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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

#571

Post by N_A_T_E »

shagie wrote: post #471
N_A_T_E wrote: post #241

I'm assuming 90% of these API requests are reads. Is there a reason Apollo couldn't develop an intermediate proxy server and cache all the responses for a short period of time? I assume that would cut the API usage significantly and potentially the cost.

They are mostly reads. They are done every few seconds for each user to get the mailbox status for push notifications for monthly subscribers. https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 > 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 the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within…

Seems like that refresh rate could be slowed down significantly. Heck, if its an existential issue for the app they could cut the mailbox status completely.

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

#572

Post by volkl48 »

evandale wrote: post #323
volkl48 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-time user of the site, although currently taking a break: I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases. Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun…

How much work does a mod of a city subreddit with 600k subscribers really do though? Is it really necessary to have rules in a city subreddit such as 1) no questions or 2) no posts about crime? That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like t…

City/place subreddits tend to turn into an endless sea of the same question if unmoderated:

"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"

These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.

That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.

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There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.

A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.

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> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.

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

#573

Post by replwoacause »

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 am only fighting what I assume are subconscious impulses to go there, but I don’t feel I’m missing any utility provided by Reddit on a daily basis.

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

#574

Post by edgyquant »

jachee wrote: post #525
edgyquant wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every community you’re talking about has users who would love to replace the mod team.

So that they, too, can get treated like crap by reddit? I don’t buy it.

No so that they can be the ones who get to ban people and shape the community.

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

#575

Post by Sunspark »

ajmurmann wrote: post #537
Sunspark wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had not, good thread!

It seems to come down to that people need to debate on the same level. Some drunk bum is not going to walk out of a bar and into a classroom and debate a professor. But that's what happens on social media.

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

#576

Post by deaddodo »

john-radio wrote: post #266
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…

> Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community. It's like when a person complains that her husband looked at her phone, when by doing so he discovered she was cheating on him.* Where's the trust? * Genders included for sentence readability, not to imply anything about women or men

You're definitely in the wrong for breaking into someone's phone, spouse or not. You're also in the wrong for being unfaithful/operating out of the bounds of an agreed-upon relationship.

They aren't mutually exclusive situations.

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

#577

Post by deaddodo »

tedivm wrote: post #60
0zemp3c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans 99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

So, wouldn't the proper protest be to instead...just quit? Let the subreddits get overrun by all of this spam and extreme posts and then the admins would appreciate their influence, no?

And, as a nice side benefit, maybe we'll finally get to prune the cabal of super-moderators that have been abusing their influence for over a decade now.

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

#578

Post by ryanmerket »

shagie wrote: post #511
dTP90pN wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

...or he could just have tiered pricing.

If he were to optimize his calls, he could get them down to under the new ratelimit, as the Relay for Reddit dev has. Once under the ratelimi, with no notifications, it's a total of $0.78/user/mo.

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

#579

Post by ryanmerket »

Terretta wrote: post #538
adventured wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fi…

It's both. They are monetizing the data with LLMs AND they are still enabling 3P developers to monetize their users by charging a small monthly fee.

Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses?

Looking at Reddit's now application programming interface pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents.

That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket).

With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit.

Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.

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

#580

Post by ryanmerket »

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…

Basic math? Let's do the math...

Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses?

Looking at Reddit's now API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.

Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents.

That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket).

With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit.

The Relay for Reddit dev breaks it down here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd...

Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.

More: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/com...

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