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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

#371

Post by callalex »

nemo44x wrote: post #226
watwut wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really does not seem to me that Musk figured anything out. He is loosing both money and users at massive speed.

They have a higher user count than they’ve ever had breaking their own MAU records. Advertising will come back. There’s anti-Twitter pressure campaigns and for economic reasons ad spend slowed. It’s all coming back. He controls the worlds largest and most important megaphone. That’s priceless.

It’s easy to make your MAU go up when you fire all the anti-bot teams.

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

#372

Post by dvngnt_ »

judge2020 wrote: post #87
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…

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).

the real solution would have been to lock api access behind Reddit premium the user would have to pay and then allow users to enter the API key in a 3rd party app.

but reddit has burned so much good will that users aren't going to want to pay out of spite

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

#373

Post by [deleted] »

dale_glass wrote: post #206
kats wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, Reddit currently has a bunch of their subreddits private. And if the Apollo dev gets paid, then he can come up with something to make the blackout go away. That's the leverage he has to ask for money. It's what he implied in the call he had recorded, and he keeps indicating he's open to an offer. If reddit goes back to normal before he has an offer then that's when he has no leverage anymore.

Uh, no, he can't. He's a dev of a well liked application. That's all. He's not the head of some sort of shadowy cabal that decides when and how the blackout happens. Certainly, he could send a public message and say "I'm happy now, please stop guys". But it's up to them to listen to that or not.

[deleted]

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

#374

Post by davidgerard »

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…

This is literally answered in the linked article.

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

#375

Post by cyanydeez »

jarym wrote: post #22
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…

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…

Because the goal was to trap redditors into Reddit marketing loop.

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

#376

Post by aniforprez »

Is anyone else really curious what's going on at Reddit HQ right now? At the end of January they were confident that the API would never be priced and within 4 months they completely changed their minds. But what truly baffles me is that this honestly does not seem like a move to price out third party apps. They genuinely thought he would pay out. How exactly did they think that was happening?

Even if the pricing was reasonable, all communication with third party devs was through phone calls and pricing was discussed verbally. The RedReader app developer mentioned that he had to make rough calculations on paper to conclude that he'd have to pay close to a million dollars annually in fees[1]. There's no dashboard to show billing and API usage per client? How do they expect that will go when you're asking users to pay for your API? And especially in such a short time frame?

There's also the whole business of NSFW content on the API being not allowed for "law enforcement" reasons but reddit JUST recently pushed an update that allows uploading NSFW content on the website[2]. These moves make me feel that reddit might be trying to cash in on the porn and capture the OF market that's brewing within the site and keep it to their official apps and this might require age verification.

I'm not sure but it seems like the folks at reddit are actually floundering and not just making malicious moves. Their communication reeks of more than hostility. It seems to me more like desperation and a last ditch effort to do... something? Did their revenue numbers suddenly tank? Did they make some bad decisions and lost a lot of money? Did their ad buyers pull out suddenly? It's very possible we are watching the death throes of a website here

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/13ylk42/update_3...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13evueo/bringing_i...

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

#377

Post by shagie »

xyst wrote: post #171
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…

Agree. Before subreddit mods voluntarily blacked out, the Apollo developer stated he would pay millions of dollars per year ($20M/year?) with the increased rates. It’s insane. Reddit C-level executives suggested Apollo was poorly optimized or something. I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. If that’s not the case then it’s clearly just…

$0.24/1k calls isn't absurd (its expensive, yes, but only ~3x more than the rate for Imgur).

The issue is that Apollo was doing 600 calls per hour per user to push notifications with a less than 10 second window between "when it hits your mailbox" to "when it shows up on your iDevice".

When that 600 calls per hour per user gets billed at $0.24/1k calls it gets very expensive.

If those calls were done to the main application (not showing ads) at the same rate that the official application does, it would represent several million dollars of lost advertising revenue.

On the other hand, it represents a fairly consistent load on the servers that doesn't generate any revenue that can misbehave quite badly when there is an outage and per user rate limit information isn't reported back to encourage the push notification server to throttle itself a bit.

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

#378

Post by djhworld »

999900000999 wrote: post #35

I love Reddit, but the constant ads are getting worse. It's like they have no internal controls here. Would someone really be interested in He Gets Us and Seeking Arrangements at the same time. I'm also a bit confused as to why Reddit would target 3rd party apps like this. Most people, myself included don't bother with 3rd party apps. Unless the adds are going to get even worse soon...

The ads on old.reddit.com are less intrusive.

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

#379

Post by babypuncher »

jarym wrote: post #22
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…

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 insist this is about making it so companies training LLMs aren't doing so with Reddit's data for free.

But I call bullshit. People training new AI models are using the API right now because it's free and easy, but as soon as that changes they will go back to good old fashioned web scraping.

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

#380

Post by shagie »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #294
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…

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…

The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing

The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.

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