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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

#311

Post by dylan604 »

phire wrote: post #120
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…

It seems like the plan was always to kill the 3rd party apps, but not until their own app was feature competitive with the 3rd party ones. But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.

Isn't this always the way. Crowd source development and ideas to see what gains popularity, and then build those features into your thing or buy the 3rd party thing to rebrand as your thing. That's like startup culture 101

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

#312

Post by mynameisvlad »

revscat wrote: post #293
mynameisvlad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.

I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.

That's certainly fair, but you'd hope that out of the 2000 employees, at least some are in a position to evaluate decisions like that and explicitly calculate the PR risk of any decision. And they certainly should have taken it into account.

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

#313

Post by PoorlyNamed »

petersellers wrote: post #143
George83728 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...

Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)

Apollo implemented this as a feature last year in fact.

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

#314

Post by mbesto »

ericbarrett wrote: post #114
judge2020 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of Christian's posts, reddit agreed that the price was for the opportunity cost of serving that user without ads - since they're not going to get any ad money from these users (and are unwilling to serve ads to these 3p clients since they probably can't guarantee to advertisers the 3p app isn't doing anything shady like hiding the ad while logging an impression).

Something I've been wondering—why couldn't the API just send a batch of ads to be served with the content? Since the apps need an authorized API key, if they don't cooperate in showing the ads then Reddit could simply threaten revocation. Then users who want "premium" could pay for whatever feature Reddit-side to allow an ad-free experience, or they could even partner with the third party apps to offer it for a cut o…

> why couldn't the API just send a batch of ads to be served with the content

One word: control.

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

#315

Post by TremendousJudge »

heyheyhey wrote: post #276
ink_13 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some subs held polls, and in every one that I saw, the strike was quite broadly popular. I think characterizing this as a few power mods throwing their toys out of the pram is unfair.

> Some subs held polls, and in every one that I saw, the strike was quite broadly popular. These polls have an insane selection bias though. The ones who feel strongly for the issue will be the ones commenting and voting. It's why stickies/sidebars/etc. rarely work because most of the users simply don't care enough to view them.

what's your point? the users who care are the users who post the stuff that the others come to see. yeah the majority are lurkers, but they actually like the high quality content or they wouldn't be there. without the power users there's no site.

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

#316

Post by [deleted] »

xyst wrote: post #179
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…

This is nothing new. You don’t remember the Ellen Pao era? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit (see controversies section)

[deleted]

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

#317

Post by jefftk »

mgsouth wrote: post #284
TillE wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Reddit can't force ads on any API users Why not though? Seems really straightforward to serve ads over the API and enforce any display guidelines on third-party apps, since there are only a handful of significant apps anyway.

It would require some very careful system design and lots of trust of the third-party apps. (It's been a while since I was in the middle of this, so stuff may have changed a bit. But in general...) Ads are usually not served up by the application provider (Reddit). Instead, they embed URLs given to them by their customers (ad agencies). If the app is browser-based they'll wrap them in some javascript that also calls…

> Ads are usually not served up by the application provider (Reddit) ...

This is the case for most sites, but not Reddit. Reddit rolled their own system, and if you look at their ads you'll see it's all coming through Reddit.

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

#318

Post by x0x0 »

phire wrote: post #120
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…

It seems like the plan was always to kill the 3rd party apps, but not until their own app was feature competitive with the 3rd party ones. But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.

I can't see that.

If a 1.5 person app (Apollo) is handily beating Reddit's app... what on earth is the holdup? Either the eng team is wildly incompetent, or this is by executive choice.

Reddit's inability to deliver on mod tools despite a decade's worth of promises makes me think it's 40/60 wildly incompetent and needing firing vs exec choice.

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

#319

Post by OGWhales »

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…

Same here, however I've been severely hindered by the protests as many of the results I get are on subs that are now private.

I am fine ending my mindless scrolling, but I have realized how much I depend on niche reddit communities for good answers to specific questions now that I can't get to them and am struggling to find good results elsewhere.

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

#320

Post by Rapzid »

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 end up using Reddit as much or more than Stack Overflow these days for my profession. It's the best place I've found to get peoples opinions and experiences with libraries, tools, services, and etc.

Outside IT it's still prob my main method to research opinions and advice while filtering out all the Google crap.

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