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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

#461
post #260
post #21

The part about him already selling 50K annual subscriptions to Apollo is the interesting one in the piece, and explains the decision to discontinue the app. He entered into a contract with users assuming that his API costs would be 0. He can't change that contract and start charging another fee on top, and is obligated to continue to provide the service no matter what Reddit now decides to charge him. So the solution…

He already reneged on the "contract" he had with users once before (and ignored support emails about it), so I don't believe him that this is some kind of legal requirement.

When?

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

#462

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.

Never seen an ad in Apollo

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

#463
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 is an EXTREMELY silly comparison, like it doesn't make any sense at all.

We are talking about clients here.

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

#464
post #308
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…

He's saying that he wants a fair deal where he can make money running his app. If Reddit has a good-faith belief that he can do $20M in revenue on his app, then they should be happy to buy the app for $10M and use it to drive $20M in revenue that goes to Reddit. In-context this seems pretty clear. Also in-context it seems pretty clear that Reddit is aware that their sudden price increase has made the Apollo app's value negative with no chance to keep it going.

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

#465
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He already reneged on the "contract" he had with users once before (and ignored support emails about it), so I don't believe him that this is some kind of legal requirement.

When?

A few months ago when he switched the funding model from "pro" to "ultra."

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

#466
post #457

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…

> Specifically for Apollo, they had been selling year-long subscriptions for $12/year

Ah, thanks. I wasn't aware that Apollo was already a paid app. Clearly, I'm not a mobile user, much less familiar with the app as well. I browse Reddit mostly on the desktop, via RSS feed.

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

#467

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?”

Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted. You're not going to upvote things and then comment on the post to complain about how it's being upvoted.

It's the "engaged users" who create comment sections full of "who is upvoting this junk" because they don't understand the little circle of of people who make multiple "high quality" posts every day are the minority and the unwashed masses the moderators hate so much actually _DO_ want to see the reposts, memes, sunset pictures, and questions about the best place to find a burger because it's the one neutral topic people don't get into petty political fights over and comb through your comment history in an effort to dunk on you and defeat your point with an ad hominem.

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

#468
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being blinded by hubris and taking a hard left off a cliff on a potentially profitable venture are not things I would consider "smart". Saying it was "smart but handled poorly" is an excuse. It was a series of dumb moves because they did not see the actions they needed to take and in what order and on what timeframe to not capsize.

Correct. In general it's a good capitalist scheme. Start with a mostly open platform, court third parties into making tools that make it significantly better, get your user base. Then kill the third parties to consolidate power. It worked for Facebook. It worked for Google Chat. It's failing for Twitter, and for reddit, for the same reasons. They did it too quickly and without the finesse needed to prevent a revolt.…

I don't think it's so much about consolidating power as it is that this is the natural choice for companies that primarily monetize through ads. I've always felt that it would be better for these platform companies to instead try to monetize the app ecosystem. Start by charging for the API with a generous free tier instead of going down the ad supported route.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scr…

> Everyone is incentivized to say they showed an ad but not actually show the ad.

People don't want to see ads because ads are intrusive. The solution to this problem that the ad industry sees is to make ads more intrusive. So it's kind of a positive feedback loop of user-hostile garbage forced upon them, and no wonder that people want to make ad-free experiences.

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

#470
post #418

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.

The article says the average Apollo user makes 345 API calls a month. Using your number of 2 billion calls per month, that’s more like 5.8 million MAU. Still around 1 percent of Reddit’s MAU.

EDIT: Oops, that’s per day! Your math is right, please ignore.

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