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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

#541

Post by lightbritefight »

joecot wrote: post #214
willis936 wrote: post #172

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.…

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Microsoft used it like a scalpel and a hammer for decades.

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

#542

Post by dayedh »

wvenable wrote: post #244
joecot wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it hasn't worked before. They bought Alien Blue, made it the official app, failed to iterate on it, and eventually gave up on it. Now they've made a new reddit app, which is also not good. No reddit official app is going to look good compared to the the third party ones, partly because their profit making attempts are at odds with good user experience, and if they buy the third party ones they've already show…

> made it the official app They did not. They bought it and killed it. Their home-grown application is built from scratch.

I’m still incredibly bitter about this. The Alien Blue iPad app was fantastic, nothing that has been released since can hold a candle to it.

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

#543

Post by brokenmachine »

BashiBazouk wrote: post #342
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.

I think there are a lot of people wondering if the "even more user-hostile changes" are a loss of old.reddit. I knew of 3d party apps but none by name until this most recent incident as I am fine with old.reddit but the behavior of the CEO does make me concerned. I can't tell if he was just channeling his inner Elon and being a pompous ass or if Reddit is as desperate financially as his AMA made it seem. If the latte…

When the 3rd party apps go, that's the last time I use reddit on my phone.

When old.reddit.com goes, that's the last time I use reddit at all.

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

#544

Post by brokenmachine »

koolba wrote: post #386
thejsa wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the App Store (and Play Store) rules ban this sort of thing — any access to third party web services needs to be in line with their terms of service.

That really sucks. Maybe what we need is something more general, a web browser that doesn't enforce CORS / XSS / CSP. So you could frame up an entirely new UI on any site you'd like that.

Sounds like you're pretty much describing the original intent of HTML.

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

#545

Post by brokenmachine »

graphe wrote: post #197
koolba wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the scale of these third party apps that approach just wouldn't work. Has there been any App Store apps that go with this approach? As long as Reddit provides some API accessible to a non-logged in user on the web, there’s going to be a way to scrape it. If you push that scraping into the start of the app then it’s be distributed without any clear way of blocking it. You could even have the app fetch “how to” up…

They will now. Before people were just polite to use Reddit's API. I'm sure there will be plenty of 3p on Android that scrape that are a work of love off GitHub soon.

It would be cool if the big 3p app developers would make their apps point to a configurable different API location, then people could set up their own docker scraper instances to provide the API for their app.

It could be an open-ish format, then you could potentially support alternate sites like HN as well.

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

#546

Post by brokenmachine »

bottlepalm wrote: post #349
lights0123 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is 345 calls/day—much lower than the official app's usage—that much when the server indicates that 60 calls/minute is all good?

When I use the website, my costs are covered by seeing ads. Now I have to watch more ads to make up for API users who don't pay.

I use Adblock, so don't forget you're making up for me too.

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

#547

Post by jarym »

andromeduck wrote: post #539
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yea I don’t think the poster is particularly interested in doing his own research, only defending his point of view while asking others for examples before finding a reason to pick at them.

Thank you for your comprehensive list of links though!

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

#548

Post by jarym »

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.

> one guy.

Yes, because you asked for ‘an example’. As in you asked for ‘one’.

You’re determined to stick to your point of view, you’re entitled to do that of course. But why pretend you’re interested in a debate or discussion on the matter when you’re clearly not?

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

#550

Post by randomdata »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #502
randomdata wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load. Yes, that is addressed at the end. 'Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.' You don't want to start there…

>You don't want to start there if you don't have to. Of course (I was laid off last month, no dev wishes other devs to be laid off). But to open up my cynical side for a bit: I also don't sympathize with these huge companies taking advantage of (what EVERYONE knew was) a temporary boon in tech and growing off of low interest rates proportions that would not be needed in 2-3 years. I as an individual saved aggressivel…

> I also don't sympathize with these huge companies taking advantage of (what EVERYONE knew was) a temporary boon in tech

While perhaps there is an argument to be made that one can take advantage of another if there is information asymmetry, when you say that EVERYONE recognized the temporary nature of the engagement, to think that temporary hiring under that is taking advantage of a worker is quite silly. A worker needing a guarantee of x number of years of payment had every right to demand it be written into the contract.

> These companies instead decided to throw all bets in

Of course, so did the workers. They didn't have to leave their jobs flipping burgers. They chose to because they saw $$$ in the air. That same greed is no doubt, as before, why they didn't bother putting any conditions in the contract to protect themselves from the downturn you state they knew was coming. They took a chance – sometimes it worked out, other times it didn't. Such is the nature of risk.

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