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

271–280 of 1001 posts

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#271

Post by chillbill »

Not only does Steve Huffman need to step down and quit this whole business, the entire team of senior management at Reddit needs to just get away as far as they can from managing anything larger than a lemon stand. Impossibly stupid way of running things.

Edit: Jesus Christ, that guy on the other end of the phone has just completely destroyed himself in the world of business by lying about the conversation he had with the Apollo developer: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#272

Post by joemi »

VHRanger wrote: post #204
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,…

you must be aware that old.reddit.com is on the chopping block in the next few months/years, right?

Is that official, or just an assumption?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#273

Post by robotnikman »

duxup wrote: post #117
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…

> I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. What is the employee culture like it Reddit? I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite. Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions…

Considering some of the bad hiring decisions they have made in the past, I'm guessing not that great.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#274

Post by obblekk »

It's totally unreasonable to expect you to make changes in 30 days. Consider app review time, that might not even be possible.

After you shutdown, can you turn Apollo into a site-specific browser? Like request reddit html, write a custom transformer to make it less bad, render with a safari webview, and push nav changes as views on the stack?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#275

Post by xmprt »

com2kid wrote: post #125
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…

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...

Because I'm not so sure that it's true. Reddit isn't massively profitable but it also doesn't have to lose a ton of money. IIRC they were able to run a much tighter ship and operate off of just Reddit Gold and ads for at least a decade before they started this recent hypergrowth phase

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#276

Post by TechBro8615 »

waif wrote: post #220
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…

If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.

The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?

What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#277

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

Right now, I would only pay for a subscription if there was a way for reddit to get none of the money.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#280

Post by s1artibartfast »

zamalek wrote: post #133
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…

The angle was " buy Apollo from me": > "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal! And it would have…

>And it would have been a deal: 6 months of opportunity cost upfront to then turn into real profit. Instead they are permanently lose the [possibly] majority of that opportunity when those users lose access to Reddit.

I dont think that is accurate. Reddit doesnt make 20M a year if they buy Apollo in this situation.

If something costs 20 million/yr to operate, buying it doesnt reduce that cost. You are just out 10M upfront and then 20M/yr.

The solution is not to buy it, but to make it stop.

Post reply on HN