Apollo will close down on June 30th • Hacker News Board

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#561

Post by hayst4ck » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

LargeToes wrote: post #550

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…

[flagged]

I love him. He is showing how labor needs to fight.

There's a reason labor is losing power to owners and it's because they aren't having fights like Christian.

Christian is showing how to give our children a future.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#562

Post by Goronmon » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

DecayingOrganic wrote: post #525

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…

After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully. --- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be o…

Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call...

You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.

If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.

And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#563

Post by esskay » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

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,…

FWIW there is suggestions that old.reddit.com is next on the chopping block. If that happens I dont think I could use the site anymore. The redesign is outright hostile.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#564

Post by mandevil » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

stagger87 wrote: post #498

Maybe I missed it, but why not just increase Apollo subscription rates to match the new pricing? It sounds like Apollo has a huge following that would be willing to support it. Take advantage of the hate train, tons of people would donate through a subscription model. It also sounds like these third party apps provide much better moderation interfaces, that could a selling point for the rates. Even if your subscripti…

He says, in the FA, that the problem was that Reddit's prices kick in 1 month from now, but plenty of people have already pre-paid him for a year at the old price. So he loses 50k the first month, then 10% of his user base re-ups at the new price and month 2 he only loses 45k, then another 10% renew and he only loses 40k in month 3... not really a sustainable way to run a business.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#565

Post by unshavedyak » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

apozem wrote: post #248

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…

My feelings exactly. We're all stuck with the official Reddit and Twitter clients now. They're not even good. We know they're not good, but they're now the only place to experience Reddit and Twitter. It's like enterprise software for a whole social network.

Twitter pushed me onto Mastodon a while back and i imagine Reddit will do the same. Funny enough, i have exactly one of the clients mentioned in this discussion - Tweetbot - on Mastodon. Ie the app made by the same devs.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#566

Post by lijok » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

DecayingOrganic wrote: post #525

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…

After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully. --- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be o…

Did you miss the part where spez apologised for misunderstanding him?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#567

Post by replwoacause » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

kaqvze wrote: post #535

Does anyone have the least bit of business experience? This is outrageous. I have not followed this at all but how can everyone here be so biased against Steve? If you listen to the call this Christian guy literally said: "if your opportunity cost is really $20 million, you cut me a cheque for $10 million dollars and we can both skip off into the sunset" A joke, seriously? Why on earth would you say this in what was…

The only thing I agree with you on is how Christian brought up Reddit acquiring Apollo. He didn’t give that topic the right amount of seriousness, but besides for that Steve comes off really poorly here.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#568

Post by esskay » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

joemi wrote: post #272

VHRanger wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you must be aware that old.reddit.com is on the chopping block in the next few months/years, right?

Is that official, or just an assumption?

There's been a great deal of talk about it on reddit after they closed i.reddit.com (Despite saying they wouldn't). It wont get announced officially, it will just vanish at some point.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#569

Post by Keyframe » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:15 PM UTC

durumu wrote: post #351

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #44

Honestly, I'm surprised that spez kept his job after getting caught modifying user comments straight from the production db[0]. That's who these people are dealing with, to be clear. And now he's accusing Apollo of threatening Reddit? Give me a break. How is this the guy who's gonna lead Reddit to the promised land? 0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

I mean that was really stupid of him, but it seems like the kind of thing someone would do impulsively one time and then never again after getting reprimanded. Meanwhile, this API debacle has made me lose all respect for Reddit and its leadership — if everything the Apollo dev is saying is true, this is completely inexcusable. Reddit lied to the faces of the developers who trusted them and depended on them for their…

There's no leeway for doing that at that level at that size of a company and business.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#570

Post by hrrsn » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:15 PM UTC

actionablefiber wrote: post #167

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…

> 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. Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, wh…

The "Pro" tier was a one-off payment at one point in time, but at some point this switched to a monthly subscription. Previous owners were grandfathered in.