Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 585 posts

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

#411

Post by stetrain »

evandale wrote: post #339
8organicbits wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reporting Wasn't reporting handled by the mods? > You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares? Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care. It seems like you think Reddit was only for shitposting, that wasn't my experience. It was a collection of forums, each with their own norms.

> Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care. Right, I mentioned that for r/AskHistorians and r/science. What about regional subreddits? Why in the world does a subreddit for Toronto need rules like no CN tower pictures, no questions, or no posts about crime? Why can't the only rule be the post has to do with the city? Why do moderators want to go beyond moderating spam and insist on presenting us with a…

One phenomenon that I think drives this is that the engaged users (ie commenters) are usually a small subset of the total user base that upvotes things.

The engaged users care about the topic of the sub and tend to interact with it directly, while the larger audience is subscribed but mostly upvotes things from their main feed without caring which sub it is from, or visiting the sub itself to see what all has been posted there.

I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

So mods tend to be pulled in two directions by those two groups, and one is louder than the other so they tend to get their way.

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

#412

Post by shagie »

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?

The mobile client may be 345 calls/day.

The backend server push server is a bit more active at about 600 calls/hour/user.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...

> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.

That 345 calls/day is again mentioned https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 but shortly afterwards ( https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 ) he describes the process for push notifications (10 days ago - this isn't just the 1.3 release from 5 years ago):

> I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us

He's making a lot more than 345 calls per day per user.

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

#413

Post by edgyquant »

badRNG wrote: post #129
0zemp3c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans 99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

<1% of Reddit users make the content that provides value to the site. This 1% is disproportionately likely to know who spez is and care about his shenanigans. Even less perform the moderation tasks that keep the site running, and they basically all care about this change.

Source for this? I think this is a commonly spouted stat that applied to non-social media websites. I have trouble believing social media sites have the same demographic makeup.

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

#414

Post by babypuncher »

curun1r wrote: post #306
ljm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium.

Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.

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

#415

Post by phire »

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…

To me, it comes across as a clumsy attempt to open a new line of negotiation, one which headed in the direction of Reddit buying Apollo outright.

Christian is clearly thinking on his feet, so obviously he doesn't have a value proposition for reddit. All he is really doing is letting reddit know he might be open to it, the details could be negotiated later.

Reddit clearly has all the power here (Apollo is fully dependant on reddit), so they would have been able to negotiate it down. Maybe all the way to $1 million?

Anyway, reddit clearly weren't open to it, so it fell flat on it's face.

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

#416

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

paxys wrote: post #382
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #62

Does anything like this exist? A feed of unfiltered, unmoderated content + conversations, fed to a multitude of websites, each with its own moderation filters and content standards. All submissions go to the to the shared feed, but hit moderation and content filters on the website before being displayed. So you can have a reddit-like website with a lot of good content, but if it ever goes south people can quickly flo…

The problem with every such design is that the infrastructure layer takes up close to 100% of the development effort, hosting costs, maintenance costs and content liability while getting nothing in return. So why would anyone set up such a service?

Very good question. Although from descriptions I've heard of Nostr, isn't that how relays work? Unfiltered content (and thus, potential liability) flowing through peoples' relays? If so then I guess we have Nostr as our guinea pig.

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

#417

Post by babypuncher »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #203
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.

Isn't the whole point of this to charge AI companies harvesting reddit data? I thought 3rd party apps are collateral.

I see this theory a lot and I'm not so sure. The Reddit API makes things easier, but with this new pricing it makes way more sense for AI companies to go back to scraping.

But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.

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

#418

Post by adrr »

OldManRyan wrote: post #403
adrr wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it beating the reddit app? What percentage of users use Apollo?

I think you are reading "beating" as higher user count. I read it as better features and user experience. But even in terms of user count, enough people are using third-party clients like Apollo that reddit deemed it worthy to kill them.

did some back of the napkin math with what the apollo developer has said publicly. each user makes 10,000 api calls a month and there are 2 billion calls per month which means 200,000 MAU. Reddit has an MAU around 500m users.

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

#420

Post by raydev »

dsr_ wrote: post #250
raydev wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth This is Selig's estimate based on not much info. Numbers like "20x" are completely made up.

Based on the info that Reddit had disclosed earlier, it might be inaccurate today but it's not fair to say "completely made up" -- unless Reddit made it up.

No. It’s made up, because whether you claim it’s 20x or 100x or -5x, you can’t defend any of those numbers because of incomplete info.
Post reply on HN