I’m curious. Do you guys use some app to access hackernews? I still use the browser like a caveman.
Hack is great.
Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
211–220 of 390 posts
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#212Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we’re having a wake… I remember when I accidentally became a moderator of /r/science because they asked for variety of domain expertise and I’m a geographer and c’mon… nobody’s a geographer. It was a fun experience. Then became an educational one. Then frustrating. Then thankless. Then I stopped. I’m happy for the lessons. I’m sad it died years ago.
I had totally forgotten that you had a flair showing your expertise. I did some computer vision stuff for a while. You wouldn’t recognize r/science of the early days though. Reddit is a completely different site.
r/science is now r/poorStudiesThatJustifyMyBeliefs
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn’t even have to reverse course for this to work out. Just give a reasonable runway before beginning to charge for the API (to give third party clients enough time to adjust their subscription customers who may have just paid for a year), and charge a reasonable price. Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable. I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want…
Why are the apps being charged for api access and not the people using them?
Reddit never intended for anyone to pay for API access, that's why the costs were so high. The intent all along was to kill all third party apps through unreasonable pricing of API access so they could funnel users to the official app and inundate them with extremely intrusive ads.
If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).
This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.
They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#215Sad day indeed. Swiping to refresh and just seeing blank views everywhere was such an abrupt and matter of fact ending.
I’m wondering a few things:
1. Will the app ever be made open source
2. Could an endeavor be undertaken to give everyone their own ability to auth to the api themselves? Then instead of relying on the Apollo oauth keys you plug your own in and/or run your own self-hosted auth infra. These days it’s so easy to spin up an app on Fly or similar. Could see small communities a-La mastodon where one person operates an auth/api server for themselves and a few others (distribute the api load to many tiny api instances) versus the Apollo situation where one dev is footing the bill for every user.
Hate to see what is hands down the best iOS app of all time just poof disappear.
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#216Yeah you’re drunk. Apollo was a cash grab and selig admitted as such. That being said no one can give any points to Reddit for how they handled things either.
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#217I’m curious. Do you guys use some app to access hackernews? I still use the browser like a caveman.
I'm enjoying Octal on iOS.
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#218I'm curious what happens to reddit now. I'm guessing just auto pilot of low effort content. Don't think it'll truly die as far as numbers go.
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.
It may have only been 1% of users, but what percent of active contributing users was it? What percent of active mods?
The people who paid for a third-party app to make using and working with Reddit easier and more convenient are the power users.
I don't know if you're a regular Reddit user, but if you are have you looked through /r/popular in the past? Recently? What's bubbling to the 'top' of Reddit right now is significantly lower quality content than what used to be there. A lot of that is likely due to so many mods effectively going on strike, but do you think that's going to improve when Reddit's employees remove all those mods, reopen subs and appoint whoever wants to request moderator status as the new mods? Hint: it's not going to be all sunshine and flowers.
I like what one of the mods of IIRC /r/canning posted within the last week or so when Reddit started getting serious with threatening messages - he noted that the mods of that subreddit are there because they have specific subject matter knowledge and canning things wrong kills people. If that subreddit is forced open with mods appointed by Reddit employees and dangerous advice becomes a regular thing, does Reddit have any liability? Can an attorney make enough of a case that they do to drag them into court?
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#219Centralization of internet forums was always going to end like this. I hope this accelerates the decline of Reddit dot com. The moderation and the censorship is pretty much universal across the large boards. You will find tons of deleted comments on anything which challenges the common view remotely. Can't say I'm not glad the site is going down, or enough alternatives pop up.
Re: Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can trace my earliest account to middle school. You can imagine the cringe on there...
If every Reddit user was tagged with their age, it would be an eye-opening experience. "Why is this 16-year-old talking about divorce lawyers on r/relationship_advice?"
A 16 year old with recently divorced parents probably has some reasonable insight there.