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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#791

Post by BEEdwards »

PaulHoule wrote: post #372

It’s a basic problem for platform rot that the client is usually specific to a network today. Consider the following: AOL instant messenger, ICQ, Paltalk, Tivejo, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, 11 different messaging apps from Google, Zoom, Go2Meeting, WebEx, Microsoft Lynq, Skype for Business, Slack, iMessage, CuSeeMe, Discord, … A user looking superficially a…

>Unfortunately users seem to violently opposed to this and open messaging platforms like XMPP have only caught on with military and law enforcement users.

I don't think it's the protocol users have the issue with, it's that generally to get the best out of it you need to run your own server and nobody wants to run their own server.

I run my own server and don't want to run a server...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#792

Post by takeda »

com2kid wrote: post #125
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…

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...

The fees aren't small, they also forbid 3rd party apps to show their own ads and will be blocking NSFW subreddits from API (none of those things apply to their mobile app).

So ultimately they want 3rd party to use subscription model to ultimately get worse experience.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#794

Post by tensor »

timmytokyo wrote: post #434
square_usual wrote: post #16

> 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…

Reddit could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat simply by purchasing Apollo and making it available as an official app. So many people would have paid a significant monthly fee for an ad-free, quality mobile reddit experience. But no, they had to go full-on maximalist destroy-all-intruders mode, and now they've got an unnecessary PR nightmare on their hands. From the perspective of fiduciary responsibility…

They didn't even need to do that. They could simply have changed the terms so that user-facing clients like apollo either need to show reddit ads, allowing no ads for users of reddit premium. They approve api users anyways, supposedly, so mod tools and the like could be exempt, and they could introduce higher cost efficient bulk export of comments for large scale generative AI machine learning use cases.

Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#795

Post by dbbk »

rocky_raccoon wrote: post #441
jonas21 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should listen to the audio transcript that was posted in the original link. I believe it will dispel that notion.

It doesn't dispel it

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#796

Post by kristofferR »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #421

Here's a wild thought. What I would love to happen is that one of these apps (Sync or Apollo) release a version of their app where a user can enter their own API key. This would put the cost of the API usage on to the individual user instead of the app owner and the app owner can continue to focus on the app UI/features without worry. It wouldn't change how they made money off these apps either. Let's see what that w…

A Twitter client I used (Spring) had that, and it worked for months after Twitter killed off Tweetbot and all other clients.

However, it naturally stopped working when Twitter basically killed the free tier of their API.

It would likely still work on the "Basic" API tier, but I'm not paying $100 a month to use a Twitter app.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#797

Post by dbbk »

trilobyte wrote: post #636
jonas21 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The API usage cost still exists, it doesn't just disappear if it's owned by Reddit instead of the dev

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#798

Post by haberman »

rocky_raccoon wrote: post #441
jonas21 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should listen to the audio transcript that was posted in the original link. I believe it will dispel that notion.

I listened and I'm still confused.

I would love to see someone state clearly:

1. What was Christian actually offering to do in exchange for $10M?

2. What did the Reddit person think that Christian was offering to do in exchange for $10M?

3. How are (1) and (2) different?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#799

Post by BEEdwards »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #530

The Reddit mobile app has a few big issues for me: 1. When I click a post, sometimes it goes to a different post's detail page. The only way to remedy this is to refresh and visit the sub directly via Reddit search function, or restart the app. 2. Video player sometimes just doesn't play the video no matter how often you click "play", similar fix as above. 3. Google search is better at searching Reddit than Reddit se…

>Apollo team should have had the foresight to see this coming years ago.

    Isn't this your fault for building a service reliant on someone else?

    To a certain extent, yes. However, I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I've made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.

    January 26, 2023

    Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."

    Another portion of the call:

    January 26, 2023

    Reddit: "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.

    Me: "Fair enough."

    Reddit: "And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way."

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#800

Post by HDThoreaun »

tshaddox wrote: post #109
Ekaros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And exactly what are they losing from business perspective? Few users that generate only costs?

It’s an ads business, so the game is always “giving away a huge number of requests for free to monetize an extremely tiny portion of those requests.” So as soon as bean counters look at the books, it’s easy to be tempted to just identify cohorts of those requests that are unlikely to convert and cut off those users. It takes someone who is more than just a bean counter to realize that maybe, just maybe, the only reas…

The 3rd party apps don't have ads which is surely a gigantic part of why they're being banned. I would guess that most Apollo users literally provide zero revenue as they use adblock on desktop and most people never actually give reddit any money. The only argument for their value add is that they're contributing which makes other users likely to join but I suspect reddit has reason to believe they're too adducted to stop even when the app they use is banned,.
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