Apollo will close down on June 30th • Hacker News Board

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#261

Post by Alupis » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

garbagecoder wrote: post #238

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…

It would be a cheap shot for me to just say "you didn't read the post, did you?" but he does explain it. Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say. The relationship is broken.

Sometimes, in the real world, and especially with business - you must swallow your pride to survive another day.

Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.

HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.

That's entirely on Apollo...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#262

Post by shmde » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

I use Sync Pro on Android to browse reddit. That's going out next I guess. Just waiting for old.reddit.com to die so I can finally leave reddit all together.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#263

Post by TechBro8615 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

apozem wrote: post #248

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.

I wish the Twitter client were half as good as Apollo. I really miss the ability to navigate the stack by swiping as intuitively as I can with Apollo. In Twitter the best I can hope for is a stack of depth two.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#264

Post by thih9 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

soneil wrote: post #68

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.

They also made the same claim in r/partnercommunities too, not just internally. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

> We will exempt any mod tool or bot affected by the API change.

What's the definition of a mod tool?

If a mod uses Apollo to keep up with the posts on their subreddit, is Apollo going to be exempt?

Or should Apollo pivot, add more moderation features and rebrand itself as a mod tool?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#265

Post by geuis » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:38 PM UTC

d1str0 wrote: post #104

Scarblac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never heard of it before this. Could he just make a backend for it and take his users with him?

Might be a pretty big legal argument if he just copied Reddit backend functionality. Would probably have to redesign the front end from the ground up as well to make it clear it’s not just a rip off.

I don't remember the specific case at the moment, but a few years back I think Oracle was suing Google (or some mix of big companies) about Google replicating the Java api but with a complete from-scratch backend reimplementation. Google wasn't using private Oracle source code, just building a replacement that used the publicly published api. Google won the case, and it I remember right that established public api's as non copyright or something. Again, not a lawyer and someone else probably has the details better than I do.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#266

Post by rdlw » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:38 PM UTC

dtech wrote: post #72

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.

To be honest it sounded like that to me too. It's very hard to differentiate between some honest clumsy phrasing and fishing for a payout, and the "clarification" doesn't help with that since it could also be an excuse to save face.

I don't understand, what is the threat on Christian's part? His project is being killed, that's not a threat but something that is actually happening. He suggests that they pay him a small fraction of what he has cost them to shut down without compromising the reddit API as a whole. What's the threat, that he keeps operating? That's not an option, they are FORCING him to shut down.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#267

Post by honksillet » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:38 PM UTC

Reddit’s censorship of r/the_donald was a huge moment in the splintering of political discourse into disconnected silos. It used to be you could go to the front page of Reddit and see what each side of American politics was pushing that day. People on both the left and right would be confronted with news that otherwise they might not see in their personal echo chambers. That all died when spez and co first “quarantined” (ironic jargon choice) then ultimately killed T_D. Truly a sad chain of events. PS. T_D still lives at patriots.win fwiw.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#268

Post by rpmw » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

_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…

Frankly I'm surprised they didn't nip this in the bud years ago. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#269

Post by WestCoastJustin » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #254

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 situati…

Yeah, Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour.

This should have gone like, "Hey, in a few months we're rolling this out and wanted to give you a heads up so you know before anyone else, since you're a major API user. We wanted to offer you a grace period and special pricing. When's a good time to chat we'll fly out.". Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.

This is all just my opinion based on what I've read so far.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#270

Post by iLoveOncall » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #74

I'm not a user of Apollo, and honestly have been perfectly fine using old.reddit.com on both mobile and desktop. That said, while I realize it's just his side of the story, the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational (and he apparently has the receipts to back it up), while Reddit comes across as embodying typical corporate greed. On a related note, I think everyone should understand that,…

I'm sorry but how exactly is it being evil to shut down 3rd party clients that use your content and your bandwidth to make (huge amounts of) money off of you?

Reddit owes absolutely nothing to those developers. This guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions, meaning he made millions, if not tens of millions, off of exploiting the API while not displaying Reddit's ads.

Poor Apollo developer, he's going to have to wipe his tears with Benjamins and blow his nose with his silk disposable tissue.