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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

#301

Post by e40 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #215
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'.

In the subreddits I saw polls, all were in favor of the blackout.

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

#302

Post by ditch_baby »

mardifoufs wrote: post #163

It's so weird that this revenue generating app is the poster child for Reddit admins abusing third parties or whatever. They literally made money for years, almost completely unbothered by Reddit inc, with their own ads and subscription model. I just don't get it, this is not some open source app getting mauled by a corporate behemoth. Apollo probably made more profit from Reddit than Reddit itself. And yes I know, R…

I think the sense of martyrdom comes from the fact that these changes directly affect how millions of users spend large chunks of their day, which is itself the location where these discussions are happening. Stack that with the very visible corporatization of many of their other favorite websites, and you see this emotional backlash. The internet is just different now.

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

#303

Post by e40 »

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 did a few google searches today and the top hit was reddit and the sub was blacked out. That was annoying.

I think people underestimate the amount of curated info/answers are in reddit subs.

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

#304

Post by rifty »

If Reddit really wanted to make this work they could've worked something out. They know the apps developer keys and could have specially given them a longer runway to transition similar to how they are giving accessibility exemptions[1].

To speculate... I get the sense in part that Reddit hung the big apps out to dry for being publicly vocal and interacting with the press. Apollo probably was already lacking in sympathy with executives for being the reddit app getting air time at an Apple event. It would be petty if true but it is unfortunately no less then what I expect from Reddit.

Reddit came out looking dysfunctional[2] and sleazy throughout this. There was no good reason for this to blowup in the way it did.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/comments/145e9sk/...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

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

#305

Post by downWidOutaFite »

andromeduck wrote: post #270
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If plenty of countries have tried give an example where the rich fled and the country reversed the tax

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

#306

Post by curun1r »

ljm wrote: post #55
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.

Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators. I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing sche…

> I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API

Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads.

Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way.

All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.

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

#307

Post by ink_13 »

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…

Sounds like the real problem is that those questions were drowning out all other content. Personally I don't object to moderators setting rules that reduce noise. Or, to put it another way, moderating.

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

#308

Post by bagels »

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-...

I'm interested in what came before that clip, but, it sounds like he's awkwardly asking for $10M in exchange for... nothing? Why would Reddit take that deal?

1) Shut Apollo down: increase ad revenues, decrease server costs (if the claim that Apollo is inefficient is true)

2) Apollo pays $20M: increase api revenues

3) Pay Apollo $10M: decreased revenue, maintain high server costs.

I don't even understand how this kind of deal would make any sense to propose.

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

#309

Post by evandale »

thepasswordis wrote: post #253
evandale wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Oh my god the banning questions thing is infuriating. Just let people not answer it if they don’t want to. Linking everybody to an FAQ from 4 years ago is not helpful. We don’t need more room for pictures of sunsets, and even if we did, nobody is paying per character. My actual hope is that what comes out of this protest is that the majority of moderation is simply removed. Forgive me for not shedding any tears becau…

> Just let people not answer it if they don’t want to.

hah, I tried making this argument for months, no years, after the decision was made - that they were banning the wrong thing. It's trivial (and a built in Reddit feature) to automatically hide posts after you vote them (up or down - you have full control) and there's even the hide button to hide posts you don't want to vote on. It would have been so easy (and made nearly everyone happy) to have the rule to be against bad faith answering questions. To encourage people to downvote and ignore questions you they want to answer. If nobody is answering or voting for the questions then people will stop asking them.

Well powerusers didn't want questions period (and I think some friends of the mods already had control of the question subreddit) so they punted questions off to a different subreddit.

The mods definitely get some enjoyment through trolling people and making the experience on the city subreddit miserable - most of them are extremely active in a shitposting subreddit that was specifically made for making fun of users in the city subreddit. The powerusers that were involved in the bad behavior own the shitposing subreddit too. It's a small sort of r/drama or r/subredditdrama for a local subreddit. If you make the "right" comments in the city subreddit (i.e. dunk on the "right" people) you get invited to mod the shitposting subreddit.

What's really needed is a public moderator log outlining what gets removed. I wouldn't care about things being removed that much if I had an option to see it. I really hate that they can remove things that _someone_ found interesting about the city and I can't see it at all because of arbitrary rules the moderators made.

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

#310

Post by ink_13 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #287
ink_13 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The choices are not just "third party apps get a free lunch" or "third-party apps pay $millions". Even Selig admits there's a middle ground where API pricing is reasonable. Or maybe just restricted to Reddit Gold accounts. Or Reddit inserts must-show ads into API responses. Et cetera. The point is there's a middle ground to be had, but rather than negotiating for an outcome both sides can live with, Reddit is just ch…

What would be the middle ground here? As I said I'm not sure inserting ads in the API would be feasible. And the quoted figure of 2.50$ per user per month would be reasonable to charge for a commercial user , I think. Yes, it would mean every apollo user would have to pay but that's the thing ; they are monetizing the app already. I'm not sure what would be more reasonable but I'm also sure that the timelines suck fo…

> Did I get that wrong?

Yes. You can't just insert your own API key into the app of your choice.

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