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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#591

Post by BizarreByte »

kernal wrote: post #407
punnerud wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Isn't he a citizen and current resident of Canada?

Yep and it's completely legal here too as long as one participant knows and is fine with it being recorded (him in this instance).

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#592

Post by klabb3 »

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…

> the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority

The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.

Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.

Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#593

Post by sgustard »

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 has been mired in controversy since day one. It is also regularly touted on HN as THE ONLY trustworthy place on the web to find, for example, honest product reviews; where Google, Amazon, Yelp, Wirecutter etc are hopelessly corrupted. I'm not buying that a brief fit of bad PR will hurt them; and in the meantime Reddit thinks there's 20m of revenue on the table they will recapture when the app goes away.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#594

Post by tedivm »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #421

Here's a wild thought. What I would love to happen is that one of these apps (Sync or Apollo) release a version of their app where a user can enter their own API key. This would put the cost of the API usage on to the individual user instead of the app owner and the app owner can continue to focus on the app UI/features without worry. It wouldn't change how they made money off these apps either. Let's see what that w…

Don't forget that they're getting their tokens from an OAuth endpoint. In otherwords it's already tied to a specific user. Reddit could have simply said "third party api support is only for reddit gold users".

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#595

Post by nfriedly »

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…

The thing is, I think a lot of moderators use third-party apps.

So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#596

Post by replwoacause »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #305
marcell wrote: post #285

Interesting to note that /u/spez hasn't posted anything on reddit for 10 months now: https://old.reddit.com/user/spez

Maybe he uses other users' accounts to express his opinions.

You mean the guy that manually edits posts in the Production DB that he disagrees with? Nah, no way he’d pull a stunt like that.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#598

Post by ckolkey »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #478
flanbiscuit wrote: post #421

Here's a wild thought. What I would love to happen is that one of these apps (Sync or Apollo) release a version of their app where a user can enter their own API key. This would put the cost of the API usage on to the individual user instead of the app owner and the app owner can continue to focus on the app UI/features without worry. It wouldn't change how they made money off these apps either. Let's see what that w…

Here’s an anecdote. I was subscribed to ChatGPT Plus for a while, to get access to GPT4. I stopped subscribing after after I got GPT4 API access because I developed a little personal app which used the OpenAI API to just read and write directly from plain text files and that suits my workflow better than the ChatGPT website. But it sucks because I’m constantly thinking about how much I’m using, and how many tokens I’…

I completely take your point, and would _love_ some kind of negative externality to keep from scrolling to much. I'd see that as a positive.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#599

Post by cortesoft »

MostlyStable wrote: post #510
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…

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)

I use old.reddit on iOS safari, works well

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#600

Post by IAmGraydon »

zamalek wrote: post #133
willidiots wrote: post #96

I hope Apollo's not overplaying their hand here, though it's super interesting hearing these conversations from the inside. It's clear reddit's got it out for the 3p apps, and I'm personally leaving reddit over this (longtime RIF user), but this post is a bit concerning. It focuses on the "[apollo can] quiet down [for $10M]" topic in the conversation, and the apparent misunderstanding between Apollo and Reddit, Reddi…

The angle was " buy Apollo from me": > "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal! And it would have…

How do you think the Apollo users will lose access to Reddit?
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