Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apollo will close down on June 30th

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 1001 posts

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#241

Post by benatkin »

robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I 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…

> Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?

He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#242

Post by MuffinFlavored »

> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality.

So far so good. Speaking facts, no opinion, no bias.

> The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year.

No bulk discount?

I guess it's in Reddit's best interest to have people on the official Reddit app in the first place.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#243

Post by TechBro8615 »

wolpoli wrote: post #29

> 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.

Not only do the receipts contradict the Reddit CEO, but even if they didn't, the Apollo dev is well within his rights to offer an ultimatum that either Reddit acquires his app, or he shuts it down. If he has enough leverage in that situation for Reddit to feel as if that's "blackmail," then it actually means that Reddit is the one blackmailing him with the pricing changes.

On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it "blackmail" - meaning they're losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can't they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo's costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#244

Post by jkubicek »

_yb2s wrote: post #215

Do you guys really expect a for profit company to offer free API access to 3rd parties, that offer a better experience with no ads, bypassing their revenue stream, and making their own site and apps look terrible in comparison? I've always been shocked Reddit allowed this at all. No other major player that owns a platform- FB, instagram, Google, etc. offers this either. I don't like it either but it makes perfect sen…

> Do you guys really expect a for profit company to offer free API access to 3rd parties, that offer a better experience with no ads, bypassing their revenue stream, and making their own site and apps look terrible in comparison?

I certainly don't expect this, and if you read the linked article, Christian didn't either. His primary issue was that he was only given 30 days to find a solution, which wasn't a reasonable timeline. His secondary issue was the pricing of the API access. Having a paid API in the first place didn't make his list of concerns.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#246

Post by moomoo11 »

Invictus0 wrote: post #127
falcolas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion. It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.

Patagonia didn't take VC money, and reddit wouldn't have even survived this long if they hadn't

How true is that honestly?

The more I talk to people the more I feel like people just like to party/waste money more than work.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#247

Post by Firmwarrior »

robbiet480 wrote: post #54
koolba wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this? If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?

Good point, I totally forgot that he was caught editing posts directly in the production DB https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

I hate Reddit, Reddit Admins, Reddit Mods, etc more than most people. Especially how they love to gaslight you and subtly screw you over/sabotage you, as we saw with their attacks on the_donald.

BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#248

Post by apozem »

duckfruit wrote: post #39

This makes me indescribably sad. Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These…

My feelings exactly. We're all stuck with the official Reddit and Twitter clients now. They're not even good. We know they're not good, but they're now the only place to experience Reddit and Twitter. It's like enterprise software for a whole social network.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#249

Post by distances »

ghostpepper wrote: post #89
sebastialonso wrote: post #69

I see two pretty distinct issues here: 1) most people's favourite app is going to die, and 2) many subreddits will be negatively affected by this move: prime example is /r/AskHistorians. Personally, 1) is not really an issue and people are enjoying the outrage train, and that's ok and valid and whatever, but it's a third party app. It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make mo…

What is causing #2? Do the mods use Apollo exclusively or something?

Here's the take by the mentioned AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askh...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#250

Post by dend »

willidiots wrote: post #96

I hope Apollo's not overplaying their hand here, though it's super interesting hearing these conversations from the inside. It's clear reddit's got it out for the 3p apps, and I'm personally leaving reddit over this (longtime RIF user), but this post is a bit concerning. It focuses on the "[apollo can] quiet down [for $10M]" topic in the conversation, and the apparent misunderstanding between Apollo and Reddit, Reddi…

There's no hand to overplay here anymore - the app is shutting down, and the author made it clear that is the intention. While the verbiage could've been different, that doesn't really matter. In these kinds of conversations Reddit folks could've asked for clarification, not assume bad intent (which they did, but then misrepresented).

Apollo's leverage was "We help keep power users on your platform, and keep them happy." And, as it turns out, while their numbers are not necessarily large, they are also some of the loudest and with most influence (see how many subreddits joined the blackout). What the outcome of this will be is to be seen, but it's a very shortsighted take from Reddit, in my own humble opinion.

Post reply on HN