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Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

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Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#421

Post by heisenbit »

shagie wrote: post #377
xyst wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Before subreddit mods voluntarily blacked out, the Apollo developer stated he would pay millions of dollars per year ($20M/year?) with the increased rates. It’s insane. Reddit C-level executives suggested Apollo was poorly optimized or something. I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. If that’s not the case then it’s clearly just…

$0.24/1k calls isn't absurd (its expensive, yes, but only ~3x more than the rate for Imgur). The issue is that Apollo was doing 600 calls per hour per user to push notifications with a less than 10 second window between "when it hits your mailbox" to "when it shows up on your iDevice". When that 600 calls per hour per user gets billed at $0.24/1k calls it gets very expensive. If those calls were done to the main appl…

Apollo claimed to be more efficient in API use than the Reddit client and somehow the rate you quote make no sense. Polling for push notifications at that rate? If that is the case then the Api is insane.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#422

Post by ng12 »

donretag wrote: post #385
madeofpalk wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A medium-ish video game reddit that I participate in held two votes on whether to participate, and whether to shutdown for 24 or 48 hours, and in both users overwhelmingly (95%) voted in favor of shutting down, and for 48 hours. There is a vocal amount of non-mods who are also participating. Also "mods" are still users of reddit. When I'm an admin of a Facebook group, I'm still a 'facebook user'.

The overwhelming majority of users on most social networking sites are lurkers. Those lurkers did not vote. I would assuming the majority of users do not even know about the changes or the blackout.

I think that's ok. Without the contributing users the lurkers have nothing to lurk.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#423

Post by ok123456 »

stetrain wrote: post #400
evandale wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much work does a mod of a city subreddit with 600k subscribers really do though? Is it really necessary to have rules in a city subreddit such as 1) no questions or 2) no posts about crime? That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like t…

It’s possible for automoderator tools to immediately hide all new posts, or posts matching certain criteria, pending moderator approval. Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.

Then what value are the moderators adding if what they do can be automated by a regex filter?

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#424

Post by gknoy »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #312
revscat wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.

That's certainly fair, but you'd hope that out of the 2000 employees, at least some are in a position to evaluate decisions like that and explicitly calculate the PR risk of any decision. And they certainly should have taken it into account.

Not only that, if they really didn't want to kill 3rd party apps, they've had a week to say, "oh no! We see exactly how this is going to kill third party apps, let's iterate to try to fix it so that we don't do that", instead of doubling down on a feud with them.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#425

Post by tkanarsky »

bagels wrote: post #277
George83728 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...

Has Time Cube vibes.

From the great "welcome to my meme page" on FB.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#426

Post by civilitty »

babypuncher wrote: post #379
jarym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics. Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxati…

Some insist this is about making it so companies training LLMs aren't doing so with Reddit's data for free. But I call bullshit. People training new AI models are using the API right now because it's free and easy, but as soon as that changes they will go back to good old fashioned web scraping.

People training AI were already using CommonCrawl. There’s too many data sources to figure out each API. Everyone just downloads CC from AWS.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#427

Post by shagie »

heisenbit wrote: post #421
shagie wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$0.24/1k calls isn't absurd (its expensive, yes, but only ~3x more than the rate for Imgur). The issue is that Apollo was doing 600 calls per hour per user to push notifications with a less than 10 second window between "when it hits your mailbox" to "when it shows up on your iDevice". When that 600 calls per hour per user gets billed at $0.24/1k calls it gets very expensive. If those calls were done to the main appl…

Apollo claimed to be more efficient in API use than the Reddit client and somehow the rate you quote make no sense. Polling for push notifications at that rate? If that is the case then the Api is insane.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...

> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.

Yes, that's from 5 years ago. He repeats it 10 days ago in this video.

https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 (closer to the actual timestamp, that gives context https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 )

> I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us

Note the every 10 second call.

People are likely confusing the "app" with what is installed on the phone rather than the application being the entire system of front end and backend (likely using the same API client keys).

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#428

Post by pritambaral »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #338
andrewmunsell wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he wants to badmouth Reddit and its leadership with the small chance that there's some goodwill left that would result in a compromise. He could say all the things we are thinking, but given the CEO has a history of editing posts on Reddit critical of him , it seems like a bad strategy to have any hope of negotiating with them.

He's already badmouthed Reddit's leadership. He's gotten into spats with spez a few times, calling him just short of a blatant liar.

Tact is the difference between calling someone a shameless liar vs. calling them out on their lie.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#429

Post by lazycouchpotato »

evandale wrote: post #173
tedivm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit. The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this pl…

> I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

Would you be able to provide examples of where you believe this to be the case?

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#430

Post by wolverine876 »

redmerchant2 wrote: post #7

They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…

Of course Reddit's management knew what the outcome would be, and they chose that outcome. They wanted to clear out API users. It's not a new tactic - you can see Twitter doing it, of course, and many other businesses.
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