Relay App is also shutting down https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/13wsn92/gue...
Apollo will close down on June 30th
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#632> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript: > Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us." > Wow. Because my memory is that you didn't take it as a threat, and you even apologized profusely when you admitted…
Honestly this is the tipping point for me to just move on. Reddit is an ad-filled cesspool, with a morally bankrupt C-suite. Growing up I actually looked up to this guy. . . how pathetic and sad. Such a fall from grace, and for what?
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#633In 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 genuinely don't understand the "pay me 10 million to save half on 20 million of costs" negotiation tactic... if they wanted to save money, why wouldn't they just shut down the API access?
They say somewhere that the 20m is from opportunity cost, so 10m for an app that's "costing" them 20m a year would be a deal.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#634Can someone please explain to me why users of third-party apps like Apollo don't just use their own API keys and pay for their API calls themselves?
Why is the third-party app vendor (and not the users themselves) paying for these API calls?
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other social media companies seem far less ethical to me. Facebook still has tons of employees even though they treat users much worse than reddit. In the end reddit is a business that exists to make money. They were never going to let third party apps that undercut ad revenue exist forever.
It's a weird balance right? You'd think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app. Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they're the one's submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform. With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the…
The problem is their revenue per user is garbage compared to other sites. Facebook is sitting at $70 per user/year. More users who don't bring revenue doesn't actually help the company. I think they should focus more on getting their ad platform to make a reasonable CPM, but I assume they've been trying and for whatever reason just can't make it happen. Maybe forcing users onto the official app is how they plan to boost the ad numbers?
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#636> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us." I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.
It sounds to me like the conversation went in a way that it could be interpreted as a threat. This is from the Apollo developer's own telling of the story: > As said, a common suggestion across the many threads on this topic was "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 co…
Framing it as "give me money and I'll stop making things difficult for you" is disingenuous. The proper framing was "buy the app out and the API usage, and thus the $20mm/year in costs, will stop, or whatever you want to do with the product at that point".
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#637Why is there NEVER any talk of adversarial interoperability? Explicitly maintained and versioned APIs were a nicety, but not a necessity! Especially in this day and age of continually pushed code updates. Why just throw away Apollo's popularity and go dark, rather than simultaneously diversifying by adding support for open platforms that appreciate users (eg Mastodon) while also mitigating the damage Reddit can do by continuing to access the site like every other HTTP user agent?
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#638I 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…
See this response reddit posted https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c... Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused a…
They still repeat the “Apollo threatened us” lie, even though Christian’s recordings prove that they apologised and accepted that misunderstanding.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#639> 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…
Shit, I really hope it doesn't. Do you really want every silly thing you say be recorded, to come bite you in the ass decades down the line?
In things to do with business, yes, if you behave ethically the risk is minimal and the upsides can save your ass like in this case.
Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th
#640I 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…
I run a small sub, about 50 people.
One day I looked at it, not logged in.
Turned out there was a post, "pinned by moderators", at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.
I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.
I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.
Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!
Bloody hell.
At that point I knew Reddit could not be trusted.