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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

#221

Post by danpalmer »

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…

This sort of stuff tends to be against the terms of service – it is with Twitter at least and Reddit are following their playbook here.

This would have the same effect though, almost no one would use it, and that kills the business case for Apollo, and Apollo ceases to exist. Maybe an open source volunteer run client might limp on, but that's it.

It's also super easy to detect these sorts of things and just ban that usage.

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

#222

Post by newqer »

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…

Do these people have a life? Or are they paid by some social media influencer company to mold narratives?

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

#223

Post by Sunspark »

EnragedParrot wrote: post #174
nightski wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably right, but at the same time there are probably plenty of people willing to step in and take their place.

But now you have to subtract from the "plenty of people" those who are angered and disillusioned over Reddit's treatment of existing community mods and power users. You're whittling down the population of people who actually care about the subreddits they moderate and contribute to. So yeah, you could get them moderated, but the site would mostly go to garbage. Reddit's triumph from the user perspective is that all o…

It is true. Walking down the street, you gaze with more enjoyment at a garden someone took the time to make presentable and not so much the other property with the random weeds all over and perhaps an empty can.

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

#224

Post by riskable »

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…

Users won't revolt until the 3rd party apps stop working. Basically, on June 30th we'll see a ton of new users trying out new sites.

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

#225

Post by willis936 »

kats wrote: post #162
leokennis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you don’t really see the power dynamics here. Reddit holds all the power: they have the API, they can shut anyone out of it, they can ask for it whatever they want, they could even re-open all closed subreddits and install new mods. All the community and Apollo has is the power to say “Reddit, if you don’t play nice, we’ll walk away”. To call that a blackmail requires some mental gymnastics.

Nope, Reddit currently has a bunch of their subreddits private. And if the Apollo dev gets paid, then he can come up with something to make the blackout go away. That's the leverage he has to ask for money. It's what he implied in the call he had recorded, and he keeps indicating he's open to an offer. If reddit goes back to normal before he has an offer then that's when he has no leverage anymore.

Selig is not tsar. He says his piece then people pick sides and vote with their feet. Users support Selig and despise Reddit's user-hostile actions. As they say "oh no, it's the consequences of my actions".

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

#226

Post by nemo44x »

watwut wrote: post #112
nemo44x wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff I think this is the case for many things. And I imagine people will/are get wise to it. Elon Musk I think figured this out when he did what he did with Twitter. Some very online people really cared and made a lot of noise and the very online part of the media that cares made a lot of noise. But those people don't really matter and the media…

It really does not seem to me that Musk figured anything out. He is loosing both money and users at massive speed.

They have a higher user count than they’ve ever had breaking their own MAU records.

Advertising will come back. There’s anti-Twitter pressure campaigns and for economic reasons ad spend slowed. It’s all coming back.

He controls the worlds largest and most important megaphone. That’s priceless.

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

#227

Post by chromakode »

kats wrote: post #162
leokennis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you don’t really see the power dynamics here. Reddit holds all the power: they have the API, they can shut anyone out of it, they can ask for it whatever they want, they could even re-open all closed subreddits and install new mods. All the community and Apollo has is the power to say “Reddit, if you don’t play nice, we’ll walk away”. To call that a blackmail requires some mental gymnastics.

Nope, Reddit currently has a bunch of their subreddits private. And if the Apollo dev gets paid, then he can come up with something to make the blackout go away. That's the leverage he has to ask for money. It's what he implied in the call he had recorded, and he keeps indicating he's open to an offer. If reddit goes back to normal before he has an offer then that's when he has no leverage anymore.

There are many other apps affected by the API pricing which announced they'd shut down: Sync, Relay, Reddit is Fun, etc. Reddit cutting one (or five) sweetheart deals is unlikely to make this go away at this point, since the uproar is about the API pricing and its rollout.

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

#228

Post by evandale »

thepasswordis wrote: post #151
ajmurmann wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, in at least one huge sub I follow the mods are widely hated

I think that’s most subs. This is why I’m actually torn between which group I dislike the most. On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children. The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose. Something in the culture…

> Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.

> On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.

Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news in the city about crime and banned posting stories about crime in January. It's now June and still a rule. You can only post a story about someone committing a crime or getting arrested if their crime had a city-wide impact.

There was a story about teenagers shooting fireworks off on a public bus around Victoria day this year and that post was allowed. People shat on the teenagers and said whatever they wanted about them. It got as nasty as you'd expect. The post announcing their arrest though? It turned out to be a group of POC and so the mods locked the comments within minutes because they anticipated "bad" comments and it was going to be too difficult to moderate.

The other annoying thing before that was a small group of powerusers getting annoyed with people asking too many easy-to-Google questions. So a few choice posters would always come in and make the same "I recommend House of Lancaster" (a strip club with a reputation) for every question that got asked. It didn't matter what the question was, there was at least 1 house of Lancaster suggestion. It turned into a meme, the moderators noticed people were hostile to newcomers, and rather than outlawing being hostile to people they banned questions!

It’s _extremely_ annoying.

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

#229

Post by jarym »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #155
jarym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics. 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 now some governments go with taxati…

> some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax. Examples or I don't believe that happens, maybe very rarely.

You're free to choose what you believe, I'm not here to convince you. But one of the older examples is the 'window tax' https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...

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

#230

Post by CivBase »

It's not about price. It's about implementation and lies.

30 days is not enough time for Christian (or any third party app fev) to build, test, and release a solution to collect payments on behalf of all his app's users for API access. Not to mention making things right with users who already payed for an extendes subscription for his app.

There are a few things Reddit could have done here.

1. Let third party app devs know about the upcoming change much earlier so they could prepare.

2. Extend the deadline.

3. Implement a BYOK system where users buy individual API keys directly from Reddit, then provide the keys to the third party apps for API access.

Instead Reddit lied to the devs about their API plans up until almost the last minute. Then they rolled out a plan they knew no major third party app could comply with in time. Then u/spez lied about Christian in a poor attempt to discredit him.

Reddit could have made their API work even at that huge price tag. But they didn't want to. They just wanted to drag everyone kicking and screaming to the official app.

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