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Apollo Back end just made public

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Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#131

Post by napsterbr »

LeSaucy wrote: post #93
andremedeiros wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an amazing way to look at it. Thank you for your perspective <3

Any developer should be proud of the value that code/backend provided millions of users.

Amen to that.

When I first started coding (some 15 years ago) I wrote the ugliest, buggiest and "owasp-ridden-est" PHP spaghetti code. Turns out that code went viral and was used by millions of users for a few years.

Yet, I came to the conclusion that that's the best code I've ever written, for it's been the most used code I released so far.

Real software development is far different than the ideal one.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#132

Post by vernon99 »

gtsteve wrote: post #18
spiderfarmer wrote: post #2

All this backlash is going to kill Reddit. It will take a thousand little cuts for sure, but it started the moment they announced their ludicrous pricing.

I don't think it will. It'll IPO just fine, make their shareholders wealthy and become another millquetoast advertiser friendly walled garden for your average internet user while the jilted original users go and find another platform, which will in turn IPO just fine, make their shareholders wealthy and the cycle repeats forever. The average internet user by the way, is statistically not you reading this, doesn't rea…

> All platforms go through this cycle, but Reddit felt special to me and it hurts to find that wasn't true.

This is not always true and there’s an important correction to this: all VC-funded platforms go through this, especially monetized by ads.

There are examples of privately owned platforms with subscriptions that are doing great and show no sign of quality decline. Telegram most notably being one of those.

This chase for constant high returns and also the focus on an audience very ortogonal to your actual users (ads buyers) are what seriously misaligns the incentives of users and platform owners.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#133

Post by alickz »

andremedeiros wrote: post #4

Hi all! I wrote this code, and for educational purposes, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions. A gentle reminder that the whole history is here for show. This is very vulnerable — you can see the times I was in a rush, or when I took my time. You’ll find my mistakes. Either way, all I ask is please be kind. I know there are 50 things I could have done better, but this is a product of the reality at the time…

Your code was production ready for millions of users, that's all that matters

Do you think Christian would be willing to open source the app (under a non-commercial license) and allow us to build it with our own Reddit API keys?

That way we could still use Apollo, but pay for it ourselves

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#134

Post by ziftface »

madeofpalk wrote: post #128
trollied wrote: post #8

There's a Reddit CEO AMA later today: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce... Can't see it being anything other than a PR disaster for them, unless they change their stance.

The AMA is confusing - I don't understand what questions they expect to recieve, and how they'll answer them to anyone's satisfaction.

I think the original intention was to get ahead of the story but I think the apollo dev's announcement that he's shutting down the app is going to make that difficult at this point.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#135

Post by eterm »

aeyes wrote: post #129
eterm wrote: post #21

Politically reddit have played a blinder. They've succeeded in killing their main competitor (in terms of ad share) and could even now walk back the api charges for any smaller operators and leave Apollo dead and avoid the biggest backlash. It's scummy as hell and I won't want to continue to contributing to reddit, but I can't help but feel they've been shrewd in getting what they wanted.

Why would that leave Apollo dead? If they set the API charges back to zero all third party clients, including Apollo, would be happy to continue.

I said they could walk back the charges for smaller operators, e.g. by having generous API limits that most third parties wouldn't hit.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#136

Post by AndrewKemendo »

542458 wrote: post #52
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #12

What if all the blackout communities move to an open source, community funded, community owned and run version of Apollo? I’d be happy to try and convince my 100k community to Apollo and if the UX is similar for web and mobile then I’m not sure switching costs would be that high during the blackout. I’d help fund it but all my money is wrapped up in my trash cooperative.

I haven’t seen a compelling OS alternative to Reddit yet. The ones I’ve seen have all either been big on decentralization at the expense of long load times and a lot of UI complexity, or big on 4chan-style dialogue with little moderation. Neither of those sounds like a great migration path. IMO this is the same problem “migrate off Twitter” efforts had.

I don't disagree, but Twitter never had a site wide Billion user blackout

If we blackout long enough and then figure out how to cooperate to create an actual community alternative in the blackout period, it could work

Not easy and will take real leader with 80 hour a week work ethic for a year, and probably a few million dollars to start.

However it would be an amazing groundbreaking feat

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#137

Post by mrweasel »

andremedeiros wrote: post #4

Hi all! I wrote this code, and for educational purposes, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions. A gentle reminder that the whole history is here for show. This is very vulnerable — you can see the times I was in a rush, or when I took my time. You’ll find my mistakes. Either way, all I ask is please be kind. I know there are 50 things I could have done better, but this is a product of the reality at the time…

Making the code available is a wonderful thing to do. I love being able to see how others managed and structured a Go project that was actually meant to run in production.

Thank you.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#138

Post by AndrewKemendo »

tester457 wrote: post #97
542458 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t seen a compelling OS alternative to Reddit yet. The ones I’ve seen have all either been big on decentralization at the expense of long load times and a lot of UI complexity, or big on 4chan-style dialogue with little moderation. Neither of those sounds like a great migration path. IMO this is the same problem “migrate off Twitter” efforts had.

Have you seen Tildes? - incredible moderation and respectful community - you can't sort by controversial - non-profit, no investors can corrupt it - beautifully simple UI, better than old.reddit on mobile - fast and not decentralized - no images just text - open source - The site is the main mobile interface, not an app - No limits to logged-out browsing - Completely functional for browsing without javascript - Zero…

This looks interesting for sure thanks for the link

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#139

Post by hu3 »

andremedeiros wrote: post #4

Hi all! I wrote this code, and for educational purposes, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions. A gentle reminder that the whole history is here for show. This is very vulnerable — you can see the times I was in a rush, or when I took my time. You’ll find my mistakes. Either way, all I ask is please be kind. I know there are 50 things I could have done better, but this is a product of the reality at the time…

Your commit messages [1] are better than of many projects and seniors I have worked with. Nothing to be ashamed. You made something that "just worked" and delivered value. You should be proud!

Sample of latest commit messages:

batch size wants to be smaller for less locking time, not higher

increase scheduler batch size

bump locks again

make pool sizes customized

increase prefetch

[skip render] remove old redis from infra

increase poolsize a bit

bring new redis up to line in blueprints

reduce pool size

bump pg client count

tweak pool sizes and consumer count

double the amount of consumers

small tweaks

[ci skip] update pgbouncer github url

clean allow lists

add new redis instances

make connections to the correct redis url envs

add new env variables

spam prevention

update reddit http client

feat(ops): add distributed tracing (#109)

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#140

Post by Semaphor »

qball wrote: post #51
wkat4242 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder.. The very same thing hardly seems to have hurt Twitter.

Maybe so, but Reddit is not Twitter; API access is far more important for Reddit because its official client is garbage and can't handle the long-form content that Reddit is known for. This will have outsized implications for the 1% of users who actually post the content the other 99% come to see in a way that Twitter (and its 280-character comment limitation) does not.

> can't handle the long-form content that Reddit is known for.

Isn’t Reddit widely known for memes by the public?

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