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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#831

Post by ludocode »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #276
waif wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.

The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app? What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incenti…

>So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?

It's because of misaligned incentives.

Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.

First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.

First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#832

Post by fencepost »

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…

I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small

In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.

Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.

In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#833

Post by azemetre »

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.

do you happen to know of general programming/computer science forums (not counting hacker news)? That's really my only interest, I enjoy TV and movies but like discussing those in person nowadays.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#834

Post by johnnyanmac »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #276
waif wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.

The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app? What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incenti…

two big points

1. "better is subjective" and what reddit's native app is trying to do is "better" for reddit's bottom line. 2. more importantly, there is a case of "good enough". As I'm sure we've seen over the history of the internet, the "better product" doesn't always win. this is 1000x truer for social media. Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives. it lets you scroll, look at pretty pictures, and maybe up/down vote quickly. Anything else to that user is fluff. You can skimp out on a lot of features, even core ones, if those 3 parts are good enough.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#835

Post by ineedasername »

mike00632 wrote: post #734
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #287

When your landlord raises your rent from $2000 to $8000, they're not really hoping to raise your rent. They're evicting you. I think the new API pricing model was developed with a single purpose: extinguishing third-party apps to improve the official app's install/usage metrics before their upcoming IPO.

I think they were also considering the crawlers that were using Reddit data to train AI models.

Couldn’t crawlers just scrape w/o using the api?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#837

Post by anton000 »

not_a_shill wrote: post #737
wolpoli wrote: 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.

To be fair, buying 3rd party apps out makes absolutely zero sense when they can just ban them and improve their own client if that aligns with their business priorities. I stopped reading at that point. I probably would have laughed at the suggestion instead of taking it as blackmail though.

have you tried using reddit's own app? they couldve bought Apollo for $10m and made that the official app. lol

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#838

Post by poink »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #276
waif wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.

The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app? What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incenti…

> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.

This seems like half the argument. The other half of the argument is that you could build a federated system of similar efficiency where everybody notifies/queries a central hub decided by convention.

The important-ish distinction is that you don't need as many resources (for polling) if you can generate enough trust that ~everyone is willing to push to you.

(I don't want to get up my own ass here, so to my mind the only thing that matters about "having enough resources to make a better product" is that you have all the content, presumably by crawling the entire network on shorter intervals than anyone else.)

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#840

Post by pciexpgpu »

I am surprised nobody has coded a HTML/JS/CSS -> API thingamagic..

Assuming the website is public, allows login using standard JS/HTML and provides results in JS/HTML/CSS: with all the hype around GPT4 etc, wouldn't it be 'easy' to catch the bullet using some converter? And keep deploying a machine to catch up with another machine that keeps changing its "API" (i.e. the look and feel of the website in this case)

I am only partially joking.

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