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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

#551

Post by DropInIn »

theturtletalks wrote: post #392
dylan604 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this always the way. Crowd source development and ideas to see what gains popularity, and then build those features into your thing or buy the 3rd party thing to rebrand as your thing. That's like startup culture 101

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.

Seems more that they were upset/afraid about how it made the corporation appear inept (and correctly so).

It was about maximizing the value of the IPO by ensuring investors would be minimally aware of the failures of the app and new Reddit, by ensuring as few 3rd party products exist as comparatives to the first party offerings.

It could be argued to be part of a conspiracy to defraud investors by ensuring they were incapable of being fully informed....

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

#552

Post by tommit »

dylan604 wrote: post #311
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.

Isn't this always the way. Crowd source development and ideas to see what gains popularity, and then build those features into your thing or buy the 3rd party thing to rebrand as your thing. That's like startup culture 101

But they have done neither. They did not build the most popular 3PA features into their native app, nor did they offer to buy them out.

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

#553

Post by Peaches4Rent »

phire wrote: post #415
bagels wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in what came before that clip, but, it sounds like he's awkwardly asking for $10M in exchange for... nothing? Why would Reddit take that deal? 1) Shut Apollo down: increase ad revenues, decrease server costs (if the claim that Apollo is inefficient is true) 2) Apollo pays $20M: increase api revenues 3) Pay Apollo $10M: decreased revenue, maintain high server costs. I don't even understand how this kind…

To me, it comes across as a clumsy attempt to open a new line of negotiation, one which headed in the direction of Reddit buying Apollo outright. Christian is clearly thinking on his feet, so obviously he doesn't have a value proposition for reddit. All he is really doing is letting reddit know he might be open to it, the details could be negotiated later. Reddit clearly has all the power here (Apollo is fully depend…

Yeah. I think Christian meant to say 1 million.

That means, if you pay 1 million now, it would be less than the cost to upkeep for 30 days and it would we a win win

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

#554

Post by mishagale »

lazycouchpotato wrote: post #442
bagels wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$0.12 per user per year... how many users are using third party apps to skip out on ads? Is the true value higher once they start seeing ads? Also, that number is so laughably low!

I believe it's $0.12 per month, not per year. https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

You are right, my bad.

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

#555

Post by flutas »

shagie wrote: post #501
flutas wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 100,00…

The 100k users is the total username when he released 1.3 if he were to have that entire user base get push notifications. He didn't do that - he set up a new subscription tier for the app to handle that. Not everyone in the 100k user base bought a subscription. The 100k number was also from 5 years ago and is likely not accurate for today. The main value from that quote is as a description of how he was architecting…

> If you scale back the notifications from 1 every 10 seconds to 1 every 5 minutes, it becomes a much more reasonable number with only 288 requests per day per user - which gets into very different numbers when dealing with a subscription.

Except you're still making up fake numbers. He was giving an example, not quoting a dedicated solution.

I even linked to their server code in my previous comment where you can see they do batches of 100 users every 5 seconds. Unless they only have 200 users, then it will not ever be “1 every 10 seconds” like you keep claiming.

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

#557

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

paxys wrote: post #503
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm astounded that he was actually able to run a business pulling in $500,000 a year in subscriptions without ever having to pay the actual platform the users are "subscribing" to a dime. And he's been doing this for what? 8 years? No wonder he doesn't care about shutting it down. It was a free lunch the whole time.

$500-600K/year in revenue. Take away 1. app store fees (30%) 2. income taxes 3. hosting costs 4. contracting costs (he employs at least one part time engineer) 5. design costs 6. health insurance + other payroll taxes, and you are left with a small percentage of that as net income. Now add in the hours of his life he has presumably put into this app for the last 8+ years. I'm going to go ahead and guess that it was m…

I feel compelled to mention that he's in Canada; as with most of the rest of the developed world outside the US, paid health insurance is either not a thing or is a rounding error.

The rest of your math sounds about right.

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

#558

Post by ok123456 »

evandale wrote: post #535
ok123456 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

They seem to like to do it for free.

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

#559

Post by johnnyanmac »

paxys wrote: post #505
benhurmarcel wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Something tells me this is exactly what he is going to do once the uproar dies down and everyone goes back to using Reddit like normal.

Based on the interview here, it sounds like it's not just about the money at this point. He sounds emotionally done, and Reddit's horrid support throughout this was the nail in the coffin. There certainly are ways he can keep the app running (maybe not popular ways, but ways), but when it comes to dealing with someone who's CEO basically slandered you behind your back: yeah, I can see why he'd want to move on.

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

#560

Post by johnnyanmac »

JeremyNT wrote: post #366
madeofpalk wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A medium-ish video game reddit that I participate in held two votes on whether to participate, and whether to shutdown for 24 or 48 hours, and in both users overwhelmingly (95%) voted in favor of shutting down, and for 48 hours. There is a vocal amount of non-mods who are also participating. Also "mods" are still users of reddit. When I'm an admin of a Facebook group, I'm still a 'facebook user'.

It stands to reason that the people most inclined to see and participate in a reddit poll about protesting a reddit policy would be a self-selecting group of enthusiasts (e.g. the 1% rule[0]). I suspect a vast majority of reddit users don't have a dog in this fight and just want to use the site. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

I imagine so. But when the content is also made by those 1%, what do those browsers do when acticity goes down?

That's the rub here compared to Twitter. It's not run by huge companies/content creators/personaliies providing news, but by users posting news or discussions. And if they leave, that does directly impact the content of the site, despite being a minority.

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