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Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#121

Post by slg »

extr wrote: post #42

I remember signing up for Reddit as a college freshman. I was a digg user and joined Reddit in the aftermath of that fiasco. I sometimes laugh looking over my post history for the past decade plus. If you read the posts linearly, you can trace my evolution from a kid arguing passionately over politics and culture (things he didn't really know much about), to a more mature young adult who rarely waded into discussions…

Well said. Although one aspect that makes this both sadder and stranger is that we all watched Twitter do the same thing just a few months ago with awful results. Sure, the sites will still live for a long time, but the versions that existed as of last year are forever gone.

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#122

Post by lucb1e »

codeslave13 wrote: post #118
lucb1e wrote: post #90

Oh that's dumb. I forgot to check my inbox before midnight. I had offered Tildes invites and don't have the password to that account (but have been logged in since years, can access the auth token, etc., but reddit doesn't want you to recover from this scenario, so that's gone forever). Well... anyone here needs a Tildes invite?

Would love a tildes invite

No contact info on your profile, not sure how you want me to send an invite without someone else snatching it...

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#123

Post by genocidicbunny »

ryandrake wrote: post #74
dom96 wrote: post #50

I am still somewhat shocked that they went through with this. I built a Reddit API[1] alternative as a form of protest, they responded by blocking my personal Reddit account. Very sad what Reddit has become. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com

Like a lot of news today, it’s simultaneously shocking and not surprising. It’s tough to keep a positive attitude. Every week it seem like things that, against the odds turned out to be good, are being deliberately torn down so that a few rich people can get slightly richer. Greed is killing everything nice, and nobody has both the power and willingness to stop it.

More and more I find myself on the side that greed and those who egregiously practice it, need to be excised from humanity with extreme prejudice. Greed should be a short-lived terminal illness.

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#124

Post by shagie »

predictabl3 wrote: post #119
shagie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would have required negotiating image hosting, having a significant amount of server power and storage space, dealing with laws about who can see what, and active moderation until volunteers can be found to moderate the content. Having someone to deal with DMCA requests and age verification laws. If it wasn't a subscription service (that had to front load a lot of its costs), it also involves getting advertisers…

So, are we just pretending like reddit has any of that when it started out?

It was a single page link farm with votes that competed with Digg in a much simpler regulatory time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124035428/http://reddit.com... (edit: upon reflection, I am nostalgic for the time when that the top link there was to "The Truth About Web 2.0" at paulgraham.com shared by a user named AaronSw)

If you were to try to build something today that competed with Reddit and wasn't just a "here's a bunch of links - vote on what you like (without even comments)", it would take quite a bit more investment.

If you were to build reddit c. 2005 you wouldn't even need a device local app.

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#125

Post by CJefferson »

shagie wrote: post #82
MBCook wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t blame Christian. Spez, on a whim, decided to basically destroy his livelihood, with basically no notice. Then Spez kept doubling down and accused Christian of extortion, repeating the accusations after it was proven they were false. I would sell the app even if they reversed course. I wouldn’t trust they wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t trust they’d ruin me some other way. If they had said “we’re doing this i…

I'm not sure how much of a whim Reddit had. A Virginia law was signed into effect on May 12th that required commercial entities that distributed "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users or be exposed to civil penalties. That law goes into effect in 3 hours.

How is that solved by charging for the API?

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#126

Post by auxym »

lousken wrote: post #11

So where is everybody going after reddit?

Trying kbin and lemmy. Both are compatible with each other through activitypub federation (aka fediverse), so choose an instance of either and browse away.

It's still very quiet compared to what reddit was. Not yet enough users to support the niche communities which made reddit special (IMO), but I'm trying to contribute anyways, hopefully building it up a bit.

Losing reddit is sad, the feeling to me is a bit similar to when we lost supernova, then what.cd. An internet jewel that will never be the same again.

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#127

Post by covercash »

datenyan wrote: post #96
adrr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. Apollo was less than 1% of users. It would be interesting to a see a survey to see what population of Reddit was affected by these changes or cared.

I think the bigger issue is that Apollo (and other apps such as RIF) were amazing tools for moderators, with the official app lacking a lot of features the unofficial clients had.

I recently described it to a friend as trying to get from point A to point B in ankle deep water when using 3rd party apps compared to waist deep water in the official app - sure, you can do it but it’s going to take significantly more time and effort.

So if you’re constantly popping in and checking things throughout the day, that extra time and effort really adds up. By killing these user friendly apps that a large portion of power users and mods preferred, it’s Reddit showing all of these dedicated unpaid contributors that their time and effort don’t matter to the company. Steve spit directly in all of our faces repeatedly over the past month and now most of us are actively rooting against the success of an IPO. I hope he continues to be the 3rd most successful Reddit cofounder, and his name never gets mentioned in a positive light within YC/HN.

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#128

Post by zmmmmm »

If you care about this stuff, please at least give the fediverse a try. Yes it's inadequate right now in all kinds of ways. But the main reason is that not enough people are there. It needs critical mass.

Pick whatever you want - kbin, lemmy, mastodon. Go there, find your community (it will probably look very sad compared to Reddit). And contribute something positive - comment, post, whatever. If everybody just did that, we would kickstart something durable that couldn't be destroyed and take back the internet that everybody is pining for.

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#129

Post by Shawnj2 »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #78

There will be a spiritual successor though, for kbin/Lemmy, called Artemis: https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp Right now it's in a closed beta, and the size of the closed beta is increasing slowly through the end of the month. The goal is for it to be public around the start of August. That kbin magazine has a link to a signup sheet for the closed beta. (disclosure? I was an alpha tester for it, and so far it looks AMA…

Memmy is also similar to Apollo

Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo

#130

Post by perfectstorm »

ortusdux wrote: post #3

Sync is also dead. They just sent out a push notification: "Sync for reddit had shutdown. Thank you for using Sync. It's been one hell of a ride."

sigh. Android Sync was one of the best reddit apps i have used. it had tons of customization, never crashed, snappy, had multi-window support etc. Apollo on iOS was a distant second.
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