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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

#451

Post by donmcronald »

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…

> It seems like Reddit could have just charged them 3.00 Per user per month, so they get a healthy margin off of the third party apps.

That's not the way things work anymore. If they think they can charge $10 a user and get away with it they will, regardless of how unethical or deceitful they need to be. And it's not just Reddit, it's our entire world of business "leaders" that have adopted that attitude.

The problem is that you're looking at it from the perspective of what makes a good product, and view 3P apps as part of a good product. However, the only question getting asked by the executives, board members, investors, etc. is "what makes a ton of money?"

Bring back the product focused people IMO.

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

#452

Post by plagiarist »

solveit wrote: post #381
EatingWithForks wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, but you'd think reddit could pay for 1.5 engineers to get that smoother integration themselves.

By paying for developers who can write good code and allowing them to write user-focused code instead of user-tracking code?

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

#453

Post by marcosdumay »

joecot wrote: post #56
jarym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth…

> If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.

If the reddit app was any good, the 3rd party ones wouldn't even exist. All their problems are because their users prefer to pay a 3rd party than to use the recommended, official app they keep pushing into them.

Instead of all this confusion, if they just made their app work on the high-latency that is common on mobile networks, they would get much better results. (No need to even make their video work.)

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

#454

Post by deaddodo »

raydev wrote: post #396
KptMarchewa wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think reddit spends 2.50 monthly per user on their 430 million MAU? That would mean 13 billion dollars in expenses yearly.

I don’t really think of any number, because that would be silly. None of us know the answer nor can we confidently estimate what it is. Therefore any attempt to justify or argue costs by us is useless.

We can confidently assume it's not 26x their annual revenue. That would be silly.

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

#455

Post by stereolambda »

tornato7 wrote: post #182
potatolicious wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.

Just for posterity, I glimpsed at their homepage and it seems that someone is gilding posts and comments explaining the protest. This as far as I understand entails paying Reddit. Fascinating. May be trolling.

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

#456

Post by shbooms »

tornato7 wrote: post #200
KptMarchewa wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think reddit spends 2.50 monthly per user on their 430 million MAU? That would mean 13 billion dollars in expenses yearly.

Reddit should realistically charge for lost revenue rather than lost expenses. Instagram makes $50B annual revenue on 2 billion users, or around $25/user/year. I'm certain that Reddit is making nowhere near that per user, but they're probably pricing their API along their most optimistic projections.

I can't find the source but in some of the communication Selig released between him and Reddit a few days ago, Reddit themselves confirmed that their pricing is based on lost oppurtunity cost per user, not just expenses

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

#457

Post by tyg13 »

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 was something that the Apollo dev (and a few other apps) were interested in, but the timing was just too sudden to make work. Specifically for Apollo, they had been selling year-long subscriptions for $12/year. With the API pricing change happening on July 1, that meant Apollo would have to continue to offer up to 11 months of the same service, at the same price (since users already paid for it) while operating at massively higher costs.

Christian even said that if Reddit had given app developers longer -- maybe six months to a year -- it would have been tough to change the business model, but not impossible. With this timetable, he would have had to come up with something like $500k in 30 days just to cover immediate costs, which was obviously impossible.

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

#458

Post by shagie »

theturtletalks wrote: post #392
dylan604 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this always the way. Crowd source development and ideas to see what gains popularity, and then build those features into your thing or buy the 3rd party thing to rebrand as your thing. That's like startup culture 101

Another thing that probably irked Reddit was that Apollo, RedditIsFun, and the other popular clients were monetizing their apps by including their own ads, charging a one-time or monthly fee. I'm surprised that wasn't against their API terms.

It's not. It's similar to how Imgur does it.

Imgur serves advertisements when you go to their page. But you don't get them through the API.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial

> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.

Calling an API and monetizing the front end it is fine. The money that Imgur loses from ads is made up in the API call monetization.

The Reddit APIs don't prohibit serving advertisements or any other form of monetization of the use of the APIs and mention it as something that your app would need to do.

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/data-api-terms

    You will disclose in your App through a privacy policy how you collect, use, store, and disclose data collected from your App Users and other visitors, including, where applicable, that third parties (e.g., advertisers) may serve content or advertisements and collect information directly from your App Users and other visitors that may include the use of cookies. In addition, by using the Data APIs, Reddit may use submitted information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Note that sending data to 3rd parties from a front end (e.g., advertisers) is something that is allowed provided that it is properly disclosed to the App Users or other visitors and that it may serve content or advertisements from the application.

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

#459

Post by btmiller »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #34
jarym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.

Yes. We all know it wasn’t in earnest, but this allows Reddit to say they tried.

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

#460

Post by donmcronald »

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…

> it looks to me like this is a high stakes showdown that’s inching toward a commercial resolution

Not a chance. He embarrassed the CEO and most CEOs are the type of people that would rather run the company into the ground than do business with someone that upstaged them.

I'm not saying Apollo is important to Reddit's business, just that you aren't accounting for the hubris of C level executives.

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