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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

#341

Post by Dylan16807 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #280
zamalek wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 up…

They seem to think the 20 million is payable.

Even if they could only get a quarter of that from users, they'd be rolling in money after a year or two.

> and then 20M/yr

The servers don't cost anywhere near that much to run.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#342

Post by housemusicfan »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #229
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?

This seems like an even more egregious act, it's like attempted character assassination of a developer beloved by the community. This app got shouted out in WWDC and Spez's decision shortly after is to concoct an alternate reality where Christian is a villain and present it as fact, and then get caught almost immediately. It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now c…

Your first mistake was assuming these social media companies aren't run by complete sociopaths.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#343

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

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…

If you want a website where radical centrisim is the word, check out rdrama.net

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#344

Post by dimgl »

sexydev wrote: post #183

Remember when FB made changes and switched to timeline views. Everyone was saying this is the death of Facebook. Then in the next earnings call, they showed average engagement and time spent more than doubled. Everyone boycotting reddit is all talk and no hat. They will still be on reddit.

This is false equivalency. And since then Facebook has deteriorated and its usage has plummeted.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#345

Post by foreverobama »

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,…

[dead]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#346

Post by notaustinpowers »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #283
sebastialonso wrote: post #69

I see two pretty distinct issues here: 1) most people's favourite app is going to die, and 2) many subreddits will be negatively affected by this move: prime example is /r/AskHistorians. Personally, 1) is not really an issue and people are enjoying the outrage train, and that's ok and valid and whatever, but it's a third party app. It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make mo…

> 1) most people's favourite app is going to die Third party apps representing less than 5% of Reddit's traffic, this is by far not "most people's" favorite app.

Maybe so. But this situation has been blown up so much that now more than 5% of Reddit's traffic probably has a sour taste in their mouth about how Reddit treats people. This is something that's going to affect a lot more than 5% of their traffic as mod tools, bots, and more go down.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#347

Post by [deleted] »

ghostpepper wrote: post #89
sebastialonso wrote: post #69

I see two pretty distinct issues here: 1) most people's favourite app is going to die, and 2) many subreddits will be negatively affected by this move: prime example is /r/AskHistorians. Personally, 1) is not really an issue and people are enjoying the outrage train, and that's ok and valid and whatever, but it's a third party app. It's a no-brainer decision to try to kill it if it's hindering your ability to make mo…

What is causing #2? Do the mods use Apollo exclusively or something?

[deleted]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#348

Post by pradn »

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…

Oh wow, "pull to refresh" was invented by one of these indie clients? Do you remember which one?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#349

Post by pooper »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #280
zamalek wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 up…

This forces Reddit to say out loud that the reason they want to introduce payments is to make third party apps stop.

Reddit has to say that the pricing it has is reasonable which means that they have to say Apollo can earn (at least!) USD 20M a year. If Apollo can earn USD 20M a year, buying it for USD 10M is indeed a steal. Normally, if you think a company makes 20M a year, you have to pay at least x 5, so USD 100M to buy this money printing machine.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#350

Post by WeylandYutani »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #287

When your landlord raises your rent from $2000 to $8000, they're not really hoping to raise your rent. They're evicting you. I think the new API pricing model was developed with a single purpose: extinguishing third-party apps to improve the official app's install/usage metrics before their upcoming IPO.

Agreed. All those 3rd party apps were blocking ads and trackers.

Hell you can't even browse Reddit without an account anymore!

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