract, but they might not honor it in good faith, or will screw you at renewal time).

But I think Internet pitchforks would do well to keep memetic talking points to the unambiguous (e.g., the proposed API licensing fees, the short time horizon, a party's claims of how that will affect them), and avoid paths that seem more like (ahem) "We did it, Reddit!" loose cannon character assassination.

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

#218

Post by wiseowise »

raydev wrote: post #177
jyxent wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit reported that they had 430 million monthly active users in 2019. $500 million per year / 430 million users = $1.16 per user per year $1.16 / 12 months = $0.10 per user per month.

Where do you account for opportunity cost and future growth/loss in these (also old and also imprecise) estimates?

Ok, multiply that by 5, it’s still nowhere near 2.5.

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

#219

Post by photochemsyn »

You have to wonder if Reddit's profit model is based on selling advertising or selling the ability to control information distribution. The really poor search capability points to the latter being a big issue. If you can just write a good search query that retrieves relevant comments from posts, as well as the posts, then you can bypass the moderators and administrators, who tend to want to control the visibility of content according to their own agenda.

Closing down the API would align with the latter agenda; look up the whole pushshift camas saga for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

evandale wrote: post #173
tedivm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit. The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this pl…

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