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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

#261

Post by hax0ron3 »

I hope that Reddit just purges the mods who are behind the protest and replaces them with new ones. It might cause those mods to engage in an activity that many of them seem to not have done in years: having conversations in spaces where they cannot just shut everyone else up by pushing a button.

I dislike the Reddit redesign and still use old.reddit.com, so I should be all in favor of free API access. However, there is almost nothing that could possibly get me to side with the mods, the people who have done more than anyone else to turn Reddit into the banal and censorious echo chamber that it is today.

In a war between Reddit and Reddit's mods, the Internet of actual open discussion wins.

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

#262

Post by FormerBandmate »

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.

Why would Elon Musk care if he loses money on Twitter? His Tesla stake has gone up more in the past 4 weeks than the entire amount he personally spent on Twitter

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

#263

Post by OGWhales »

lacker wrote: post #65
redmerchant2 wrote: post #7

They 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…

Why is this rate absurd? From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit? Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides di…

YouTube and Twitch are different beast all together due to their costs. They also do revenue sharing for the content users provide, something reddit is not doing.

> I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work.

If they are genuinely trying to make this work, why did they only give 30 days notice for third party devs to figure this out? Seems to me their goal was to kill third party apps and that they have already succeeded.

> The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app.

Sure, but something being the norm doesn’t mean people like it. With reddit being how it was for so long and having a genuinely terrible default app, it’s no wonder they are getting flamed as much as they are. The way they have handled this on the PR side doesn’t help.

I think if reddit wanted this to actually work, the smart move would have been to allow users to pay for API access and use their token through the app of their choice. This would be more viable than the per-app basis they went with, which puts all the third party devs in an incredibly tough spot and effectively forced them all to shut down.

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

#264

Post by polytely »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #62

Does anything like this exist? A feed of unfiltered, unmoderated content + conversations, fed to a multitude of websites, each with its own moderation filters and content standards. All submissions go to the to the shared feed, but hit moderation and content filters on the website before being displayed. So you can have a reddit-like website with a lot of good content, but if it ever goes south people can quickly flo…

Mastodon could work like that if you would federate with every instance, except that there are a sizable amount of instances that cut ties with instances that don't do moderation because they tend to be filled with the most unpleasant people you don't want to interact with.

I'm in a small-ish instance with a great admin/mod team who's values align with mine and who judiciously eject people with bad vibes. (mostly nazi's and transphobes)

I feel no need to share a social network with people who hate my friends for who they are so the whole proposition of uncensored content doesn't appeal to me at all.

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

#265

Post by xii23 »

N_A_T_E wrote: post #241

I'm assuming 90% of these API requests are reads. Is there a reason Apollo couldn't develop an intermediate proxy server and cache all the responses for a short period of time? I assume that would cut the API usage significantly and potentially the cost.

I didn't check, but I think their back-end already cached stuff somewhat; the dev open sourced it so you can take a look*

* https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend

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

#266

Post by john-radio »

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…

> Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community.

It's like when a person complains that her husband looked at her phone, when by doing so he discovered she was cheating on him.* Where's the trust?

* Genders included for sentence readability, not to imply anything about women or men

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

#268

Post by tornato7 »

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…

The worst I've seen are subreddits focused around physical location like cities/colleges, you get a lot of what amounts to cyber-bullying of individuals (like students posting hateful memes of professors they don't like), and this can lead to a pretty toxic subreddit (even inciting violence) without close moderation.

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

#269

Post by Sunspark »

evandale wrote: post #228
thepasswordis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why Reddit if they want to be a community needs to allow ELECTIONS.

Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms.

Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected.

Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.

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

#270

Post by andromeduck »

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.

Wealth taxee are the classic example. Plenty of countries have tried
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