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Apollo Back end just made public

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Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#161

Post by veidr »

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.

Yep, and after reading this thread (and clicking through to the reddit thread) I couldn't justify not delivering 1 little papercut of my own; I just canceled my paid account.

(Although at little personal cost, since I don't normally go to reddit directly, but I paid just to stop the inline ads that I would see when I would, as often happens, end up on reddit after googling something with kagi.com or bing.com.)

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#162

Post by _thisdot »

acatton wrote: post #100
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.

Reddit's doom has been announced over and over again since they started raising the bar for what is an "acceptable" sub-reddit in 2011. The reality is that Reddit hasn't ceased growing since then. The same thing happened with YouTube. YouTube pushed its content to switch from filthyfrank to Jimmy Kimmel/Fallon. Advertisers are not interested in us, early-adopters, mostly young and middle-aged western males. They want…

I have friends who fit the target audience criteria you mention. These people absolutely do not care about the client and never find the need to step outside the default client. My partner has access to Apollo Ultra through iCloud Family, yet she finds the default reddit client good enough.

If these people exist and they’re the majority, why kill 3rd party apps to mess with a minority?

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#163

Post by paulcole »

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.

The founder of Apollo literally said in his shutdown announcement that he has 0 interest in what you’re describing.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#164

Post by soraminazuki »

ziftface wrote: post #143
soraminazuki wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything Reddit could do at this point to not let it be a PR disaster. That includes changing their stance. What they're doing is so egregious, naming and shaming and lying about people who brought immense value to the community for years. All out of misguided greed.

I was talking with a friend about this the other day and he brought up a good point. If you were about to IPO as a company, this is not a bad decision from a business standpoint (cut costs, bring as many users as possible under your control). Obviously the way they executed the decision could be harmful to them, but based on the pressures they're under, I can't see how you could blame them too much. Which is why the…

Rich and influential entities should be subject to more accountability, not leniency. I agree that for-profit entities with motives are good reason to be wary of them, but it's no reason to let them evade responsibility for their actions.

Also, no company's success should ever depend on alienating its users and slandering longtime contributors.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#165

Post by veidr »

wkat4242 wrote: post #9
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 wonder.. The very same thing hardly seems to have hurt Twitter.

Umm,? Their ad revenue is down north of 50% since the 'garch took over. How are you defining 'hurt'?

UPDATE: Oh I see, they did the kill-the-API-to-kill-third-party-clients thing before too, long before the current brouhaha. OK, never mind.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#166

Post by Kiro »

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.

How do you know? I would definitely not come back after getting screwed like this.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#167

Post by paulcole »

r0bbbo wrote: post #154

I've seen an increasing amount of support for 'nuking' your personal reddit history—posts and comments—in protest of the upcoming changes, taking back what Reddit are profiting from. I'm hugely in favour of it, anyone else considering it?

No. I could lie and say my time is more valuable than editing my reddit post/comment history, but it’s not. I just don’t care enough to try to “stick it” to Reddit.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#168

Post by Kiro »

londons_explore wrote: post #89
pjc50 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Apollo have any ad share?

It has a reasonable chunk of the most active users. Sure, it doesn't have ads in today, but it could , so there is opportunity cost.

What's a reasonable chunk? I had never heard of Apollo before this and I visit reddit every day.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#169

Post by 542458 »

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…

That's by far the best Reddit alternative I've seen. Still, I feel that "no images just text" and "invite only" (although I 100% respect the rationale for both) make this a non-starter for any sort of mass-migration.

Re: Apollo Back end just made public

#170

Post by lolinder »

hgsgm wrote: post #149
lolinder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that company cares what the Reddit community thinks and is convinced that they have an ace in the hole. An ace like, say, having full control over the platform and being able to make the AMA look like it goes however they want it to.

Reddit community is far to suspicious of Reddit corporate to fall for that.

Depends on which part of the community you're talking about. Many of the top-voted comments on some of the "sub blacking out" threads were to the effect of "TIL that there are third party apps." [0]

That part of the community is the part that Reddit probably wants to preserve, and that part could very easily see an AMA that appears to clear everything up and then get mad when their sub moderators go ahead with the blackout anyway.

[0] For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/142p1ax/comment/jn6...

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