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

431–440 of 585 posts

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

#431

Post by azemetre »

hartator wrote: post #328
Sunspark wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was making a joke. If Reddit took a stressed joke attempting to defuse the situation a bit as a threat, it really makes the statement that their management or outreach team really does consist of mentally slow people who should experience a Musk-style firing. Some people make jokes when they are stressed or anxious.

Maybe or maybe not and he was dead serious. In both cases, when you are making threats, it’s reasonable for the other side to walk away.

What threat is there? Reddit had, and still has, all the power dynamics in these conversations. It's their product, Christian can't really coerce them to do anything whereas Reddit can and is.

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

#432

Post by Havoc »

N_A_T_E wrote: post #241

I'm assuming 90% of these API requests are reads. Is there a reason Apollo couldn't develop an intermediate proxy server and cache all the responses for a short period of time? I assume that would cut the API usage significantly and potentially the cost.

Reddit API reads are all going to be pretty unique unfortunately. They're all logged in & have their own mix of subs selections etc

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

#433

Post by hbn »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #325
nocoiner wrote: post #4

IMO, he’s doing a pretty good job negotiating this as well. I know there’s a lot of words right now about broken promises and everyone not wanting to do business with anyone else, but from the outside to this uninformed observer it looks to me like this is a high stakes showdown that’s inching toward a commercial resolution. There’s some dollar amount (representing either an exchange of value or avoided losses) where…

I've felt the opposite. He's basically tried to have an argument in public to get people to turn against Reddit. His communication is no longer negotiation. It's burn everything down with me because I've given up. I understand that Christian is in a really challenging place, but fighting with Spez in a public place is not the way to do it. It only encourages other developers to build a following that they attempt to…

When he tried doing private negotiations they falsely spread accusations that Christian had been threatening them.

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

#434

Post by wiseowise »

raydev wrote: post #404
wiseowise wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, multiply that by 5, it’s still nowhere near 2.5.

Well, guess what? Your starting point is just an estimate and its accuracy cannot be sourced, so this is all meaningless

Exactly. Regardless of estimates, 20 mil to run custom Reddit client is ridiculous.

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

#435

Post by adrr »

protastus wrote: post #210
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…

> Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. It's unreasonable for a company of any size. The entire storyline shows Reddit sabotaging the process. Which seems idiotic, because they're throwing away a vibrant ecosystem that is #1 in…

Isnt that what the CEO is trying to do with charging for API access? Twitter did the same thing. Apollo dev could just raise rates to $3 a month and he makes money and the user in return get a apollo which offers an ad free browsing experience.

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

#436

Post by rideontime »

ok123456 wrote: post #423
stetrain wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible for automoderator tools to immediately hide all new posts, or posts matching certain criteria, pending moderator approval. Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.

Then what value are the moderators adding if what they do can be automated by a regex filter?

Did you miss the "pending moderator approval" part of that?

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

#437

Post by johnnyanmac »

kenhwang wrote: post #330
ericbarrett wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I work in ad tech, the difficulty in serving ads isn't showing the ads (which can be pretty annoying in itself for advanced ad formats), it's collecting enough metrics consistently enough across platforms to convince the advertisers that fraud and brand safety aren't a concern. Verification metrics for basic ads are things like: when was the ad shown, how much of the ad was visible, which parts (pixels and video time…

This may sound very ignorant but: why are advertisers so paranoid about the people they pay to? If you are going so far as to track visible pixels of your ad you probably have something more fundamentally wrong with how you're communicating your product.

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

#438

Post by ryanwaggoner »

shagie wrote: post #412
lights0123 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I see you making this claim in multiple comments that he's making 600 API requests per user per hour to check for notifications, but this doesn't make sense to me. As you said, 100k users would result in 60 million API requests per hour, which would be about 43 billion API requests per month. I've seen pricing of $0.24 per 1k calls, so that would be $10 million per month, not $20 million per year. And that's just for this notification thing, which he could theoretically kill as a feature if that's 99% of the problem.

I think you're off.

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

#439

Post by jimmydorry »

potatolicious wrote: post #77
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.

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…

This is the CEO that got mad at a user in a subreddit that mentioned his username, and in a drunken rage went into the database and manually edited their comment (who's to say it was just one?).

Huffman has had many terrible lapses in judgement over the years.

It has also always rubbed me the wrong way how Huffman re-writes history by saying he founded reddit with just Alexis Ohanian. There were three founders, and the third one that he always leaves out is Aaron Swartz.

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

#440

Post by tyg13 »

stetrain wrote: post #411
evandale wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 po…

> 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?”

Also known as the "all unmoderated subreddits eventually become /r/pics" problem. It's why a lot of major subs opted-out of being default when that was still a thing.

I've heard a lot of argumentation along those lines from users that seem to really not care what really made Reddit a special place on the Internet. To them, Reddit is another Instagram/TikTok/Facebook clone, and it seems that's a viewpoint the company is trying to support. It seems completely brain-dead in terms of understanding why the website got popular in the first place, but it seems there's a good number of "satisfied" users that want it that way.

Post reply on HN