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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#251

Post by Alupis »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #222
Alupis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks - if you want Apollo to survive, go make it known you are willing to pay $5 a month for access. I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons , but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company. It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - h…

Did you read the thread? It includes a section about increasing the cost and how it wouldn't really do much. > Why not just increase the price of Apollo? > One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating cos…

Apollo made business decisions, that turned out to be very short sighted. Apollo sold access to someone else's system, for next to nothing, and now is caught having to pay for that access like any reasonable business would expect.

We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.

Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.

This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.

The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#252

Post by adiabatty »

wunderland wrote: post #5

Funny that this was just demo'd in Apple's Keynote this week

A lot. I've watched both the keynote and also the Platforms State of the Union and not only did I hear it by name in the keynote, I've seen its icon in the background in both the keynote and the PSotU.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#253

Post by [deleted] »

Alupis wrote: post #172
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…

Folks - if you want Apollo to survive, go make it known you are willing to pay $5 a month for access. I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons , but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company. It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - h…

[deleted]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#254

Post by bogwog »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #182

In 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…

Yeah this guy didn't handle this situation very well. I don't know if it would've been possible to save Apollo for reddit, but that call didn't help at all.

Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situation is probably incredibly stressful, but when you have 50k+ subscribers per year + millions of happy loyal users, you gotta start bringing in outside people to help with these things. He's just letting a lot of people down.

I don't mean to trash the guy, but I hope that the other third-party apps see this example and change their response to find a better outcome for their users.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#255

Post by masklinn »

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?

Not Apollo (though some might) but tons of moderation extensions and tooling which goes through the api.

https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhisto... covers the moderation side.

https://reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_recently... Talks about accessibility.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#256

Post by sillysaurusx »

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.

I know I'm stretching really far with this, but is it at all possible that the mods made that up, or somehow misheard Steve?

Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...

Basically, the whole post hinges on the claim that spez was telling internal employees that Christian was making threats. But neither the calls nor the transcript seems to give any details about what exactly spez said. I'm inclined to take Christian's word, but we should all be aware that we are in fact taking him at his word, rather than the claim being proven.

It seems really hard to believe that spez would apologize for misunderstanding him and then immediately tell employees that he was threatening Reddit. This feels like a misunderstanding rather than malicious intent.

> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:

> 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."

This doesn't sound like a transcript. I don't know what it is, but that's not how anyone in a work call would behave. Supposing Apollo did threaten Reddit, why would spez even mention that to the mods? Something's weird.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#257

Post by jffry »

brycewray wrote: post #165

He put his email address at the end. As I told him in what I’m sure will be jillions of emails about the subject: > Have just read your amazing, sad, comprehensive Reddit post about the end of Apollo. > I was one of those long-ago paid-once users :-) and happily used Apollo for years. When I found out a few days ago what was happening to you, I actually deleted Apollo from my devices so I wouldn’t inadvertently cost…

For anybody who would like to mass delete their own comments and submissions: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#259

Post by bscphil »

jsheard wrote: post #157
com2kid wrote: post #125

Earlier 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.

Aren't they effectively just offloading this whole question onto the apps? For the sake of argument, let's say what they are charging for the API is about 80% per-user of what they make for users who use the official app (and therefore see ads). I have no idea what the actual numbers are, this is just theoretical.

In that case, app developers have several options:

* start showing users ads, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit

* start charging a monthly fee for the app, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit

* some combination of these two (e.g. pay a subscription for ad-free use)

Sure, Reddit could make this easier for app developers, but isn't it all basically the same thing at the end of the day? Reddit wants (or needs? I have no idea what their financials look like) to make a certain amount of money per-user or per page view. Apps take home ~100% of their profits currently, and make Reddit ~nothing. So Reddit is pricing in a profit rate into API access.

I mean, just to look at Apollo, they have 166K ratings on the Apple App Store, and surely far more users than that. Reddit wants $20M a year from them. That's high, maybe too high, but how does it compare to the value of (say) a million users a year on the official Reddit app? If Apollo switched to a subscription model on which they charged $1 a month to users, would they be able to pay Reddit's API fees? (Assuming those API fees would drop by at least 50% after non-paying users quit using Apollo.)

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#260

Post by notsound »

oldtownroad wrote: post #26
rvz wrote: post #7

A lesson to be learned. Do not build your entire business on someone else's API. The outcome was unsurprising and it is unfortunate. But this is why third-party apps are always at a disadvantage. The same happened with Twitter and they made that clear and now so did Reddit. Like I said before in [0] "Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it." [0] https://news.ycombinato…

The tired “don’t build on someone else’s api” lesson doesn’t apply to this case because Apollo is specifically a method for accessing Reddit: Apollo wouldn’t exist without Reddit. The outcome here is sad, yes, but the author built a wildly successful app and made great money for close to a decade: a disappointing end does not discredit the journey. (Ps. your obsession with citing yourself is one of the worst parts of…

They also cite themselves within that citation. That second citation contains a citation also written by them. Citationception!
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