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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

#511

Post by shagie »

dTP90pN wrote: post #507
shagie wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle,…

Note: According to the published server source code, the NotificationCheckInterval has been increased to 60s sometime in back in March: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2... Reddit had many years to listen to 3p devs and to it's own internal developers to improve their API. They/Leadership decided not to do so.

Then the push notification server is is doing $0.36/day/user of API calls under the pricing system as described.

Christian would need to change the monthly subscription from $4.99 to probably $14.99 or $19.99 to handle that (and regular daily use and Apple's subscription - though if he wanted to manage the subscriptions through a 3rd party payment processor he could reduce the 30% to 15% for that).

The lack of that, while it sucks, doesn't change that there's a cost with the polling architecture.

Looking at the history of that line (thank you for pointing it out, I'd been trying to work from the notificationsWorker)

    March 16, 2023: 10s to 60s
    Nov   10, 2022:  5s to 10s

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

#512

Post by ljm »

babypuncher wrote: post #414
curun1r wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads. Everyone would find that reasonable and there…

This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium. Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.

I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet.

Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.

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

#513

Post by actionablefiber »

shagie wrote: post #482
actionablefiber wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Developer…

This would be with interrupting service though wouldn't it?

This would be, "I can no longer provide the service you bought, so I will refund you, cancel the subscription you have, and introduce a totally different subscription that accounts for the new upstream costs."

I would not expect Apollo to do this now after Reddit swung at Christian the way it did, but I'm curious to know if there was ever a semi-graceful way to handle it even on a short timeframe or if Christian was contractually boxed in.

edit: fixed very important typos

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

#514

Post by badRNG »

edgyquant wrote: post #413
badRNG wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

<1% of Reddit users make the content that provides value to the site. This 1% is disproportionately likely to know who spez is and care about his shenanigans. Even less perform the moderation tasks that keep the site running, and they basically all care about this change.

Source for this? I think this is a commonly spouted stat that applied to non-social media websites. I have trouble believing social media sites have the same demographic makeup.

It's a pretty well-known rule [0]. There's a good post about this in r/dataisbeautiful, but it is currently private.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

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

#515

Post by zouhair »

haunter wrote: post #13

>users revolted tbh right now it feels like mods, and especially power-mods (who are moding several high traffic subs), are revolting. I actually enjoy this blackout because a lot of small subs became active refuge for people who doesn't really care about the whole drama. Honestly I'm curious how this will play out but I can see subs just "naturally" replacing themselves with new ones. fyi 92 of top 500 subreddits co…

They are the backbone of the site. Without them there is no working Reddit.

What's worse than pissing off the workers of your business is to piss off those who do all the work for free.

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

#516

Post by Paul-Craft »

shagie wrote: post #380
Paul-Craft wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right on the money. It's all that, and more. Basically, Reddit going to a paid API isn't the big deal. It's the fact that, say, Apollo can pay Imgur under $200/month for all the API calls they need, but Reddit is demanding $20M/year, or ~$1.7M/month [0]. That's what tradespeople call their "fuck off" rate, i.e. the rate they'd quote someone when they don't actually want to do a job, but also don't want to come…

The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.

> The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get.

Sounds to me like that rate might be Imgur saying "we welcome your business," rather than "fuck off."

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

#517

Post by [deleted] »

bombcar wrote: post #40
haunter wrote: post #13

>users revolted tbh right now it feels like mods, and especially power-mods (who are moding several high traffic subs), are revolting. I actually enjoy this blackout because a lot of small subs became active refuge for people who doesn't really care about the whole drama. Honestly I'm curious how this will play out but I can see subs just "naturally" replacing themselves with new ones. fyi 92 of top 500 subreddits co…

https://old.reddit.com/r/wholesome/comments/148aw58/radvicea... - https://archive.ph/3qMMA The worm is turning and the top power-mods are going to get Caesar'd.

[deleted]

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

#518

Post by Kye »

fisherjeff wrote: post #390

Okay, maybe Reddit should just buy Apollo and make Selig CEO. Just incredible how much better of a communicator he is than Huffman. Low bar, but still.

Whatever business objective is driving this nonsense is probably already too deep in investor expectations/planning (and maybe contracts) for a new CEO to stop.

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

#519

Post by mcpeepants »

bagels wrote: post #354
mcpeepants wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is a play towards profitability, when the (obvious) outcome of their absurd pricing is a massive reduction in API usage. The fact is, advertisements pay better than any amount their users or third-party developers would be willing to bear. This change appears to be more about maximizing that revenue stream (or making it more appealing to advertisers), rather creating a _new_ revenue stream in pai…

Isn't maximizing revenue and at the same time reducing costs a step in the direction of profitability?

Sure, but isn’t “raise the cost of the API to the point where it is prohibitively expensive for everyone” at best a cost reduction strategy only?

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

#520

Post by AceJohnny2 »

Reddit's sudden API intransigence can be explained solely by the shock of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Steve Hoffman, Reddit's CEO, has expressed outrage that Reddit's data was mined to train ChatGPT (and other LLMs) without any benefit to Reddit.

(I absolutely do not support their drastic measures, but it's useful to understand where it comes from)

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