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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#751

Post by commandlinefan »

mrguyorama wrote: post #702
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…

>It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)

> reasonably sized and loud portion of the community

He also spearheaded entirely killing off reasonably sized and loud portions of the community - love them or hate them, r/The_Donald was a massive, advertisable bloc of users.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#752

Post by hiram112 »

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…

What refunds will he need to provide?

I paid for the app years ago - it was $5 or so and I don't expect to get anything back. That's just how the game works.

I know he also had some sort of monthly subscription - it seemed quite absurd for whatever additional trivial features it provided, but then again there apparently was some sort of Apollo fanboy group who got a lot of excitement out of new app logos, which seemed to be the main updates in the last few years, even at the expense of serious bugs that lingered for months.

I'd assume those subscriptions would just stop being charged going forward. So again, who is getting $250k in refunds?

Furthermore, if he is refunding that much money, I wonder what kind of revenue and profits he was pulling in? I had kind of assumed he was making a very good living (deservedly - it was a good app) - maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but now I'm wondering if he was making a order of magnitude more than that...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#754

Post by clintonb »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #696
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…

> could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook Tech employees are somewhat notorious for not enforcing their shareholder rights. Most companies, for example, ignore their books & records requirements under Delaware law, or force private sales to occur at terms favourable to management and the Board’s friends.

It all depends on the terms of the equity grant. You may get RSUs, but voting rights are retained by the founders or someone else.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#755

Post by JohnFen »

Wow. That's a real bombshell. If everything he says is accurate (I haven't listened to the recordings, of course, but I'm going to assume his characterization of them is correct), then Reddit's behavior here is beyond the pale. Particularly them accusing him of making threats.

It's hard to see how Reddit can actually survive with this level of mismanagement.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#756

Post by robryan »

melvinmelih wrote: post #548
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…

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?

The whole thing was just to illustrate the point that he thinks the Apollo API access is worth nowhere near $20 million a year in opportunity cost.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#757

Post by spideymans »

sh34r wrote: post #740

Reddit is Digging its own grave. Eternal September awaits all the old school forums that still remain. But perhaps that decentralization will be a good thing in the end. I think the network effects of Reddit are a lot easier to undo than that of Twitter. There is little core functionality that didn’t exist in forum software from the Naughties.

I'd love to see a federated Reddit clone. Administrators should have power over their communities, nor Reddit.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#758

Post by hayd »

rchaud wrote: post #506
giarc wrote: post #475

>Will you sell Apollo? >Probably not. Maybe if the perfect buyer came along who thought they could turn Apollo into something cool I get that it's something he built and loves, but if someone shows up with $1m and the alternative is to shut it down and get nothing. Then take the money even if it's not the "perfect buyer" and it won't be "cool".

No one is going to buy it, the API pricing makes it impossible to turn a profit.

There is one obvious candidate to buy it... but that was shot down as some kind of threat.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#759

Post by nulltype »

aniforprez wrote: post #504
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…

> I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call He mentions that it was spez AKA Steve Huffman the CEO of reddit. The call really does sound amateurish and the joke/negotiation tactic/money request/??? was really unprofessional but Steve seems to have completely misconstrued the whole interaction and blown up at him. I would say this is worse of the CEO to use this to spread slander especially when he already apo…

It seems a number of people believe that the recorded call has Steve Huffman talking, but I don’t see this claim anywhere in the original post.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#760

Post by renewiltord »

Semaphor wrote: post #212
renewiltord wrote: post #144

I still don't understand why the user flow can't be: 1. Download Apollo 2. Go to Reddit.com 3. Open your user settings 4. Generate a client_id and client_secret 5. Paste that into these two places in Apollo 6. There you go Sure it's not strictly to OAuth2, but it's going to work just fine, right?

Because Reddit wants you to enter an agreement with them for the API, so you need to submit a request to get an API key for those client_ids.

Ah, not every user would be approved, huh? Cool, makes sense then.
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