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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

#481

Post by snuxoll »

sunflowerfly wrote: post #474
adrr wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A point that has gotten lost in the discussion; The CEO is saying the "average" user would only cost $1 a month and therefore the pricing is fair. But users of apps like Apollo are not average, they are super users (and include a high percentage of mods). The Apollo app developer says he would have to pay $2.50 a month per user. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... If he was able to pass th…

I was a Reddit Premium subscriber and had been since the only thing it did was remove ads, give you access to /r/lounge, and a shiny badge on your user page.

The fact that it never crossed their mind that a half hearted attempt like allowing Premium members, who pay more every month than a free user generates in ad revenue, to continue using whatever apps they want might stymie some of the outrage show how out of touch the execs are. It still would be a bullshit solution, but making a developer like Christian pay for API requests while I was already paying Reddit ~$5/mo was stupid.

(Needless to say, I’m not longer subscribed to Premium)

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

#482

Post by shagie »

actionablefiber wrote: post #477
tyg13 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seems it should be possible to shut down, refund, and relaunch under a new pricing model? Does Apple forbid that?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252

> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.

> ...

> If the subscription price increase is above the thresholds, exceeds the annual limit, or occurs within territories where the law requires it, you must opt in before the price increase is applied. If you don't opt in to the new price, the subscription will not renew at the next billing period. You can subscribe again within the app or on the Manage Subscriptions page.

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

#483

Post by theturtletalks »

mdekkers wrote: post #462
theturtletalks wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apollo has a 1-time fee to post and a monthly fee for notifications and other features.

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

#484

Post by hbn »

hartator wrote: post #267

Appollo main dev said he wanted 10M to “keep the app quiet”. I wouldn’t want to negotiate after that as well.

He was referring to working with reddit to optimize the API requests so it's less stress on the servers.

I'm not sure where this thing about it being a "joke" came from. Reddit accused him of making too many requests (even though he was insanely below the threshold they themselves allotted), and he said he was willing to fit within whatever they wanted as a new threshold, or "keep the app quiet"

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

#485

Post by deadso »

stereolambda wrote: post #455
tornato7 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing that people miss out on when they complain about guilding/awards is that being guilded or buying premium will credit your account with reddit tokens that you can use to guild other posts. So there's a chance the users are just using tokens that they have in their accounts already. I purchased premium back in the day to sync visited pages, and I have around 10+ platinum awards I can give out, a lot more if I use a cheaper award.

See here: https://www.reddit.com/coins/

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

#486

Post by fdgjgbdfhgb »

tezgon wrote: post #205
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without those moderators there's not much of a site How many of those users would notice if Reddit swapped in paid moderators for the largest subs?

If they're concerned with the amount they lose to 3PAs, paying their moderators is a complete non-starter. The whole point of this is to increase revenue for the upcoming IPO.

Right, but the point of this change isn't really the _actual cost_ of 3rd party API usage, as much as the _opportunity cost_. They are way overcharging for the API, and they know it. Adding some expenses in the form of paid mods (let's be honest, probably off-shored to a 3rd world country and paid minimum wage) would be worth it, if it can guarantee the subs keep running.

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

#487

Post by fakedang »

ajmurmann wrote: post #292
Sunspark wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Reddit if they want to be a community needs to allow ELECTIONS. Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms. Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected. Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.

Are there actually enough people willing to do the mod job? I am only in one sub where everyone hates the mods, but even there I haven't seen any discussion of anyone becoming a mod. Maybe it's because mods delete insurrectionist posts. However, I cannot imagine many people want to do such a thankless and stressful job that pays nothing at all.

I'm pretty sure mods are paid from somewhere. I remember reading some stuff about 4 or 5 years back, about how the left-wing party of that country (I think it was UK Labour) had taken over mod duties of the country subreddit.

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

#488

Post by thatguy0900 »

chasil wrote: post #281
tedivm wrote: post #2

It absolutely amazes me how badly reddit has handled this whole situation. From the years of broken promises to moderators, the complete lack of accessibility in their own apps, and then on top of their for their CEO to not only get caught in a major lie but for him to then double down on it. As much as reddit wants to make these developers into the bad guys, every move they've made in this mess has hurt their reputa…

"I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will." --Warren Buffet.

It's probably very easy to run a business if you've never had to worry about making a profit. I'm not sure that's a wonderful business though.

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

#489

Post by shagie »

evandale wrote: post #478
shagie wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Linking to Reddit admin posts isn't going to do you any favours. The Apollo dev has addressed, acknowledged, apologized, and fixed that March 14th problem and it's all detailed in his post [1]. He has given everyone the receipts, phone recordings, source code, and emails detailing his conversations with Reddit. There is no reason that I've seen to not take his word at face value or think he's trying to mislead people…

Feel free to ignore that then.

The push notification server is described doing 8640 requests per day (1 call every 10 seconds) for each user.

An account can sign up multiple users ( https://apolloapp.io/notifications-faq/ )

> How many accounts/devices does this work with?

> There's no limit (but please be reasonable). If you have a main account and five alternate accounts, and an iPhone and two iPads, you can get notifications for all of those accounts on all of those devices for the same fee.

With 50k subscriptions that he needs to refund the floor on this is that he's doing 432M requests per day for the push notification server.

If that is one request every 6 seconds instead of 10 (as described in the 1.3 release) that is 720M requests per day for a floor.

The backend server for Apollo handling push notifications is doing something with some consistent load that is likely showing up on the same API key as the mobile client app is.

When the backend server and the mobile app are taken in aggregate, the description that Reddit sees about how many requests per day the API key for Apollo makes is in rough agreement with those floor numbers plus what one would expect a mobile human user the doing.

I suspect that with the outage that the push notification server was scaled back from 1 request every 6 seconds to 1 request every 10 seconds because the backoff for the push notification server was not working leading to an excess of calls and an increase in the server load and egress causing an increase in the amount the node was going to get billed at. I admit that is pure speculation.

From Reddit's point of view, they only see "this request was made with this API key in the header" and can't distinguish mobile app calls from push notification server calls. When they say "this is how many requests that Apollo is making" they are looking at that number. When Christian is saying "Apollo is making X calls per day on average" he is referring to the mobile app requests (which are more efficient than Reddit's mobile app) and not including other uses of the API key.

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

#490

Post by stereolambda »

deadso wrote: post #485
stereolambda wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing that people miss out on when they complain about guilding/awards is that being guilded or buying premium will credit your account with reddit tokens that you can use to guild other posts. So there's a chance the users are just using tokens that they have in their accounts already. I purchased premium back in the day to sync visited pages, and I have around 10+ platinum awards I can give out, a lot more if I…

Thanks for clarification. I'm not really complaining, just found it amusing. Still using the awards looks a little like tacitly supporting the system, and I even wondered if they help the submissions in the algorithm (if so, gilding would make more sense in that case).
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