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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

#491

Post by evandale »

lazycouchpotato wrote: post #429
evandale wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit. Would you be able to provide examples of where you believe this to be the case?

Pretty much any small city or regional subreddits. My favourite example is r/Toronto. It's about 600k users and I don't expect it to be very hard to manage because I used to religiously browse by new before it got neutered earlier this year and made completely useless.

Lots of posts the powerusers over the years have complained about and slowly got rid of are repetitive are things like pictures, questions, and touristy stuff. Those things were extremely popular and got lots of upvotes but a couple powerusers who browse new got tired of them, decided to troll every post they didn't like, and the end result was the mods caving to them and not allowing the posts anymore rather than moderating the bad users and letting the votes sort themselves out.

On top of that, in January they decided to make the rule to ban articles about crimes happening in the city unless it has a significant impact. They were going to run a user survey at the end of January to gauge its popularity. They decided not to and now rule 8 of r/Toronto is no posts about crime. Now r/Toronto is just a sanitized feed of .. pretty much nothing? I don't know what content gets posted anymore that isn't complaining about the Ford government or housing prices. It's pretty sad when we don't even get the news about what's happening in Toronto in r/Toronto anymore unless the mods feel like it's an important enough for the whole city to know about. Why do Reddit mods get to decide what's important to r/Toronto users? I don't believe the subreddit should "belong" to them just because they had first mover advantage and now they get to run a major city subreddit using whatever rules they want.

and no, it's not realistic to spin off your own subreddit and create a new one. It works with bigger places like Canada or Ontario, but Toronto is too small to support multiple city subreddits and you'll never be more popular than r/Toronto because that's naturally the place everyone is going to go to first.

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

#492

Post by choas »

if an investor comes up with the same questions, spez should be gone as CEO: - Have they just now realized that AI might pay millions of dollars after reddit was founded 18 years ago? - Do they know that Reddit data has value because it is structured and rated and third-party tools help to do this? - They know that even their annoying ads don’t make them profitable, but do they know that these ads reduce the chance that the user might produce new valuable data for all these AI millions of dollars?

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

#493

Post by TeMPOraL »

x0x0 wrote: post #318
phire wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the plan was always to kill the 3rd party apps, but not until their own app was feature competitive with the 3rd party ones. But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.

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 not unheard of. Back when I worked in a place that forced me to use Slack, I deshittified my experience via Ripcord, which could handle 90% of Slack at and also doing 80% of Discord at the same time. And that client too was, AFAIR, a one-person project.

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

#494

Post by johannes1234321 »

bottlepalm wrote: post #345
johannes1234321 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A factor is, that the user's of those apps overproportionally create content, which is later served to other users. Most users come via Google or other ways to read some content. Only few participate actively. Earning less on those few users can be valuable overall.

'users of those apps over proportionally create content' - really? prove it. Second, posting a link is not the same as 'creating content'

That is content for the site. Without that link post reddit would be less attractive.

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

#495

Post by evandale »

stetrain wrote: post #449
evandale wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yeah, I addressed this and you had to skip this sentence to quote the sentence you did: "The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place."

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

#496

Post by flutas »

shagie wrote: post #475
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…

> Apollo averages ~345 calls per-user per-day The mobile front end does about 345 calls/user/day The push notification server does 8640 calls/user/day (one call every 10 seconds). In https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 he describes how that works. > I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of th…

> The mobile front end does about 345 calls/user/day

> The push notification server does 8640 calls/user/day (one call every 10 seconds).

I've seen you parroting this around in every thread, and don't understand why.

First of all, none of the math checks out with your theory. But I'll break down why. Here[0] he says Apollo has over 100k DAUs (I noticed you've also stopped using that link...). He also says

> At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.

> I also offer a completely free system that does not use a server so those who don't want to have to pay can have their device function as the server and use local notifications (which are slightly delayed as it uses Background Fetch and using the device uses more battery), but remote notifications necessitate a server.

> If there's nothing that can be done, Apollo won't be able to offer push notifications unfortunately.

He has stated here[1] that API pricing would cost him "almost $2m per month."

So let's check the math.

345 + 8640 API calls / user / day = 8985 / user / day

8,985 API calls x 100,000 users = 898,500,000 / day

Using the absolute average month of 30.4375 days:

30.4375 x 898,500,000 = 27,348,093,750 req / month (@ 100k users)

Or in API pricing $6,563,542.50 / month, which is almost 3x as much as he said it would cost.

> Note that it does a request every 10 seconds for each user. At the API rate that would be about $0.25 every 3 hours (for each user) to support it.

They only do that for each user, that has paid for and has an active Apollo Ultra ($5/mo) subscription. That's going to remove a significant chunk of users.

If you want to verify any of this for yourself, the backend code is also now fully readable[2]. But it looks like from their backend code, they do a maximum of 100 users[3] every 5 seconds[4].

Additionally, that's Reddit just being stupid not them. Reddit offers no alternative way to get real-time notifications from their API, and with the paid API won't as well.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

[2]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend

[3]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

[4]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

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

#497

Post by [deleted] »

Domenic_S wrote: post #23
mbStavola wrote: post #9

I can't say I've missed Reddit too much after I stopped using it. Twitter was a bit harder, but Mastodon filled that niche quite nicely. However, I don't even feel like checking out Lemmy or Kbin as a Reddit replacement, making me question how useful Reddit is for me personally. I wonder if anyone else is feeling the same during the blackout.

I'm looking for rechargeable batteries and monitor shopping right now, and my typical research process involves searching for reviews on Reddit (google: "$item review reddit") because of how many absolute garbage Amazon affiliate link-farms there are these days. It's been tough to stay off Reddit for that research. I've also decided, screw it, I'm taking an Amazon break as well (because they enable the above behavior…

[deleted]

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

#498

Post by stetrain »

evandale wrote: post #495
stetrain wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yeah, I addressed this and you had to skip this sentence to quote the sentence you did: "The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place."

Ah I missed the “this place” piece. We’ll call that even on misreading each others comments considering your last reply to me.

Well then it’s clear you understand the value of good moderation, even in a place like Hacker News which is not nearly as strict IMO as the subs you mentioned.

I get your examples of over moderation and of course there are plenty of examples of this. I just think you may be in danger of conflating good moderation, which is often invisible and doesn’t involve a lot of moderator posting and onerous rules, with the lack of need for moderation at all.

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

#499

Post by benhurmarcel »

paxys wrote: 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…

Why can't he cancel the existing "Ultra" subscription, refund the remaining time just as he already plans, then launch a new subscription with the new price?

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

#500

Post by realusername »

latortuga wrote: post #161
redmerchant2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the fi…

I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.

To my knowledge, ads and buying awards were never available from the API anyways so it's not like Reddit can use that as a valid argument
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