Does anyone know if Reddit has explored acquiring/hiring the Apollo team before? And/or why not?!
Apollo will close down on June 30th
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#412I 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…
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 they're going public, saying "we're broke, please invest" isn't going to work for them — at this point everything they do is to more or less prop up the value until everyone can cash out
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#413Reading the transcript, you could tell Steve was trying to bait Christian after hearing "I could make it really easy on you". You can feel the power imbalance. Steve didn't get much but he obviously still felt like it was enough to make the accusations he did. Steve was probably recording too.
Christian should have had a lawyer sit next to him on that call.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#414I 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…
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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#415Earlier 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…
Uhh, I'm pretty sure that you and me and anyone on this site are extremely far from a representative sample of Reddit's userbase these days. It is a fact that their traffic is primarily from their official (and shitty) mobile app.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#416So back to digg then?
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#417I 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 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…
Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, & there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome & Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API.
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#418In 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?
In addition to what everyone else has said, he really has 1 month if he has any chance of siphoning off reddit users.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also made the same claim in r/partnercommunities too, not just internally. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
From the linked post: > We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrow Is that a threat, lol?
Even funnier to me, there's a not even thinly veiled threat right below it.
>Blackout
> We respect your right to protest – that’s part of democracy.
>This situation is a bit different, with some mods leading the charge, some users pressuring mods. We’re trying to work through all of the unique situations.
>Big picture: We are tolerant, but also a duty to keep Reddit online.
>If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue. That’s a loss for everyone.
AKA: If you protest we will remove you from the mod team for that sub, and force the sub back to public.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#420I 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…
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...
There's a step before this. They're losing a lot of money because the choices they made to take investment to earn more money. They could've gone the route of wikipedia. They could've stayed extremely lean. They took $1.3 BILLION in funding, minimum. They have 500-1000 employees.
Its greed that they got here. They made choices, and then as a consequence of those choices they made choices that are significantly reducing the value they provide to their users. Its enshittification, its killing the golden goose, its destroying a public good for the benefit of investors who don't care about anything other than making a return.
The worst part is the investors don't care about anything other than making the numbers look good in the short term so they can dump their investment onto other investors. Its like all of corporate america decided to watch The Wire and go "Oh see how they're pumping up the numbers to make them look good for the mayor, but not actually solving crime? THAT should be our business plan!". Providing value is a side effect of making money, on the false equivalence that making money means you're providing value, so therefore making more money means you're providing more value.