But even so, if they had just said that, the outcome would be so much different. Because as of now it seems like they're fucking people over for the sake of fucking them over.
Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.
They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.
but that's the issue - Reddit's been focusing on other forms of content only in the native Reddit app, like TikTok-esque live streams and promoted posts from subs you aren't subscribed to.
Well, maybe not so surprising with their product team.
It's win-win for everyone for the most part.
Just cap all existing API keys to roughly the number of users they currently have.
Everyone who is currently using RIF or Apollo or $whatever can continue to use it. They can't add any new users.
Super simple, nobody is losing anything, nobody is having anything taken away. All new users would be fed into the app. Eventually the 3rd party apps would have died off. It would have been a slow, painful and QUIET death.
I say this in jest, but only partially... lots of subreddits have noticed influexes of AI bots recently. Maybe spammers testing the water, or maybe you were just the product that was just helping train its replacement.
But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on, and a sufficiently expensive API at least forces them to do engineering work to get all the data. So at the time I believed Reddit's reasoning.
Because they want the freedom to add more of the features you suggested. To join the existing classics like Chat, For You Feed and the Redesign all of which are insipid and poorly implemented.
Even the new Discover tab isn't even personalised despite recommendation algorithms being so basic to implement these days.
Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?
The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech.
* Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm sure people recognize that pattern.
* Applied to CEO roles, it means publicly demonstrating contempt toward groups of people who are (individually) weaker than you, including employees, customers, protestors, etc. And it means disregard for consequences, such as Musk's actions when bidding $40 billion for Twitter, and afterward; or much of what has happened in crypto. It demonstrates your power, demonstrates their powerlessness (if they capitulate), and makes you look like you have extreme confidence and little empathy - which is very trendy now, of course. Disregard for consequences works until they occur. It's basic con-person tactics, the most obvious bad sales techniques.
* When challenged, act more aggressively or with more contempt. Double down.
* Play the victim and characterize those who oppose you as violent threats - which again shows disinterest and contempt for them and their arguments. One remarkable place you can see it is some US Supreme Court justices - it's such a powerful trend in 'leadership' that these people with untouchable lifetime positions even do it. (In case you missed it, Reddit's CEO used this technique.)
These 'leaders' protray themselves as brilliant, innovative, and highly capable, and people assume they must be - after all, they run these big companies. They are just corrupt and swept up in the latest fashion. Power corrupts, no surprise.
The sad part is that I see many on the other side of these issues actually believe this crap - they believe they are powerless and unilaterally disarm, as if the leaders are using the Force when they say, 'you have no power' - 'Oh, I guess I have no power' and they despair. (And then they tell everyone else the same.)
At the cost of a little faith in demoracy (write large - the power of individuals working together), they hold all the power. Our ancestors who in the same way built much of the freedom and society we have now, must be amazed. We just give it all away. The worst of our society haven't given it away - look at Bud Light. Reddit should be toast, or at least the CEO. People just wake up and act.
As for why he couldn't simply shift those users to monthly, it's due to the notice being a month. If Reddit had given a 6-month warning, that would've given everyone time to content with the issue and update their own apps (billing system changes are hard).
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
"Why not just increase the price of Apollo?" on https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
Maybe it can happen now among the apps that have put their foot down about a complete end, but certainly loses a lot of momentum from those who might have already uninstalled them.
There is a sentiment of, 'Whelp, was fun while it lasted. Remember, digg, haha. See on the next go around.'
There are only so many people who would be willing to pay $x for a Reddit subscription. Would the quality of content and discussion go up? Absolutely, but that's not what Huffman and his VC backers care about. They care about _scale_, and if you can collect the information of every person who goes so far as to even click on a Reddit post that's a result in a Google search, you can have near-infinite scale. At that point, the question isn't "how do I get Joe Schmoe to pay for a Reddit subscription?", it's "How many ads can I cram into every GET request made to Reddit and maximize the price advertisers are willing to pay to be in that GET request?"
They said, on a website that is essentially a single subreddit.
Unless you mean financially.
People are tying themselves into knots turning Reddit into either near-bankrupt or evil. Or hyper-focusing on particular elements that are just disputable human interactions, like most (i.e. suggesting he could optimize API calls isn't some slap in the face & shitting on his app. really immature!)
I have absolutely 0 dog in this fight, no huge reddit fan, I just don't like how many people I see bamboozled by him. Extremely manipulative behavior.
If Huffman had called up guys like Christian Selig a while back and been like "Listen, it's been great, I love the apps you guys make, but business is business and I want to see more revenue, and to do that I'm going to charge more for the API and probably eventually shut it down, let's work on a timetable to sunset things.", he's not nearly the jerk he is today. No one's under the illusion that Reddit or Conde Nast are charities; they have revenue targets to make.
What makes this fucking people over is the negotiating over API price and implementation timetable that was clearly in bad faith and meant to shut down these applications within the timespan of a quarter. Imagine being told that your way of making a living (which these apps are for their developers) is going away in a month. Sure, these devs are the cream of the crop, but that's still a major life disruption, and you don't do that to the people who helped make your website what it is today.
Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.
Some communities have talked about going to Discord, but that's of course more of a closed platform in most ways.
TheDonald.win went down because the admin saw the light after Jan 6 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/05/why-the...)
There's a lot of people who prefer, or at least respect, an openly arrogant or dishonest leader. At least you know where you stand then, and are visible. The alternative, a lot of the time, is a leader who pays lipservice to equality, but has the same underlying disrespect.
The dream is being treated as a capable individual, but if a leader isn't willing to see you like that, it's pick your poison.
And in theory not even that. As long as the traffic can be redirected to a different server it should still work. In practice, however, at least Apollo has some server-side components so it wouldn't be totally plug-and-play without developer support.
Sadly, I'm not sure how to get in touch with the developers/users who may be interested.
(I've also heard that someone's working on a Reddit/Lemmy gateway, but I don't know who they are or how far they've gotten.)
First, no it is not 3$. Apple takes a 30% cut, and requires a yearly fee to keep the app on the store. There is also a separate server cost, and a cost associated with paying an engineer. The actual cost is 5 dollars.
Second, there is only one single month to make all changes. Pricing was announced only 30 days prior.
That means payment setup, subscription changes, app update and payment approval requests, etc all need to happen within 30days. This is literally impossible.
Third, there are people who have paid a for a yearly subscription. (10$ total) Those funds either need to be refunded in it's entirety, or be allowed to run out first. Both will not occur within 30 days. That is literally impossible for apollo dev to do. That's just an issue of how refunding works and timelines.
If it is the latter, the dev will be incurring ~50,000 usd in costs every month. This is impossible to sustain.
Either way, there are app store rules that must be followed first. Reddit's timeline is incompatible with them.
And finally, regardless of API costs! reddit has on multiple occasions, defamed Apollo dev. Why would he continue working with a company that makes false blackmail accusations, then doubles down after evidence is provided?
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
People are addicted, especially the mods and power users. They won't go, because they've infested too much in building up their "clout."
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vYx9yPEIpJaoh2I4keEjA?si=a...
(Of course, it's also possible that the whole interview was just an act.)
If I want to learn something technical (for example, music production) I'll search in google the thing I want to understand, then add the keyword `reddit`.
What the past few days has demonstrated to me, is how much of this information is on Reddit and how helpless I am without it, with all the main subreddits closed.
Furthermore, if I want to ask something technical I'll ask it on Reddit, and will almost always get an appropriate response. So it's been reliable for me as well.
Also, the fact that I don't need to create another account for a separate platform, just so I can ask a question about a new hobby I've just discovered. It's the fact that it's so centralised that makes it so valuable.
If a Reddit IPO is coming, then this could simply be a form of de-risking. It's a double edged blade, because higher quality 3rd party apps may increase the platform's value while you're on their good side, but rub 3rd party app developers the wrong way and they might start getting clever ideas. A short notification period may reduce the chance of clever ideas reaching manifestation.
I'll go out on a limb and say that most Apollo/3P users would've done the same thing.
Really sucks that they chose death instead.
The examples you cite could not be more different if you tried.
a) One is working towards their IPO. b) One was taken private, and doing nothing would have resulted in Chapter 11 c) The 3rd is a public company, trying to unwind a moonshot project with a budget that dwarfed the cost of the NASA Apollo space program itself.
The common themes in these disparate scenarios is that all 3 leadership "styles" have a strong sense of self-interest (and short term self-preservation), period.
But that's just business.
Its nothing new.
With a leader like Steve Jobs you got a lot of rumors about callous behavior in private but got a polished exterior. Trump upended that when he became popular by being publicly crass.
- $3/user is the Apollo author’s projected costs. Dunno what the rest of that means. “The App Store charges 30%!!!” simply isn’t relevant other than for devs projecting anything that’s hurt them over the last decade into this story
- What are “all the changes”? My understanding is he’d release an update with a new API key with a CC attached.
- If it’s gravely important that the yearly subscriptions who have paid already get free Reddit, why is he shutting down?
- Why is it impossible to give a finite list of customers a refund in 30 days? Again, isn’t he doing it anyway?
- I’ve developed on the App Store since day 30 and don’t know what App Store rule you’re referring to.
- I think your claim is Apple might not let him get an update out? That’s fine. Do what everyone else does and _don’t add the credit card to the old API key_.
- He can’t afford $60K/month? Why not? Charge more than costs. That’s how business works, you don’t have an inalienable right to free APIs.
- he can’t afford $60K/month, redux: he bring in millions a year, right?
- His two claims are:
1. he was offended because Reddit said the app is inefficient - he won’t put it into quotes so I’m guessing it was just generic “you could optimize your api calls” advice
2. He made a very bad joke that he frames as “mostly joking” and frankly, was blackmail. We’re seeing the other side of it now.
Anything else?
There are inevitable more than one Spez at Reddit, but I doubt all 2000+ employees are like that.
for $10/month I'd expect more quality control in communities, and my experience from years of browsing doesn't make me optimistic that my money would improve that.
if that's all you got out of the comment, you clearly aren't trying to see the POV of the app developer. He's under no obligation to keep working for a company that has at this point slandered him behind his back and he can shut down his app whenever he wants.
You are free to judge him but I don't think he's losing sleep over internet comments trying to claim he is disingenuous. Personally, I see no fault on his end, especially when Reddit is dealing the cards to begin with.
This isn't just about an API becoming paid. It's clear they want to phase out 3rd party apps without saying it out loud.
Google and many other companies for almost 2 decades have spent their time scraping petabytes of data from the web. A lot of that with no expectation of payment. Some companies became billionaires off of that ability to freely access mass bulks of data.
Data scraping has always been a grey area, but I find it strange how it's suddenly taken a turn for some people whenever modern AI comes up. We can't really be drawing lines based on what we feel is good/evil, because we will never agree as a whole on what is good/evil.
And as we see yet again in internet history, we see the cost of that comfortability when you put all your eggs in one centralized basket. This isn't the 90's dial-up days; I'd rather create a burner account in 5 minutes and keep my trail scattered across the net than fall into that trap where everything is in one place.
There might genuinely not be a single price that pays for itself, and usage-based pricing might be required.
People are unintentionally grading him on a _huge_ curve, essentially "what if...all I had to do was code and App Store?" That would be nice, I get the impression he's had a fun ride so far where that was pretty much it. Now that the thing he's selling isn't free, he can pound the table and quit, or run the business.
Do you understand your comments are focused on making judgements about _personalities_, not business decisions? Do you see how they assume others are too?
Since you've indulged, please, allow me:
Your comments are aggro and focused on personalities and people. I don't find them useful or interesting.
Yes, I know my stance on this isn't the common one. I have been taking it for a few days on several forums.
I've obviously seen a bunch of people who were happy to dismiss everything I said. Your replies stand out as the only ones that were wildly off-topic and myopic. You are strangely focused on social dynamics and stack-ranking strangers that will never meet, and assume the strangers are doing the same.
You chose to comment on a personality and not a business decision. So I responded in kind. To remind you of your comment:
>I just don't like how many people I see bamboozled by him. Extremely manipulative behavior.
This is not a comment about a business decision. This isn't even a comment about Apollo nor Christian. So yea, I reply simply to voice my disagreement with this assertion as you have indeed brought me into your odd argument.Tit for tat.
And since you asked for my useless and non-interesting opinion by proxy: As a fellow dev (not reddit app dev, just general person who has worked on tech only for it to fail due to powers outside my control), I do empathize with here. Trying to and spin my own emotions as being bamboozled is dishonest, inflammatory, and in my singular case, wrong.
Other than the needless personal attack, that's exactly what he did.
a) 30% on mobile app (made up) would be less than 70% web, but still sizable!
a) Scraping by generative AI companies, etc.?
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
I honestly can't be bothered to answer any of your claims. You obviously don't read links attached to comments. So read this, or just ignore it. Your choice.