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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#771

Post by aniforprez »

nulltype wrote: post #759
aniforprez wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you read the section titled "Bizarre allegations by Reddit of Apollo "blackmailing" and "threatening" Reddit", he is directly addressing Steve. He starts with the transcript of the private mod call with Steve and then begins addressing Steve directly. The "you" in that section is the Steve Huffman he had calls with who heard the "threatening" bit

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#772

Post by tzs »

paulmd wrote: post #309
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…

> Why would they? > 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 hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made. That's practically the definition of tortious interference. https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/liability-and-insuranc... "The most common form of [to…

The act that is alleged to be tortious interference has to be improper for it to actually potentially be tortious interference (see farther down on the page you quoted).

There's nothing obviously improper about a site replacing a free API with a paid API even if it causes problems for those who relied on the API being free.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#773

Post by MostlyStable »

replwoacause wrote: post #618

I’m calling it now, the Reddit devs are already hard at work ripping off all the cool shit that makes Apollo 1000% better than their crappy app. Christian better LAWYER UP.

Nah. They bought and then just killed a vastly superior mobile app (to their own thing) years ago with Alien blue. If they _wanted_ to get something better, they would have done it.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#774

Post by zamadatix »

dcow wrote: 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…

The "Why not just increase the price of Apollo" section says he's already sold 50,000 yearly subscriptions at normal price. He's going to offer a pro-rated refund and, at that point, he'll be out $250,000 of revenue he already recognized while still having all of the lifetime user loss to contend with. Even if he could optimize the API usage to halve it in the next 30 days that's still $1.25/m ($15/y) in API fees per user. After the App Store cut, the $20/y would only barely cover API cost of users who sign back up. Something like $30/y might make more sense to cover overall cost and bring in profit but then it comes to the question of "is it really worth trying to put all of this effort in to save a fraction of the userbase and MRR with a company that won't even give him more than a months notice to make these kinds of changes".

While I think there is a way to keep Apollo running in some form or another, I by no means blame them for going to this hill to let it die on. Waaaay too much work for far too little reward to have the burden of massive risk from dependency on Reddit's future whims lingering in the background.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#775

Post by wpietri »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #150
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…

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 would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.

I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.

That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/...

And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#776

Post by MostlyStable »

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.

I've heard these new API fees would result in monthly subscription numbers between $2 and $5/month. I'd pay $5 to keep my third party app (which isn't Apollo). I fully believe that _most_ users aren't interested in paying these fees. But I'm skeptical that there are so few that _none_ of these 3rd party apps will stay afloat. I've got to believe that if none of the current big players want to stay in, someone else will come along soon.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#777

Post by ml_giant »

One thing I dislike about using Reddit (At least when accessing the main page from a browser) is that I have to be logged into an account in order to sort comments.

Was this always a thing? I cannot remember if this was in the case in the past, and I don't really have a Reddit account that I actually log into ever.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#779

Post by luuurker »

dcow wrote: post #690
moritzwarhier wrote: post #614

Sad. Just bought Apollo in March. But no hard feelings. Anyway, this will probably stop my Reddit consumption altogether. Already deleted my account a while ago, because some discussions became too toxic for me. Stil enjoying to read there and Apollo made it really enjoyable, even better than rif is fun on Android. Is there a good archive of previous Reddit content until now?

Funny how a history of categorically silencing certain viewpoints on a major discussion platform ultimately leads to more toxicity . Hmm...

Allowing toxic viewpoints wouldn't make the platform less toxic though.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#780

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

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…

> are only a loud minority.

Hmmm ...

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