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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#651
post #624

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 chang…

> I don't know anybody who attributes a meaningful difference to $10/year and $20/year.

You forgot to factor in other things.

Base API cost: $2.52/mo (0.00024/call @ 345req/day)

App Store Taxes / Fees: $1.08/mo (I doubt he qualifies for the reduced fees at this point)

Just adding the appstore tax makes this $43.20 a year. That doesn't factor in any servers he has to pay for (push notifications). The app dev fee $99 per year, not a huge amount but small parts add up. Add in the cost to pay his server engineer, or any profit for him to live off (likely less users, so has to be more $ per user) of while making the app and it probably goes to something like $60/yr.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#654
post #29

> 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.

Not only do the receipts contradict the Reddit CEO, but even if they didn't, the Apollo dev is well within his rights to offer an ultimatum that either Reddit acquires his app, or he shuts it down. If he has enough leverage in that situation for Reddit to feel as if that's "blackmail," then it actually means that Reddit is the one blackmailing him with the pricing changes. On one hand they claim they need to increase…

DARVO

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#655
post #248

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.

I just don't think I'll use Reddit anymore. It was a nice place to catch up with my interests but the only way in which I used it was via Apollo. The one thing that made Reddit unique compared to all its competitors was its developer community and they have deliberately torpedoed it.

All good things have to end but this was avoidable.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#656

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…

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…

> 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 listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#657

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]

>has a precedent in post-Weimar Germany

That's an effective end-run on Godwin's law. Well played, sir.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#658

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…

[deleted]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#659
post #468

Reddit CEO will have AMA tomorrow https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...

I'm sure that will go over just swimmingly...

I for one welcome all of these tech CEOs making utter fools of themselves for us all to watch. And welcome the paradigm shift as people start seeing the technocrats for what they are. Steve, you could have walked away from it all years ago. And now you get to go down in history as a villain (hint: because you are one).
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