Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apollo will close down on June 30th

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#621

Post by naet »

bardfinn wrote: post #500
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…

[flagged]

A Reddit moderator and Reddit user coordinated temporary blackout of various subreddits to protest changes made by Reddit that impact Reddit moderators and users makes perfect sense and may end up being effective in achieving it's goal.

A coordinated blackout on Reddit to protest the new Ugandan anti lgbt legislation wouldn't make as much sense or be as effective. There are regularly posts voted to the front page of reddit about these new laws and other human rights issues and what you might be able to do to help if interested.

These different issues don't have to be in competition and aren't analogous to each other.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#622

Post by paradox460 »

xmprt wrote: post #275
com2kid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I'm not so sure that it's true. Reddit isn't massively profitable but it also doesn't have to lose a ton of money. IIRC they were able to run a much tighter ship and operate off of just Reddit Gold and ads for at least a decade before they started this recent hypergrowth phase

13 years ago, when I worked part time for them, it was about 5 people, with support being provided by Condé Nast peeps. This was right during the middle of the Digg v4 exodus to reddit. I remember when reddit got its billionth pageview month

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#623

Post by chihuahua »

kossTKR wrote: post #288
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…

Reddit is stupid, and the whole situation is bad, but shouldn't the man behind the biggest app for the biggest forum in the world, in the lucrative ios ecosystem have made himself wealthy enough so that 250k is close to nothing? Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space? If he isn't "10+ million"-wealthy that's extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.

I think you may be overestimating how much money there is in this space. People don't want to pay for things if they can avoid it. The biggest app for the biggest forum in the world apparently had 50k paying users. The author was complaining about the cost of icons, which to me suggests that he is not terribly wealthy.

But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:

* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.

* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#624

Post by dcow »

Totally agree that Reddit are being glorious ass-munching hentais here. I fucking hate all that Reddit has become as a company and as a product.

But also, dude just raise your prices. I read the whole announcement and truly don't understand why Apollo can't be $20/year. I don't know anybody who attributes a meaningful difference to $10/year and $20/year. I'm not a user but if I was faced with that type of price change and some language around needing to adjust pricing because Reddit is now charging for API access, I'd not give it a second thought.

It really really seems weird to want to die on this hill when you don't need to. Maybe it is the harbinger of the end for Reddit and we're just overdue. But I see no reason the founder of a popular Reddit reader couldn't secure some temporary funding to weather the transition, or simply negotiate a longer lead time rather than spending all the time in talks and ugly back and forth.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#626

Post by raydev »

While I agree with services pricing their APIs in any way they like, it's worth pointing out that Reddit's current CEO Steve Huffman is the very same person responsible for editing Reddit user comments as recently as 2016, like he was just an admin on some no-name forum. [1] On the eve of an IPO, someone that irresponsible and childish should not be leading this company.

I was initally on Reddit's side in this particular matter (and I still think Selig's API pricing justifications are worthless), but I was shocked to learn Huffman is still the CEO, so his offhand comments about this situation and Reddit's general bad faith interactions with Selig in the past week are now very obvious to me.

Anyway, all the best to Selig.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#627

Post by paradox460 »

fknorangesite wrote: post #519
hospitalJail wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>#1 Reddit Android app "Reddit is Fun" Guess no more bathroom reddit for me. 4chan still works.

An appropriate place to read 4chan, I suppose.

Why do you think they call it shit posting?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#628

Post by sorenjan »

generalizations wrote: post #355

> Please note that I recorded all my calls with Reddit, so my statements are not based on memory, but the recorded statements by Reddit over the course of the year. One-party consent recording is legal in my country of Canada. Also I won't be naming names, that's not important and I don't want to doxx people. IMO this should be much more common practice, where it's legal. It would be cool to one day have built-in fun…

My Xiaomi phone records every call, it should be a standard feature, but Google doesn't seem to like it.

https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/call-recording-on-xi...

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-ends-call-recording-app...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#629

Post by [deleted] »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #287

When your landlord raises your rent from $2000 to $8000, they're not really hoping to raise your rent. They're evicting you. I think the new API pricing model was developed with a single purpose: extinguishing third-party apps to improve the official app's install/usage metrics before their upcoming IPO.

[deleted]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#630

Post by Majromax »

e40 wrote: post #608
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,…

I just logged into old.reddit.com w/Safari on iOS. The difference between that and Apollo is the difference between using reddit on my phone and not. That said, I have to think something is wrong: I seem to have been served the desktop version in Safari. I do have 1Blocker and AdGuard running in Safari.

old.reddit no longer has a mobile version. The mobile interface was redirected to the new-style quite a while ago.
Post reply on HN