I haven't seen much discussion in defense of Reddit protecting their content from LLM training competitors. This to me is why they have to crack down on their API, it's no longer just SEO links back, it's training someone else's models on your content and community for free. This to me is the elephant. It's horrible how they treat their app community, but this is a massive problem for them.
Apollo will close down on June 30th
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#322I 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?
I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?
> Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years." > "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
At least for the yearly subscriptions
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I don’t know of many such situations but this one was odd:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...
I don’t really understand how they could make that hire or why they would have thought that person was a good choice…
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#324Earlier 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…
> 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 [to…
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel
"By way of illustration:
If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#325I'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…
1) Apollo exploited nothing. Reddit offered their API for free for years.
2) Sure, he made a ton of money running Apollo, doesn't make what Reddit did less scummy.
3) No requirement, but it's largely accepted as courtesy to notify developers of any changes to the API policy, especially when it comes to pricing. Giving the developer only 30 days to rework their business model, change app architecture/design/code, pass App Store Reviews with Apple/Google, migrate subscribers to a higher-priced tier to afford the increase in pricing, and more is tantamount to spitting in their face. Especially when it's a drastic change from 8+ years of more or less the same.
4) Even if the developer did update pricing to be able to afford the new API rates, the developer himself stated he would have to be $50,000/month in the red for months while he waits for current subscription holders to have their subscription terms expire and renew at the increase rate, and that doesn't count lost subscribers who just decide to not renew.
5) Reddit admins and their CEO slandered the developer in interviews, outright lied, and got caught as the developer recorded the audio of all of their calls proving those lies. Reddit has done this stuff before (Back in 2016 the CEO was caught editing comments critical of him in the production database).
6) Reddit has every right to do what their doing, as Apollo has every right to call them out on how shit this whole thing is, when just back in January they said they had no plans to change their APIs in the short or medium term.
Bad situation all around, but Reddit knows they're doing this to kill third-party apps. They just have to lie that they're being reasonable to save face so investors will buy them up when they go public in a few months.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#326I 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…
See this response reddit posted https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.
This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#327Why not just pay Reddit for their APIs? If you’re making $20M a year by building an app on their platform, it seems totally fair to pay them $10M a year for access. Do you expect AWS to host your stuff for free too?
It's unlikely the developer is making $20m+ a year. But only Reddit would know the real number.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#328> 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've listened to the voice call [1] linked in [2] and I interpret it the same way that Reddit staff apparently did -- as a veiled threat. Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars. I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ...…
Are you deliberately ignoring the next few lines of the conversation, then?
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#329He needs to sue Steve Huffman personally for defamation. Steve has been a known lying snake for years and it's long past due that somebody make him pay for it.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#330Looking at #s on the app store / play store and it looks like RIF / Apollo usage is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual reddit app. I doubt this has any meaningful impact after all is settled. Just seems like a loud vocal minority.