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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

#341

Post by SkyPuncher »

nemo44x wrote: post #82
spiderice wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to call someone naive once you have all the information (like you do now). But it was much less obvious a couple months ago. Especially given that Christian has worked closely with Reddit for years and they've always treated him well, and seemingly like third party apps.

I think the OP is just saying that Selig thought he was bro's with Reddit and didn't really consider that they are a for-profit corporation with a board of directors and shareholders that will abandon him the second it makes financial sense to do so because their leadership are fiduciaries, not bro's.

I was extremely surprised to learn that Apollo did not have any contractual ties with Reddit (beyond the API agreement).

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

#342

Post by BashiBazouk »

tornato7 wrote: post #182
potatolicious wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this take - this seems pretextual rather than a good-faith attempt to charge for API access. Because history rhymes I suspect Reddit's leadership was heavily inspired by Twitter's killing of third-party clients, which actually ended up working out for Twitter. IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the com…

No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.

I think there are a lot of people wondering if the "even more user-hostile changes" are a loss of old.reddit. I knew of 3d party apps but none by name until this most recent incident as I am fine with old.reddit but the behavior of the CEO does make me concerned. I can't tell if he was just channeling his inner Elon and being a pompous ass or if Reddit is as desperate financially as his AMA made it seem. If the latter, I would not be surprised if old.reddit was shut down.

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

#343

Post by bagels »

mishagale wrote: post #68
causi wrote: post #8

I would like a breakdown of Reddit's actual costs vs their proposed fees. Why isn't Reddit profitable? Is there a way to make Reddit profitable without charging for API access?

Based on their published user numbers and revenue, Selig estimated that reddit's revenue per user is about $0.12. They are asking for $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. Apollo averages ~345 calls per-user per-day (although some users are much higher), but Reddit claims that other apps are "more efficient" and only use about 100 calls/day. If we assume 100 calls/day/user, then that's 36,500 calls/year/user, and a user is wort…

$0.12 per user per year... how many users are using third party apps to skip out on ads? Is the true value higher once they start seeing ads?

Also, that number is so laughably low!

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

#344

Post by johnnyanmac »

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)

People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now.

Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur.

Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.

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

#345

Post by bottlepalm »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #288
bottlepalm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny when I design my own public apps, I'm careful about API usage. I can only imagine what an app is like that was designed with no API limits whatsoever. It's kind of amazing Reddit ever allowed this sort of no limits API usage - while at the same time Apollo charged their own users while enjoying zero infrastructure costs. What a steal.

A factor is, that the user's of those apps overproportionally create content, which is later served to other users. Most users come via Google or other ways to read some content. Only few participate actively. Earning less on those few users can be valuable overall.

'users of those apps over proportionally create content' - really? prove it. Second, posting a link is not the same as 'creating content'

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

#346

Post by OGWhales »

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…

Reddit is doing this on a per-app basis rather than a per-user basis. That would be a great idea, but sadly reddit it against it (likely because the goal is to kill third party apps).

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

#347

Post by superfrank »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #51
superfrank wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community Were the calls ever posted? For the way Reddit has handled this and previous issues I definitely believe Christian over spez, but unless I missed something, r…

Transcripts and recordings were posted a few days back by Christian. The transcript is here: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9... The recording itself was posted on Reddit in the apolloapp subreddit.

Excellent. Ty!

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

#348

Post by thejsa »

koolba wrote: post #122
nlarew wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two Reddit APIs - the public REST API and a private GraphQL API which limits access. Third-party apps use the REST API and the Reddit website/app use GQL. For a hobby project you could maybe get away with scraping a GQL bearer token and issuing requests as if you were an official Reddit client. Or you could even request the HTML and scrape that. At the scale of these third party apps that approach just woul…

> At the scale of these third party apps that approach just wouldn't work. Has there been any App Store apps that go with this approach? As long as Reddit provides some API accessible to a non-logged in user on the web, there’s going to be a way to scrape it. If you push that scraping into the start of the app then it’s be distributed without any clear way of blocking it. You could even have the app fetch “how to” up…

Unfortunately, the App Store (and Play Store) rules ban this sort of thing — any access to third party web services needs to be in line with their terms of service.

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

#349

Post by bottlepalm »

lights0123 wrote: post #164
bottlepalm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny when I design my own public apps, I'm careful about API usage. I can only imagine what an app is like that was designed with no API limits whatsoever. It's kind of amazing Reddit ever allowed this sort of no limits API usage - while at the same time Apollo charged their own users while enjoying zero infrastructure costs. What a steal.

How is 345 calls/day—much lower than the official app's usage—that much when the server indicates that 60 calls/minute is all good?

When I use the website, my costs are covered by seeing ads. Now I have to watch more ads to make up for API users who don't pay.

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

#350

Post by castlecrasher2 »

George83728 wrote: post #78
redmerchant2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the fi…

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...

Agreed. The only good bot is the one that attempts to identify comment-stealing bots farming karma.
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