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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

#361

Post by john-radio »

Decabytes wrote: post #245

I'm not a webdev so I understand if this point is naive. The Apollo dev said the cost will be about 20x what Reddit pays for its user. Obviously Reddit needs and can maintain a competitive advantage by having a native app. So charging more per user for a 3rd party app is not unreasonable. For the sake of simplicity let's say that reddit makes $1.00 per user per month that uses their app. Currently they make no money…

> Instead they went with the move that is obviously intended to kill third party apps, and face major backlash from its most devoted users in a self own

It seems that the Reddit executive team has decided that killing third-party apps is in its best interest regardless of the probably-to-some-degree-expected backlash. I think Christian's and your conclusion, that Reddit intends for the new pricing to be prohibitive, which indicates that it "is obviously intended to kill third party apps," is fair.

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

#362

Post by Paul-Craft »

tschwimmer wrote: post #331
Paul-Craft wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right on the money. It's all that, and more. Basically, Reddit going to a paid API isn't the big deal. It's the fact that, say, Apollo can pay Imgur under $200/month for all the API calls they need, but Reddit is demanding $20M/year, or ~$1.7M/month [0]. That's what tradespeople call their "fuck off" rate, i.e. the rate they'd quote someone when they don't actually want to do a job, but also don't want to come…

It says right in the first paragraph of your link that it was going to cost $20m per year, not per month.

Brain fart. Fixed.

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

#363

Post by dabluecaboose »

brianfryer wrote: post #19
dabluecaboose wrote: post #5

I've gotta say, Christian comes across as really naive in this piece. > Well, it’s weird because prior to this, I almost always understood that Reddit as a company understood that they’re very community-focused, and they kind of didn’t do the bullshit corporate speak. And it was weird to kind of see this week, where they engaged in a lot more of that than I have historically ever seen them do. And it just went over……

I imagine that, when working with reddit for 8+ years, he got a pretty good sense of what their culture is like. His latest experience seems to be pretty out of line given the longevity of their relationship. "Naive"? Maybe, but I can cut him some slack.

>I imagine that, when working with reddit for 8+ years, he got a pretty good sense of what their culture is like.

He literally said "they kind of didn’t do the bullshit corporate speak." I've definitely been using reddit for 8+ years and I can tell you that's not true.

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

#364

Post by davidgerard »

neilv wrote: post #217
ekanes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Thanks, the audio clip helps. Selig's initial voice and language signals sounded all over the place (maybe he was nervous, or was speaking very off-the-cuff when broaching an acquisition), but I agree that his correction starting around 2m17s sounds sincere. Devil's advocate still: the perception of a shakedown isn't necessarily dependent on mishearing something literally as "go quietly". What reason does Reddit have…

Reddit's already been caught lying, there's no justification to construct an alternate reality in which this was all a silly mistake rather than something they chose to do.

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

#365

Post by mardifoufs »

ink_13 wrote: post #310
mardifoufs wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it because of an inherent limitation to the API? Would it be possible to create an app that takes user API keys?

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

#366

Post by JeremyNT »

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'.

It stands to reason that the people most inclined to see and participate in a reddit poll about protesting a reddit policy would be a self-selecting group of enthusiasts (e.g. the 1% rule[0]).

I suspect a vast majority of reddit users don't have a dog in this fight and just want to use the site.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

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

#367

Post by SkyPuncher »

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…

Apollo absolutely could do all of that.

That being said, I doubt anyone would use it. $1 per 1k requests is insane.

I'm not exactly sure what counts as an API call, but it has the potential to add up quickly. On initial load, new Reddit makes 209 network requests and old reddit makes 127. I doubt the API needs that many requests, but it's not a nested API. It likely requires a bunch of additional requests to grab accessory information.

It seems plausible that power users would end up easily running into $1 to $5 daily usage fees. Nobody is going to pay $30/month for Reddit plus an application fee.

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

#368

Post by davidgerard »

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…

The user support has been overwhelming, as far as I can see.

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

#369

Post by renewiltord »

x0x0 wrote: post #318
phire wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a bit of a silly question, right? How come the Pirate Bay with fewer developers can offer me all Disney films but Disney with so many more can only release some from the vault. The motivations are different, so they’re probably working on things that make Reddit make money.

Fine, I'll spell it out: The hard part of making a client is making a client that can retain the money-making portion of an application. It is trivial to charge a small amount for client functionality when the predominant cost is on someone else. The reason you need a lot of engineers building the Reddit client is that they have to deliver the ads, make sure the ads are viewed, and correctly reported as having been viewed. The whole thing.

If you don't have to worry about making money, you can make a front-end to anything quite easily. This is why most HN commenters frequently make the "what's so hard about the Uber app" mistake. The hard part isn't the app chrome. The hard part is making it make money.

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

#370

Post by ekanes »

bagels wrote: post #308
ekanes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1) Yes, but you could lose a lot of reddit's actual power users. See: Current Situation. :P

2) Yes, this is better for reddit but untenable for Apollo.

3) If you buy the app that makes your site SING, that everyone loves, then you keep all those users, and make money from them instead of losing them.

Also, don't forget that everything before an IPO is magnified. This has cost reddit perhaps hundreds of millions now in bad press and lowered valuation.

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