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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

#441

Post by maaanu »

adrr wrote: post #418
OldManRyan wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean since apollo users are a subset of reddit user your comparison seem pretty mundane.

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

#442

Post by lazycouchpotato »

bagels wrote: post #343
mishagale wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I believe it's $0.12 per month, not per year.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

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

#443

Post by johnnyanmac »

randomdata wrote: post #409
judge2020 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't do it for the money - the money is to make it unrealistic for them to continue in any way, and push more end-users to the official reddit app to participate in their ad network. They knew no app was going to pay those astronomical rates unless it's some personal project that only gets charges a dollar a month or so.

> They knew no app was going to pay those astronomical rates Perhaps, but they don't have much choice. If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt. May as well go big and go bankrupt only if that fails then not try and be guaranteed to go bankrupt. Thing is, Apollo is on board to pay the big price, but Christian has exclaimed he needs more ti…

>If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt.

I know reddit was never profitable, but I'm not convinced Reddit is so short on money that they can't last to 2024. They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load. From what I heard, Reddit employs 2000 workers and I can't imagine they need that many to keep the site operational (For reference, Twitter had ~4k employees pre-pandemic, and peaked at 7500 employees... I'm not convinced that Reddit's site complexity is a quarter of the largest site in the world, despite reddit having plenty of traffic as a top site itself).

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

#444

Post by shagie »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #438
shagie wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

It's possible. He could have also changed the rate at which it polls. ~1B calls a day isn't out of the realm of possibility.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...

> On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day. If the app can operate with half the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?

(note: 53% less calls is about going from a 6 second window to a 10 second window)

Note also that 100k users is the user base at that time and 1.3 is when the subscription ($5/month) was added for push notifications. He noted that that would be something that he would have to pay to support for a server to do those requests. It is quite likely that the number of users who are signed up at $5/month for push notifications is less than the total user base.

Having dabbled with the API, if he is doing push notifications on a short time window, he's making a call with at least that frequency.

https://apolloapp.io/notifications-faq/

> Wait, why does it cost money? I already paid for Pro!

> Apollo Pro unlocks extra features and is a one-time fee, but Apollo Ultra includes a notification server that has ongoing monthly costs to me (the developer) to rent and maintain that add up and can't really be covered by the fee associated with Pro (especially when trying to keep Pro affordable at a few bucks). I'd love to give it away as part of Apollo Pro, but I don't want to potentially jeopardize the future of Apollo. As a result I also tried to keep the price very reasonable at under a dollar a month.

And yes, the price went up when you look at the current in app purchases that are displayed on the App Store page.

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

#445

Post by dale_glass »

renewiltord wrote: post #369
x0x0 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a silly comparison.

Apollo is a better client. The comparison is Apollo vs the Reddit app, not Apollo vs Reddit as a whole.

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

#446

Post by stetrain »

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?

Do you think that all online moderation can be accomplished with a regex filter with no human review?

Even if it magically could, someone needs to maintain the regex.

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

#447

Post by randomdata »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #443
randomdata wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They knew no app was going to pay those astronomical rates Perhaps, but they don't have much choice. If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt. May as well go big and go bankrupt only if that fails then not try and be guaranteed to go bankrupt. Thing is, Apollo is on board to pay the big price, but Christian has exclaimed he needs more ti…

>If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt. I know reddit was never profitable, but I'm not convinced Reddit is so short on money that they can't last to 2024. They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load. From what I heard, Reddit employs 2000 workers and I can't imagine they need t…

> They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load.

Yes, that is addressed at the end. 'Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.'

You don't want to start there if you don't have to. If they can turn things around there is still the possibility of IPO. Current investors have made it clear that they want off the sinking ship. Only staving off bankruptcy by trimming the workforce to the bare minimum is not a good look for the sake of IPO, however. That is saved for the last ditch effort.

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

#448

Post by kenhwang »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #437
kenhwang wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a lot of ad fraud in the industry, there's a lot of money in advertising. Everyone is incentivized to say they showed an ad but not actually show the ad. There's a lot of very sophisticated ad fraud operations and the tracking is designed to be difficult to defeat. We've seen app developers try to render ads in hidden iframes or muted behind/under content or on server farms with headless browsers or click scripts being served with the ad.

The default is to not pay for an ad shown until the publisher can prove it was actually shown and independent verification matches. It's a lose-lose situation for the user and publisher to show an ad but not get paid for it (but the advertiser still benefits, so they'll make a good effort to find reasons to not pay).

Brand safety is also the highest priority for most advertisers. They don't want their ads shown next to content they disagree with. Which the publisher also has to prove they've done in a way that can be independently verified.

Some of these problems are very hard to solve with tech, and for these cases, the solution is often "just trust me". It's not uncommon to simply let advertisers have access to audit ad serving code. It's easy to trust a big entity like Google or Facebook or even Reddit, but it's very hard (and a lot of work) to trust random single dev apps (or even companies lead by untrustworthy figures like Twitter).

The bigger (unsolved) problem is: how do you prove your advertising actually worked? How do you convince a customer like Coke or McDonalds with massive advertising budgets and not immediate trackable sale/action that their money was well spent? So far the tech solution is to just provide a lot of data supporting that the ad was served exactly as the advertiser wanted.

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

#449

Post by stetrain »

evandale wrote: post #173
tedivm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit. The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this pl…

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

The same question could be asked of Hacker News, which is run very much like a topically focused subreddit with rules, moderation, merging of duplicate topics, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#450

Post by plagiarist »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #351
x0x0 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a big chunk of this is prioritization of resources in a way Apollo doesn't have to worry about. I highly doubt reddit has like utterly mediocre/shit devs. I think it's more likely that works are being prioritized in a way that shafts mods (who don't pay money) towards the goals of the reddit company to ipo (more ads and engagement with their first-party platforms). We had stupid shit like reddit coin and redd…

Imagine if you could simply write app code without needing to spend hours of time in meetings, writing analytics for every button tap, or writing dozens of explanations to managers why the app doesn't behave exactly like the web version.
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