Missed opportunity imho... they should have made apollo its own social network, maybe even a lemmy instance with rooms with identical names to some of the reddit ones.
Apollo will close down on June 30th
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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#182In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing with negotiations of this level. He clearly has an awesome product if you look at any of the HN/Reddit comments.
He probably could have walked away will at least a few million vs shutting it down if there was a small level of negotiation that took place here. I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call but strategic accounts normally get pretty seasoned sales folks assigned to them. They are used to having hard conversations around pricing and pissed off customers. That's all part of negotiation.
That call was brutal to listen too.
Or, is saying you're shutting down part of negotiation too? This likely took it too far if it was, in that you're making reddit look like the bad guy very publicly now. So, it's probably worth it for reddit to cut ties and force people into the reddit app.
No winners here:
* Apollo the company is gone.
* Apollo users are gone.
* Reddit has no customer paying money.
* Reddit cannot reference them.
* Reddit users are ticked off.
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#183Remember when FB made changes and switched to timeline views. Everyone was saying this is the death of Facebook. Then in the next earnings call, they showed average engagement and time spent more than doubled.
Everyone boycotting reddit is all talk and no hat. They will still be on reddit.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#184I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…
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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#185> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us." I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.
The author doesn't want to look at it this way, but this is a really weird thing to say. My interpretation was that they'd make an offer to sell the app to reddit, but the specific phrasing there really is not that.
edit: I still think it was the wrong way to approach the situation. Consider this from reddit's perspective, it would only make sense for Reddit to pay for the traffic if they think they would lose it if it Apollo went away, but then it's not opportunity cost.
It doesn't make the change any better of a look for reddit, and you can certainly question whether it's true that Apollo users would just use reddit, but if you accept that then I don't think you can claim the moral high ground if you offer to accept payment to "make it go away". The developer should have approached this from the perspective of the value that Apollo offers users and reddit instead of the cost to make the problem go away. I imagine the dev doesn't accept that Apollo users would just switch over, but they shouldn't have made their statement in those terms then, and I think that was a mistake.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most users won’t opt for a refund from Apollo. People are on his side.
I would not ask for refund. This app is a jewel on iOS, extremely well polished and gave me hours and hours and hours of enjoyment.
The smart move for the Apollo devs might be to create a back end of their own. There's no reason why their app needs to work only with Reddit, is there? Quite a few users would migrate to a new forum just to keep using the app.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit should try honestly. "We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps." I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...
Reddit had an easy way out for the issue of 3rd party apps not showing ads, they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients, so they could have made the API exclusive to users with a subscription. People would have been upset, but not this upset.
Honestly, I think they would have had a sizeable amount of people paying for the subscription.
Now, even if they backtrack on this later on in a few months or years, they burned the good will, so I doubt developers are going invest the time to make a good Reddit client after this.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#188I'm sad about this. I use apollo daily, I really don't like the reddit app one bit. I guess I can still use the old.reddit.com for the 3-4 subreddits I still follow.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#189Can’t Apollo be open-sourced and the tokens of the original app be used? I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.
You'd likely have to enter an API agreement with Reddit, and it's unlikely they'd be willing to run you through the sales funnel and write up a contract just sell you what's effectively a $3/mo API plan. That said, open sourcing the app would be great to archive it for posterity.
> sell you what's effectively a $3/mo API plan.
For a single user, the API is free. But every user would have to apply for a key, and there is no guarantee they’d get one.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#190Honestly, I'm surprised that spez kept his job after getting caught modifying user comments straight from the production db[0]. That's who these people are dealing with, to be clear. And now he's accusing Apollo of threatening Reddit? Give me a break. How is this the guy who's gonna lead Reddit to the promised land? 0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
> for about an hour
To be fair, this doesn't seem that bad, especially in comparison to the API price hike and their handling of it.