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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

#141

Post by mynameisvlad »

gs17 wrote: post #96
ajmurmann wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder why even bother in that case to introduce phony pricing.

IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side. The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.

They probably also didn't anticipate quite this extreme of a blowback.

The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.

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

#142

Post by sodality2 »

nlarew wrote: post #66
googlryas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does there need to be a paid API, when reddit provides all of the content over a free HTTP API to user agents already? Are these apps more than just a custom user agent?

There are two Reddit APIs - the public REST API and a private GraphQL API which limits access. Third-party apps use the REST API and the Reddit website/app use GQL. For a hobby project you could maybe get away with scraping a GQL bearer token and issuing requests as if you were an official Reddit client. Or you could even request the HTML and scrape that. At the scale of these third party apps that approach just woul…

And let me just say, reverse engineering the GQL API is a massive pain. From my tests they verify a ton of things or else you get rate limited or "trusted less" - order of headers, formatting of JSON being posted, someone even said they check the TLS handshake signatures. GQL specifically has become a massive burden for me working on Libreddit, and I probably am going to give up on GraphQL and just have instances provide their own API token. The good news is there might be ways to auto-retrieve these tokens. We'll have to see in 17 days.

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

#143

Post by petersellers »

George83728 wrote: post #78
redmerchant2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the fi…

Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...

Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)

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

#144

Post by micv »

zerotheliger wrote: post #14
amichail wrote: post #11

What would a highly profitable Reddit look like? Why would it be bad for redditors?

user experience has always suffered on social media sites that go public and answer to profits they stop caring about the community. and only try selling us shit or sell the content we create. without us reddit wouldnt exist and they need a reminder of that.

The user experience of reddit is already poor unless you hide on old.reddit.com. I have no idea how anyone could sign off an interface like the new one, which is just appallingly slow even on relatively high-end hardware.

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

#145

Post by redkinght99 »

Redditors I've seen: 1. They don't know what's going on with their favorite subreddit being taken offline. 2. They agree with the protest but couldn't care less if some person doesn't get free / cheap API. 3. They are actively angry that a Reddit neckbeard took their business, show, hobby page offline, unilaterally.

I could see this backfiring and spez preventing subreddits with a certain following from going private in the future.

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

#146

Post by phire »

ericbarrett wrote: post #114
judge2020 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of Christian's posts, reddit agreed that the price was for the opportunity cost of serving that user without ads - since they're not going to get any ad money from these users (and are unwilling to serve ads to these 3p clients since they probably can't guarantee to advertisers the 3p app isn't doing anything shady like hiding the ad while logging an impression).

Something I've been wondering—why couldn't the API just send a batch of ads to be served with the content? Since the apps need an authorized API key, if they don't cooperate in showing the ads then Reddit could simply threaten revocation. Then users who want "premium" could pay for whatever feature Reddit-side to allow an ad-free experience, or they could even partner with the third party apps to offer it for a cut o…

They probably did not negotiate in good faith. But....

I understand the API that the 3rd party apps interact with is powered by the legacy platform. The same platform that powers old reddit.

It doesn't seem like reddit are updating that platform anymore (I haven't noticed any major changes to old reddit in years), and I really don't think it has the ability to serve the same ads that the new reddit platform does. It would take a major refactor to either replicate the full API over to the new platform or otherwise feed ads back to it.

BTW, this also raises questions about how much longer reddit will keep old reddit running. It really looks like they are planning to retire the old platform all-together.

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

#147

Post by Marsymars »

paxys wrote: post #86
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is how much money they apps can make from having users, not Reddit.

The apps can make whatever they charge. $2.50 is now the base cost to add to every subscription. If the users value the service they will pay. Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut?

Even granting the rest of your argument, that math stops working for users who don’t use a particular app as their primary/only method to access reddit.

I use reddit 80% on the web, 10% on iOS and 10% on Android. I’m not going to pay reddit that full $2.50 (plus app store cut) for 10% of my usage twice. I’m just going to stop using reddit on mobile and stick to the web.

The “pay for reddit premium and get ad-free reddit plus unrestricted third-party app use” model makes more sense for users, for third party apps, and for reddit.

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

#148

Post by nikole9696 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #102
joecot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth…

Ding ding ding The real reddit app doesn’t even have an option to block a particular ad account so when they serve you evangelical right wing ads all day you just have to swallow it.

The inability to block ads I personally find offensive is the #1 reason I'll use a browser with ad block over a native app. Reddit and Tumblr are my two biggest offenders that do not let me properly block particular ads - notably gambling and religion, but also those scam mobile games and other scammy nonsense. I get that they need to pay the bills, but I should have some level of control over what I see.

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

#149

Post by mynameisvlad »

bottlepalm wrote: post #124
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…

It's funny when I design my own public apps, I'm careful about API usage. I can only imagine what an app is like that was designed with no API limits whatsoever. It's kind of amazing Reddit ever allowed this sort of no limits API usage - while at the same time Apollo charged their own users while enjoying zero infrastructure costs. What a steal.

There were limits, they were just reasonable and based per-user-per-app. One of the changes was drastically lowering them on the free tier and making it per-app only.

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

#150

Post by neura »

lacker wrote: post #65
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…

Why is this rate absurd? From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit? Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides di…

You're comparing video streaming services (one of them a live streaming service) that have far more cost per user, to something that has far more minimal costs. You're also comparing individual account cost per user that includes much more than just API access.

Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work?

Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.

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