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Apollo will close down on June 30th

old.reddit.com

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#301

Post by no_butterscotch »

robbiet480 wrote: post #153
SkyPuncher wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? Why would they? In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed. A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot…

I don't think lifetime access is getting refunded since that was just a one time unlock. He says the $250,000 cost is to refund all "subscriptions".

How does Apple's refunds work?

I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#302

Post by bombcar »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #199
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?

My memory on this is murky, although do I recall correctly that his reply to criticism of the production db comment edit amounted to something like “it was just a prank bro”?

Basically, and if it was a small-time forum, it would be more "reasonable".

But Reddit is and always has pretended to be a "big name" company like Youtube, Facebook, etc.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#303

Post by treesknees »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #270
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 wip…

If you read his post, he presents all the information you need to know that this isn't true. Reddit themselves admitted that the cost isn't about server/bandwidth usage but opportunity cost per user on 3rd party apps. And it's not exploiting the API if you are using the API within the terms of service agreed to when registering the API token. Apollo wasn't exploiting or abusing anything.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#304

Post by Kalium »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #256
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 Christia…

> 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...

He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators. He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place. Both are in the OP reddit thread here. Just search for "transcript" in the page.

It's the sort of thing you'd say to mods if you think it will get them off your back.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#306

Post by Silhouette »

nocoiner wrote: post #166
SkyPuncher wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? Why would they? In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed. A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot…

I generally agree with this type of analysis regarding for-profit ventures, but as a lifetime purchaser, I’m not going to try to get a refund here. I got my money’s worth out of Apollo, and Christian is handling this like a steely-eyed capitalist. He’s not asking the community to bail him out from his business decisions or Reddit taking things in a different direction, and I respect that a lot. Very different tone fr…

Did people really sell services that necessarily depended on a third party's services without some contractual safeguard in their terms in case the third party changed how they operate? There's always a risk in building your offering on top of someone else's and plenty of attempts to do that in that past didn't work out so surely any lawyer who works in this field should have seen that one coming?

Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#307

Post by bityard »

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…

It is not surprising to me that a product intended for social drama (news) aggregation has basically been steeped in drama its whole life.

Like, I can't remember a time that there _hasn't_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that's for sure.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#308

Post by okdood64 »

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.

I'm sure a few will but, I can't name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it's just a job and pays money. And pays well.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#309

Post by paulmd »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #121
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…

> Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? Why would they? In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed. A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot…

> Why would they?

> A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.

That's practically the definition of tortious interference.

https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/liability-and-insuranc...

"The most common form of [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance."

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#310

Post by Panoramix »

honksillet wrote: post #267

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 “quarantin…

Indeed. I despise everything right wing, but I'm also not a fan of what Reddit has become as of late. On the larger subs there are plenty of threads where somebody asks "can somebody give their perspective on why [XX issue that usually right wing people complain about]". Followed by a storm of progressive commenters stating a variation of "because if you care about XX you're insane/you're a nazi/etc". That makes up about the top 300 top level comments. If you scroll past that, there are hundreds of comments from people that intended to actually answer the question and provide nuance, but, but those comments are all deleted by the mods. It's mostly a progressive echo chamber nowadays.
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