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Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

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Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#291

Post by wvenable »

milkytron wrote: post #283
wvenable wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to stay off Reddit in protest.

Likewise. But idk if I'll have much of a choice come June 30th when 3rd party apps get shut down. I don't really use a browser anymore to engage with reddit, and their official app has been complete garbage. I'm fine with not providing them with content or ad views anymore if they don't want to work with 3rd party developers.

I engage with old.reddit.com in my browser a lot on my desktop. But their mobile app is just not enjoyable to me so I just won't be using Reddit on mobile anymore.

Maybe I'll build myself a nice little HTML-scrapper app for Reddit instead.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#292

Post by ajmurmann »

Sunspark wrote: post #269
evandale wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion. > On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed. Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news…

This is why Reddit if they want to be a community needs to allow ELECTIONS. Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms. Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected. Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.

Are there actually enough people willing to do the mod job? I am only in one sub where everyone hates the mods, but even there I haven't seen any discussion of anyone becoming a mod. Maybe it's because mods delete insurrectionist posts. However, I cannot imagine many people want to do such a thankless and stressful job that pays nothing at all.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#293

Post by revscat »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #34
jarym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics. Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxati…

That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.

I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#294

Post by Paul-Craft »

redmerchant2 wrote: post #7

They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…

You're right on the money. It's all that, and more. Basically, Reddit going to a paid API isn't the big deal. It's the fact that, say, Apollo can pay Imgur under $200/month for all the API calls they need, but Reddit is demanding $20M/year, or ~$1.7M/month [0]. That's what tradespeople call their "fuck off" rate, i.e. the rate they'd quote someone when they don't actually want to do a job, but also don't want to come out and say they don't want to do it.

The TL;DR on this whole situation is that Reddit quoted Apollo and other 3rd party apps their "fuck off" rate, and now Reddit is all like surprised Pikachu face that people who depend on those apps are, well... fucking off.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit...

Edit: $20M/year, not per month.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#295

Post by Sunspark »

ajmurmann wrote: post #292
Sunspark wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Reddit if they want to be a community needs to allow ELECTIONS. Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms. Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected. Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.

Are there actually enough people willing to do the mod job? I am only in one sub where everyone hates the mods, but even there I haven't seen any discussion of anyone becoming a mod. Maybe it's because mods delete insurrectionist posts. However, I cannot imagine many people want to do such a thankless and stressful job that pays nothing at all.

It's not thankless or stressful if all you do is just enforce the overall corporation rules plus perhaps some locally agreed upon additional rules.

If people want to post sunsets and nobody is writing you emails to complain about it, then have at it. It's the voice of the people.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#296

Post by volkl48 »

evandale wrote: post #173
tedivm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit. The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this pl…

Long-time user of the site, although currently taking a break:

I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.

Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.

A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.

But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#297

Post by e40 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #76
0zemp3c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans 99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

Worse, in at least one huge sub I follow the mods are widely hated

This varies greatly.

Most of the subs I'm in, the mods are thought of pretty highly or not at all.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#298

Post by downWidOutaFite »

jarym wrote: post #229
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax. Examples or I don't believe that happens, maybe very rarely.

You're free to choose what you believe, I'm not here to convince you. But one of the older examples is the 'window tax' https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...

A tax from 1696 that was replaced 154 years later? Nothing was driven away or killed so it's not even a proper example.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#299

Post by abhijat »

Interestingly (though perhaps a bit off topic) I received a survey from reddit today in my inbox of my 11 year old account. This is the first of any communication reddit has had with me.

It had questions like how comfortable are you with the information on reddit etc. At first I thought it was because of the possible IPO but I did recently ask for my data so that might have been the trigger.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#300

Post by darknavi »

N_A_T_E wrote: post #241

I'm assuming 90% of these API requests are reads. Is there a reason Apollo couldn't develop an intermediate proxy server and cache all the responses for a short period of time? I assume that would cut the API usage significantly and potentially the cost.

Honestly sounds like a headache for outdated cache bugs. Reddit data is very fluid.
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