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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

#531

Post by hooverd »

marcosdumay wrote: post #453
joecot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the problem is that third apps get in the way of ads. Reddits users and content and "community" get in the way of ads too.

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

#532

Post by downWidOutaFite »

jarym wrote: post #333
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If plenty of countries have tried give an example where the rich fled and the country reversed the tax

https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/gerard-depardie...

one guy.

The fact is rich people can afford to live wherever they like more than anyone else. There's no reason for them to leave if they don't want to. But if they do leave and they're famous sometimes they'll take the opportunity to score political points.

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

#533

Post by jpdaigle »

masklinn wrote: post #170
ladberg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The straight answer is that ads are embedded in the "HTTP API" and the vast majority of browser users don't have adblock, and Reddit can't force ads on any API users (except through the official app).

> Reddit can't force ads on any API users (except through the official app). They absolutely could make ads part of the API that third party applications have to display. There's a hundred things they could do if you assume they care about third-party applications, and don't specifically want to kill them. I do think they want to kill them, actively, but even beyond that it's really clear they don't care.

The exact same point applies to Twitter's 3rdparty API getting killed off, and both moves are still a mystery.

It'd be easy to say "as a condition of getting this API key, you agree to display ad elements as they are served in the feed, and on click, open their associated URL in the system browser". All the ad-targeting is done server-side anyways, and attribution via unique links is easy.

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

#534

Post by 93po »

xyst wrote: post #179
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…

This is nothing new. You don’t remember the Ellen Pao era? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit (see controversies section)

The era where they banned fatpeoplehate before the jailbait subreddit. Good times.

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

#535

Post by evandale »

ok123456 wrote: post #423
stetrain wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible for automoderator tools to immediately hide all new posts, or posts matching certain criteria, pending moderator approval. Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.

Then what value are the moderators adding if what they do can be automated by a regex filter?

This is what I'd like to know. Based on mod comments in r/Toronto I suspect their regex is literally "ends with ?" and they have to manually approve every question.

They invented work for themselves that doesn't even need to exist and can be solved with the voting system. Every rule change they've made seems to be in an effort to make themselves relevant and take on unnecessary work. This seems like a common theme with Reddit moderators - they give themselves more work to do that nobody is asking them to do in order to justify their existence.

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

#536

Post by bloopernova »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #231
bloopernova wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 2,000 employees.

Which is an insane number for an operation like Reddit. I wonder what those people do all day ? I would have estimated Reddit to be 100 people max, and even that seems high.

Me too. I was very confused when I heard that number. I was thinking maybe 200 people if they have multiple dev teams and a corporate marketing/sales side for advertising.

My employer has slightly fewer people, but we have dozens of clients with sites/apps far more complex than reddit. It just doesn't make sense.

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

#537

Post by ajmurmann »

Sunspark wrote: post #295
ajmurmann wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not thankless or stressful if all you do is just enforce the overall corporation rules plus perhaps some locally agreed upon additional rules. If people want to post sunsets and nobody is writing you emails to complain about it, then have at it. It's the voice of the people.

It's all easy till the fuzziness of reality hits with it's ambiguity, anger, etc. Have you read Yishan's famous thread on the topic? https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586956430162083841

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

#538

Post by Terretta »

adventured wrote: post #479
redmerchant2 wrote: post #7

They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…

This isn't about API costs. It was changed so rapidly due to ChatGPT 4 and how it shocked the industry. They believe time is essential, in regards to pricing up the data (GPT has indicated to the Reddit company that it has massively undervalued its text content). API pricing/use is the excuse to lock down their content asap. They see a goldmine under their own feet that others are extracting value from and so far the…

This argument doesn't hold water. Licensing can charge commercial reuse differently, and technology can have 3rd party apps use OAuth, and reddit can enable that OAuth solely for users with Reddit Gold Plus, to get whatever they think they need per user.

It's users using the API, to contribute the content. If Reddit stopped to think it through, they'd realize content contributed by Apollo users is better for LLMs.

Finally, if it cost users to use the API, Reddit gets paid, apps compete on their own merits as they do today, and the pile miners pay for commercial harvesting of the content users paid reddit and the app builders to let them post.

It's hard to see why Reddit thinks their current approach is the cleverest.

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

#539

Post by andromeduck »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #532
jarym wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/gerard-depardie...

one guy. The fact is rich people can afford to live wherever they like more than anyone else. There's no reason for them to leave if they don't want to. But if they do leave and they're famous sometimes they'll take the opportunity to score political points.

It's good to do some research of your own.

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-7...

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-when-the-wealt...

https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2021/02/11/le...

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-aba...

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

#540

Post by fisherjeff »

Kye wrote: post #518
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.

I don’t mean to imply I think he could - or even necessarily should - stop the changes. Just, if you’re going to be CEO and make a big change you need to be a great communicator and… well yeah.
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