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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#501

Post by Veen »

kojeovo wrote: post #330

Looking 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.

Yes, but all the high-value content on reddit is created by a minority of users. The people who moderate reddit are a minority of users. The issue for reddit is that these are the same people as your "loud vocal minority" who use third-party apps. You know, the ones that do the work generates Reddit's value in the first place.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#502

Post by hayst4ck »

com2kid wrote: post #125
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…

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...

Yeah. The wikipedia approach to an online platform seems ideal.

Wikipedia is pretty fantastic. Signal is pretty great. I'm pretty happy with NPR. Archive.org makes me happy.

Appeal to people with money (the professional class) and then beg.

I feel like the next great social media platform will result from a rich person disillusioned by reddit (a Bryan Acton type) creating a platform resistant to "next quarters profit"-ism.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#503

Post by bhtru »

an-allen wrote: post #464
bhtru wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the transcripts and listening to the audio and seeing how Reddit is behaving is a fucking wild ride. I use old.reddit.com on mobile and desktop so I'm not directly effected by these changes aside from the likely steep decline in moderation quality as longstanding mods lose their tools. I feel compelled to migrate from reddit and only utilize it as a resource for knowledge when it's the only resource for some…

I second this. I’ve deleted all the social media, except Reddit. When I see an organisation acting like this - its toxicity. Deleting reddit. I look forward tothe hours of my life back. Bye bye.

Two quotes come to my mind.

1. From Marcus Aurelius, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit. I remove that pool of thought from my lived life and arguably my happiness ought to increase.

2. From Epictetus, "It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them." I'll admit do a lot of mindless browsing on reddit. In the past I've used site blockers to block loading reddit for me and I'd have the muscle memory of cmd+t then typing in "old" to load reddit. That all too common doomscroll of post after post, reading comment after comment, still has a pronounced grip on me. It would serve me well to reclaim that time and my unconscious self away from reddit.

This APIgate honestly, in an entirely self-serving way I'm thankful for it. For it to give pause to reflect on my own relationship with reddit.

If they're doing this, old.reddit.com is on the chopping block too, might as well get ahead of that sooner than later.

I know this whole situation is doing a lot of harm and there's a lot hurt over for folks, especially financially, but I'll take this as an opportunity to grow.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#504

Post by aniforprez »

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…

> I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call

He mentions that it was spez AKA Steve Huffman the CEO of reddit. The call really does sound amateurish and the joke/negotiation tactic/money request/??? was really unprofessional but Steve seems to have completely misconstrued the whole interaction and blown up at him. I would say this is worse of the CEO to use this to spread slander especially when he already apologised for misunderstanding Selig and then privately walked it back

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#505

Post by tootie »

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…

Apollo says they have 50K paying users. That seems pretty insignificant. And where else are they going to go? Twitter?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#506

Post by rchaud »

giarc wrote: post #475

>Will you sell Apollo? >Probably not. Maybe if the perfect buyer came along who thought they could turn Apollo into something cool I get that it's something he built and loves, but if someone shows up with $1m and the alternative is to shut it down and get nothing. Then take the money even if it's not the "perfect buyer" and it won't be "cool".

No one is going to buy it, the API pricing makes it impossible to turn a profit.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#508

Post by toyg »

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.

That's already happened; if that were the reason, they'd be trying to close the barn after the horses have already crossed into another state.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#510

Post by MostlyStable »

bhtru wrote: post #448
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,…

Reading the transcripts and listening to the audio and seeing how Reddit is behaving is a fucking wild ride. I use old.reddit.com on mobile and desktop so I'm not directly effected by these changes aside from the likely steep decline in moderation quality as longstanding mods lose their tools. I feel compelled to migrate from reddit and only utilize it as a resource for knowledge when it's the only resource for some…

What browser do you use for mobile? I just tried old.reddit on Brave and Firefox mobile and it was.....not pleasant, relative to my current 3rd party app.

For desktop, it's the best, and I'll seriously consider ditching Reddit for good when it's killed, but it seems to be extremely poorly optimized for mobile (unsurprisingly)

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