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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#361

Post by punnerud »

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 (the maker of Apollo) is from Norway, and if the recordings was done in Norway it’s legal as far as I know.

Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.

§205 : https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-05-20-28/KAPITTEL_2-...

EDIT: See now that he was in Canada when it was recorded, and they have the same kind of laws.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#362

Post by devjab »

bogwog wrote: post #254
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #182

In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing…

Yeah this guy didn't handle this situation very well. I don't know if it would've been possible to save Apollo for reddit, but that call didn't help at all. Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situati…

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Would you want to moderate Reddit? I get that Apollo is in a good position to take their users with them, but it's not like it's going to be easy to build a Reddit when what you've made so far has been a frontend for Reddit and some mobile widget spin-offs.

Many of us can make a frontpage for hacker news in a few hours, some might even be able to grow a userbase on it but that doesn't mean we can do what dang does.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#364

Post by yett »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #318
rogers18445 wrote: post #228

Is there a legal reason why they can't just scrape reddit and forget about API? It would be the app users doing the scraping.

Or just clone whatever API the official Reddit mobile client is using. As long as it's offered for free to the official app, there's no technical way to stop another app from using the same API. The best they could do is bundle some private keys in the official app, but ultimately anything on the client can be reverse engineered and cloned by another app. The only solution Reddit has to that is complaining to Apple,…

I don't think even cloning anything would be necessary. They will still allow free tier of 100 requests/minutes if authenticated so why not let people use their own tokens? https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_e...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#366

Post by SkyPuncher »

paulmd wrote: post #309
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…

> 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…

Sorry, I don't see how that's a textbook case of what you've cited.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#367

Post by Dylan16807 »

colinrand wrote: post #321

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.

Even if we ignore the idea of just scraping the site, how much would it cost an API user to grab most posts just once? Is it actually enough to stop anyone?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#368

Post by Hoyadonis »

Demmme wrote: post #290
mustacheemperor wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community. I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is reall…

I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website. If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority. Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact…

>If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web

Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.

https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/

HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#369

Post by George83728 »

bagels wrote: post #70

I don't have any dogs in this race, but Apollo should be careful about recording calls. Just because he is in a one-party location doesn't mean he hasn't violated the law wherever the other party is if they are in a two-party location and he didn't have consent from the other party.

If you don't want to be recorded, then don't have phone calls with people who live in one party consent jurisdictions. This is common sense.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#370

Post by hospitalJail »

xmprt wrote: post #275
com2kid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder how much of costs went up due to hosting their own images and videos.

A text website is easy to run.

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