You'd think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app.

Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they're the one's submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform.

With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the number of actual visiters to the site will also go down. Thus lowering potential revenue.

If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?

It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.

Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.

I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.

I cannot understand how anyone in his team with a sturdy ethical compass could look him in the eye after seeing that post, especially if they were party to the original conversation. I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate leader get caught in such a high profile absolute falsehood, especially directed at a single individual.

If this reflects the company's culture I have no idea how it can succeed as a public firm. How will Steve deal with criticism from public investors? What is he not willing to lie about?

Can you point to a source for this for those of us not familiar with his comments?

Additionally, someone else in the comments here linked the text of a post[0] made in /r/partnercommunities with similar accusations to what's quoted in TFA.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

This is rich. The entire for-profit Reddit business is based on people contributing data for free, subsidizing their for-profit business. These guys couldn’t be any more clueless.

We owe it to the world to make sure touching the stove DOES burn you, otherwise it's just DARE all over again.

See the section titled “ Bizarre allegations by Reddit of Apollo "blackmailing" and "threatening" Reddit”

I don't use the app and I don't have any great attachment to Reddit, but I wondered if Reddit screwed themselves a bit here by not having a clearer link between the two parties. If either the Reddit employees involved or Steve entered the fray with any sort of bias/grievance, they likely misinterpreted the developer's comments.

Their best case scenario is really Twitter’s case, where they go public, have middling performance, and then get bought out by a billionaire after annoying them with bad moderation decisions lmao

Reddit is worthless without community contributions, and Reddit is very clearly telling the community (both users and developers) that they aren't valuable and should go find somewhere else to spend their time.

I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:

1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API

2. Developers don't want to pay that much

3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly

4. Developers push back and announce app closures

If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.

They think $X is vastly larger than the $Y they would get from third party app developers. So, goodbye to third party app developers.

>Hi Mods,

We’re providing a follow-up on the last API update we made to make sure our mods, developers, and users have clarity on changes we are (and aren’t) making.

API Free Access

This exists and continues to be available.

If usage is legal, non-commercial, and helps our mods, we won’t stand in your way. Moderators will continue to have access to their communities via the API - including sexually explicit content across Reddit. Moderators will be able to see sexually-explicit content even on subreddits they don't directly moderate.

We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API. We will support legal and non-commercial tools like Toolbox, Context Mod, Remind Me, and anti-spam detection bots. And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.

Developers can continue non-commercial usage of the API, free of charge within stated rates. Reddit is also covering hosting for apps via the Developer Platform, which uses the Data API.

Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).

If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.

I'm a little surprised they'd not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.

This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.

Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.

I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?

Pretty much. Long tail of tiny-userbase clients probably doesn't matter that much, I suspect a small number of apps that can reasonably be spot-checked if it complies is the vast majority of traffic.

> I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?

No reason third-party apps couldn't be allowed to be ad-free for premium users too. (or if the API is explicitly pushing "show ad URL X to user in this context" the API can take care of adjusting that)

Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.

Within the realm of folks who are willing to pay for a Reddit skin, imagine that very few of them will just give up the site once their skin is gone.

More likely is that someone comes in and makes a similar app and charges more for it. Power users and professional users will pay, and most of them will gladly pay a premium.

Not gonna lie… I think op said he charged $10 a year. I raised my eyebrows… that should probably be the bottom option of a three-tier monthly price matrix.

I think someone should buy this app and just price it properly based on value add. Im not sure what the various user profiles of Apollo are, but my guess is that there are a few profiles that can be profitably monetized even with the new Reddit API charges. Imho, Reddit is being shortsighted, but they do have a unique and large community.

I'm so annoyed with three-tier monthly price matrices. It's honestly a red flag for me at this point.

On an aesthetic level, I agree with you. For some business, it’s just not needed.

That said…

As someone who has optimized pricing matrixes many times, I will just say that it works incredibly well. Also, for the whatever number people (like you? sort of like me?) who drop out due to “red flags”, there are legions more who allow their behavior to be shaped in an incredibly profitable way.

Is that a matter of fact? How do you know it isn't higher? Also consider that it's not just advertising, it is also about funneling users to new products Reddit may want to develop

From the post:

> Me: "Because I assume the majority of it isn't server costs. I assume the majority is the opportunity cost per user."

> Reddit: "Exactly.""

Reddit's doesn't care about the $0.12, they care about the ads that doesn't get shown.

For reference, approximate global ARPU if converted to monthly for other social networks in 2022: Pinterest: ~$0.5, Snap: ~$1, Twitter: ~$1.6, FB: ~$3.3

This says the IPO roadshow will say Reddit has potential somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, which feels like the right sales pitch to me.

I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.

Apollo will never pay, because it's shutting down. It was always an option to monetize 3PA but Reddit decided not to.

This 100% reeks of business people who don't even care to understand what Reddit is coming in and seeing the raw metrics of "% of users who aren't seeing ads" and the "lost" revenue.

10 years too late.

BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.

Now we dont even have a real r/all (that shows top posts from all subreddits). Partially due to russian bots spamming the_donald on top and then due to reddit not allowing to have a working r/all with opt outs.

You have to be quite blind to not see that it was a propaganda vehicle fuelled by bots.

I know that you do, and you have your reasons, but...well, I don't. I think people are taking reddit commenting way too seriously if heads need to roll over a comment edit.

Suppose dang edited your post to say "I like to get drunk at work", and there it is for the world to see. You never said that, but anyone looking at Hacker News would see:

"qup 10 minutes ago: I like to get drunk at work."

No, that's absolutely not OK! Now, consider that spez could just as easily edit some old Reddit comments someone wrote years ago to say something horrendous. Do you often go back to verify that all your old comments are unchanged? I certainly don't.

I have no way of knowing exactly which comments spez edited, or how significantly he changed them. And honestly, the not knowing is simply inexcusable. All we know is that he has tampered with the production database, not how often or how much.

Dang can edit my comments. (He does have to edit comments sometimes, I'm sure, but for reasons you approve of.) I would find it annoying. Until this comment thread, though, I'm not sure I would have considered that dang would get fired for it.

I don't think I nor anyone should be held accountable at work for comments made on Hacker News. If I lost my job over dang editing my post, I would think I worked for a really shit company and nobody went to bat for me. Basically, I would continue believing the interaction on the forum was totally unimportant, and I would be dumbfounded by the idiocy of my manager for elevating it to that a fireable offense, particularly after I let them know I did not make that comment.

FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.

HN isn't partnering with the CIA to catch some Russian spy by modifying a comment so that the drop is in a monitored location. He's just going to delete the comment if it contains something it shouldn't.

> FWIW, nobody needs to worry about me. I do not have a boss.

Great, but now bring it back to real life, because a ton of people are held accountable at work for comments made on social media and do have a boss.

Bringing it back to real life: I don't fire my people for what they say on the internet.

This is the saddest thing I've read all week and my uncle just died.

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...

Should he have been able to? No, that's a concerning setup for the reasons you say.

How bad is what he actually did, from what we actually know? For about an hour, comments that said "fuck spez" after he banned the pizzagate sub were changed to "fuck $the_donald_mod_name".

I just don't find that a big deal. It's not like editing your comment to say you drink at work.

If he only made those changes and solemnly vowed never to do it again, fine, shouldn't have done it but whatever. But who besides him can say for sure?

You mean changing fuck spez to fuck $mod?

> We just don't know to what degree

Well I'm not sure what auditing they have, and I know there's public databases of all Reddit comments. It's been a while and I'm not aware of other claims.

My point was more that you two were arguing at crossroads. You seemed more concerned about what could have happened, and they were talking about what has evidence.

> He played his hand that he is willing to put words in other people's mouths basically just for entertainment, so why should we believe he hasn't done it in much more important cases?

I find this logic a bit backwards. Willing to do something when the stakes and impact are low to annoy someone trolling you is very different from changing comments in important situations.

Before: I have no evidence that spez tampers with anyone's reddit comments in production

After: I have evidence that spez tampered with ONE reddit comment in production.

The new status quo does not increase the likelyhood of "I have evidence that spez may be inexplicably tampering with old reddit comments habitually" being more true.

And thinking that it does shows a poor understanding of human behaviour and nature, especially under stressful emotional circumstances.

You're generalizing the action described in the article to something that feels very different to me. Yes, his actions fall under "editing comments"; yes, your hypothetical falls under "editing comments"; yes, I think that his actions make him more likely to do something like your hypothetical; no, I don't think that we should treat his actions like your hypothetical because they are different.

> Reddit CEO Steve Huffman today admitted that he had edited Reddit user comments that criticized and insulted him, wielding his power to anonymously change references to his own username, and replace them with moderators of the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald.

> Huffman — who posts on the site as "spez" — admitted to the transgression after being called out by users of r/the_donald, saying he was inspired to edit the comments after a spate of insults emanating from the pro-Trump subreddit. "I messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," Huffman said, indicating that the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults.

* Any media reporting on what’s happening within Reddit. Remember when WSB was all over the news cycles? Picture that but with some malicious mod/admin setting somebody up to take the fall for equities fraud.

* Any person or entity with legal or fincial muscle looking to protect their reputation or product. You don’t want Wizards of the Coast sending the Pinkertons to your door because they think you’re selling stolen goods.

* Anyone who values their own reputation in the internet. Imagine being an aspiring politician and having somebody insert racial slurs into your historical posts.

The issue isn’t somebody being petty, it’s that there is potential for systemic abuse of power and trust.

This isn't the old days when everything on the internet was in good fun. For a lot of people these days, internet unironically srs bsns. And a lot of those people think it's okay to harass folks over their passing thoughts on the internet.

what attacks are you specifically referring to here, other than kicking them off the site?

I don't think there is a neutral interpretation better than "the_donald was a lot of trouble for reddit as a business and social network, because they caused hostility, even by their existence, and it's not reddit's business to make humans less tribal, so why continue supporting them? Especially after they were clearly brigaiding and manipulating front page content. This front page manipulation was different from what the reddit owners wanted to be on the front page, which for the most part is benign and fun stuff that's easy to monetize."

The admins always had some new rules and some specific ways they had to be enforced, and were always happy to heap ever-increasing punishments on the subreddits capriciously

Oh, you can't say "Retard" any more, if we find any more examples of this prohibited hate speech your subreddit is going to be actioned against. Also we banned half of your most active moderators for wrongthink. We'll continue banning moderators and levying punishments until the situation is rectified.

I think we're on the same page overall here, just that I never put any faith in the sanctity of Reddit's database

They sure as fuck were not! Even to this day, /Conservative still claims the moral high ground bastion of free speech and balance while banning you for any slight question of the narrative being encouraged. Importantly, this is VERBATIM what they claim /politics does.

On the other hand, we expect some level of fairness and professionalism from Reddit and its administrators.

But Reddit is and always has pretended to be a "big name" company like Youtube, Facebook, etc.

They would even feel good about it because they have managed to obtain an unfair advantage and get away with it.

It’s merely a dick move, unbecoming of a social media giant.

An average doctor probably does more unethical or criminal things in every given month out of tiredness coupled with inattention, but that’s banal & preventable negligence.

What Spez did was, outside of any ethical considerations, a window into his understanding of his relationship with the site and its users, and his lack of any sense of obligation to them.

> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?

> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.

> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.

seems reasonable.

I really don't see why Reddit doesn't just purchase the app.

They've all but stated openly that their goal is to kill Apollo in its current form. Why pay millions to do that when they can accomplish it for free?

How long will Reddit survive if they don’t do this? I have no idea. But I do know the CEO has to deliver more than happy users.

Had they set out a reasonable timeline for the new prices, they would have had a new revenue stream. Instead they killed it and at the same time created an incentive for some of their most active users to leave.

This is *literally* what is expected of someone running a company with intitutional investors - anything other than this and investors are not interested.

What more proof do we need that there is nothing more important to a small group of humans that own all the money, than them getting more money?

What is the employee culture like it Reddit?

I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite.

Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions based on personal relationships, rather than anything else.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...

I don’t really understand how they could make that hire or why they would have thought that person was a good choice…

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 hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.

I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.

Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.

I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing.

I don't know how monthly subscriptions work, but yearly subscription refunds are pro-rated.

> I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing

I'm not, at least not for apps like this that need consistent revenue to support regular maintenance and/or server costs in an era where customers balk when an app costs more than a few dollars. To achieve this you end up balancing whether or not to serve ads, hope you can just grow enough new users forever, charge for major updates, charge a subscription, or beg for tips. While there are some exceptions, you can probably tell that ads or subscriptions are generally winning this nowadays.

One-time purchases are a tricky thing, since you've realisitcally now precluded ever charging for a major update. This is great for them, and might be for you if you've gotten your math right, but if you haven't (or it changes) then you're stuck. And, for better or for worse, they tend to be the loudest users.

Marco Arment talks about this balance in general on an episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast a couple weeks ago when discussing how Casey (another host) should price an app he's writing. For context if folks aren't aware, Marco created Overcast, which is a popular 3rd party iOS podcast app. The discussion spans a couple episodes but I the post-show of [Episode 535](https://atp.fm/535) captures the gist.

Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.

Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?

Yet for some reason, the Twitter client devs (who had happily shifted all their users to a subscription-only model) all of a sudden realized that they had sold a bunch of one year subs they had sold were going to be useless as soon as Twitter turned off the API and, more pertinent to their pocketbooks, all those customers would be entitled to request and receive a refund through the App Store for their now non-functional app. The devs started whining to their customers about being “small businesses” and having the food snatched out of their families’ mouths and why would anyone be so cruel as to seek a refund?

Christian is showing a hell of a lot more integrity and toughness than the Twitter client authors.

Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space?

If he isn't "10+ million"-wealthy that's extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.

But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:

* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.

* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"

Because according to Reddit, the problem with Apollo is the opportunity cost of Reddit not being able to monetize its users.

Acquiring Apollo is user acquisition. Destroying the app does not necessarily mean that all those users will now start using Reddit's official app and become monetizable, they might just quit Reddit entirely. By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.

After what Reddit did to Alien Blue I don't know how many Apollo users would be too keen on playing that game again. I personally have no confidence that a Reddit owned Apollo would retain what makes the current app great.

> 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 [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance."

"By way of illustration:

If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."

Generally speaking the law doesn't care whether or not you personally think it applies, merely that you've broken it.

Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs, which Reddit was not under a legal obligation to continue providing at historical rates that Apollo had based its entire product around, despite long-standing advice not to do so.

"I didn't refuse to transport your goods, I just said it would cost a billion dollars per pound to do it and you couldn't afford it" is not the gotcha that you think it is. The law is technical but it's enforced by humans.

It's straightforward: Apollo and Reddit have a longstanding business relationship, via these APIs that Reddit has provided for a long time at zero cost. Reddit generally no longer wants third parties to use the API, so they are increasing the price to a level that they know will cause everyone to balk (other third-party clients are closing up too) so that they can direct that traffic to their own native client and first-party sites, while knowing that Apollo has these long-standing business relationships of their own that are built on this relationship with Reddit.

In short, reddit is deliberately taking action to sabotage and cause economic harm to a business partner by changing aspects of the relationship that make it impossible for the partner to fulfill their contracts to third parties, so that Reddit can direct that business to themselves instead.

That is an improper taking under tortious interference, and the rest of the tests (intent actual economic loss - not just refunds but future income, etc) are trivially satisfied here.

I know people are libertarians here but the right to swing your fist ends at someone else's face, and legally speaking if you take actions that you know will result in a business partner being forced to sustain economic losses due to your improper breaking of your business relationship with them, you are generally liable for that damage you cause to the partner. That is the basic concept of tortious interference, you're paying for the damage you caused to your business partner. Swing your fist and hit someone's face and you get to pay for the surgery.

(IANAL and Reddit's lawyers would obviously say their conduct is proper, but, generally this is the type of situation where people can unexpectedly get themselves into legitimate legal trouble based on actions they think are perfectly legitimate. And generally they may have been legitimate if you didn't have this prior relationship, that changes things! It's different to not build an API at all, vs having the API be free and have third parties start selling clients and then to stop doing the API.)

(As a sibling comment notes, estoppel is another - if you promise something to someone, even a verbal promise, and they take a financially detrimental action on the expectation that you will follow through on your side of the promise and you don't, then you are generally liable for the financial harm you have caused them too. Libertarianism doesn't mean you can wiggle out of contracts, even verbal ones.)

This is the part that you seem to be confusing.

Apollo and Reddit do not appear to be business partners. Nor does Apollo seem to have any contractual agreement with Reddit, outside of the API usage agreement.

The API terms were lasted updated May 25, 2016. These include this language:

> a. Fees. Reddit reserves the right to charge fees for future use or access to the Reddit APIs, rates to be determined in Reddit’s sole discretion.

I assume these are the terms that Apollo are bound to. If that's the case, I don't see how you can support your claim. Reddit is using it's contractual right.

Sorry, I am confused what you are arguing here. If you think a usage agreement is binding they are certainly business partners. They may still be business partners or generally covered by tortious interference even if they do not have an explicit contract either.

Precisely. If the API agreement wasn't binding, why would it bother saying Reddit reserve the right to vary the fees?

Reddit's Data API TOS has always allowed it the right to start charging for access. That it chose not to do so until recently was its prerogative. That it chooses to do so now, is also it's prerogative.

This is not a unfair taking, since Reddit isn't taking anything from Christian, they are simply no longer freely providing something.

This is not an issue of estoppel, since Reddit never promised to make their API free forever. And Reddit gave him due notice, as required by their TOS, of changes that would take effect...several months after notice was given of the changes...

This is not tortious inteference, since Apollo could have continued to provide Reddit services to their customers, though this might have required Christian to change his business model.

This is not slander, since on the call Christian clearly suggests to Reddit to give him $10 million and he'll go away and not make a fuss about things.

It's irrelevant that they have a "prior relationship" since that means nothing in this context, since Christian did not have a binding contractual relationship that entitled Christian to perpetual free access to the Reddit Data API.

As I said, I'm looking at this from the legal perspective, not the emotional perspective.

So, this is the one thing I'm not sure I entirely agree with. While it's true that Apollo could have changed its business model, they only had 30 days to migrate users to a new business model, including some users that are on a yearly model.

Furthermore, Reddit had previously stated to Christian that the timeline was flexible, and that they'd be open to extending it. They then walked back on that promise, leaving Apollo scrambling to move all their existing users to the new model in very limited time. And that's after telling christian multiple time earlier in the year that no change to the pricing policy was being considered for at least the year to come.

There's essentially no solution for Christian here. They don't have the money to pay for the usage of their existing 50k yearly that won't migrate for up to 12 months.

While I'm not a lawyer, I'd be very surprised if a case couldn't be made with this behavior.

Not that it'd ever go to court anyways - it'd be a huge time and money sink with unclear outcomes. Better to focus on the next steps.

I am a lawyer. I can say, with 100% certainty, that this case would never make it to trial. It's unlikely that Christian would even make it to discovery, as based on the facts stated, by Christian himself, even viewed in the light most favorable to Christian, he does not have any colorable legal claims.

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.

I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?

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

At least for the yearly subscriptions

"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...

Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.

So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.

Hope is not a strategy - yet appears to have been the only strategy Apollo employed.

Or at least a much larger time to recalibrate that "hope".

> So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.

If you read the post, it's not just about the willingness of users to pay. It's also about the existing obligations (prepaid subscriptions), the timeline of the changes, and the amount of work that would be required on his end to adapt to the new changes within the next three weeks.

None of that would be an issue with the proposed solution of Reddit charging the users directly.

He could fire up a new system with appropriate pricing as soon as he can manage. All customers, if they want to come back, are then forced into the new system at new pricing levels. Maybe this takes a month or two or three. He's not losing money in the mean time and can re-open at something resembling a profitable stance when he can do so.

Yes, it sucks. But there's a path here if he wants to go for it. I don't blame him for throwing in the towel. He's tired of getting yanked around. I would be very hesitant to keep throwing good time(money) after bad.

Good call out. It's like the business equivalent of:

You changed the rules of the game because you didn't like how I played. So I'm not even going to bother playing with the new rules. I retire.

The rules of the game changed so severely that playing the game isn't just disagreeable, it's impossible.

What would you have done instead?

Charge $5 monthly and refund the annual fee for those who want it (which is already being done it seems, regardless of Apollo's future).

Apollo has options. They're just choosing to shutdown. That's the founder's prerogative, of course, but it is totally unnecessary.

Look at the support in this thread alone - Apollo has tons of people willing to throw money at them.

He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app. Now he's put into a position to support those customers at $2.50/month. (He estimates their server cost is $0.10 per month.) That's an instant $125,000 per month out of his own pocket that he can't recoup from existing customers for at least the next 6 months.

Over the course of 2023, he'll have to pay Reddit $1 million MORE than he has made from the app this year.

Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps. That's fine. That's their right. But it's certainly not the app developer's fault that he's forced to quit.

This sentiment is obviously false. Reddit doesn't want to support third-party apps at Reddit's own expense. That is reasonable.

> He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app

And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.

I take him at his word that he was willing to pay a reasonable amount.

Again, Reddit has the right to run their business however they wish. Not arguing that it should be free.

This is subjective. He's basically saying he's willing to pay an amount that fit into his old, not well thought out business model, and it's up to Reddit to pay for the rest.

That's unfair. He also had way more than 30 day's notice and chose not to do anything until the last moment. He was hoping his idea of "reasonable" meant zero changes for his customers - but that was foolish and short sighted. He basically hoped he could cover all of his API access expenses with $10 a year per user... it doesn't even sound reasonable when you say it out loud, given how much content an average Reddit user consumes daily.

He has had several months to prepare for a new billing model - but chose to do nothing.

> He has had several months to prepare for a new billing model - but chose to do nothing.

I like how you keep on refusing to read the article, but claiming things from it that are straight up untrue.

Reddit announced two months ago that there would be pricing changes. But not what those prices would be. Even the loosest possible interpretation of the words "notice" and "several" barely covers that.

Explicitly:

> On April 18th, Reddit announced changes that would be coming to the API, namely that the API is moving to a paid model for third-party apps. Shortly thereafter we received phone calls, however the price (the key element in an announcement to move to a paid API) was notably missing, with the intent to follow up with it in 2-4 weeks.

And at the time, there was absolutely no indication that the prices would be this high.

> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.

They announced the actual prices six weeks later, which would put it May 30th. The day he posted this: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

Literally the most cursory of reading of the first few paragraphs of the OP would have given you this information.

If you aren't going to bother to read it (that's your prerogative), then don't bother making easily provably false assertions as if they were facts, either.

That's not what he said. He said that it's not feasible to transfer from the current pricing with 30 days notice.

That choice is entirely on Reddit, the situation did not demand such a short notice period. They could have smoothed it out but chose not to.

I find it strange to push the blame onto someone who was assured by Reddit of their intention to charge a reasonable price, and to work with 3rd parties on a flexible timeline for the introduction of the charges.

The worst I can say about the Apollo developer is that he believed Reddit were acting in good faith. Reddit on the other hand look like incompetent arseholes.

Christian has already shared his correspondence on Reddit with this. He pretty clearly sought and received regular assurances that when and if Reddit moved their API to a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost and with a flexible timeline to accommodate third party apps.

After telling him no such big moves were happening in 2023 they changed their mind, set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.

What does this even mean? "Reasonable" is subjective - and from Reddit's perspective, I'd bet they believe the fees are reasonable.

It's on the business operator to mitigate risk. Apollo didn't do that - and is now throwing in the towel instead of charging their customer's more.

> set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.

Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.

Just stop.

You’ve been told multiple times, by multiple people, that this was not the case.

You’ve been provided the timeline, which you refuse to acknowledge.

You very well know that he was not provided the pricing until 8 days ago.

At this point, you continuing to say this is just being disingenuous and talking in bad faith.

What, exactly, are you getting out of this? Is unreasonably placing the blame on a single developer your way of getting your rocks off?

You may want to believe and be sympathetic toward Apollo - fine.

That doesn't change the circumstances nor realities. Apollo screwed up, and is now throwing in the towel. It's really hard to be sympathetic towards a business operator that's made a series of bad choices and now is playing the victim card and shutting down.

You’re the only one who is finding it hard, and your constant push to shift the blame off of a massive corporation and onto a developer is frankly weird.

Re-evaluate your choices if you truly believe this, but it’s clear you are the extreme minority here.

This may go down in history as a case-study in how not to operate an internet business.

Says the person who has been told multiple times to stop making things up and incorrectly reframing the facts by multiple different people. The projection is strong with this one.

> This may go down in history as a case-study in how not to operate an internet business.

It certainly will, but not Apollo’s handling as you so desperately want, for whatever reason.

Reddit fucked up, are probably going to lose a chunk of their most active users and volunteer moderators, and will probably materially damage their IPO as a result of this.

You seem to be one of very few people who refuse to even remotely consider this idea.

There is no chance I'm paying for a "service" where power-mods will ban you for disagreeing with their radical politics, where most of the subreddits are actively taken over by similar power mods who push their radical ideologies, and where any attempts to evade this stuff and simply use the website can get you permanently banned from the service.

Imagine spotify, but if you listen to the wrong songs, you get banned from other random artists, and if you try to work around this you just get banned outright from spotify.

No thanks.

In that case, app developers have several options:

* start showing users ads, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit

* start charging a monthly fee for the app, and use that to pay both themselves and Reddit

* some combination of these two (e.g. pay a subscription for ad-free use)

Sure, Reddit could make this easier for app developers, but isn't at all basically the same thing at the end of the day? Reddit wants (or needs? I have no idea what their financials look like) to make a certain amount of money per-user or per page view. Apps take home ~100% of their profits currently, and make Reddit ~nothing. So Reddit is pricing in a profit rate into API access.

I mean, just to look at Apollo, they have 166K ratings on the Apple App Store, and surely far more users than that. Reddit wants $20M a year from them. That's high, maybe too high, but how does it compare to the value of (say) a million users a year on the official Reddit app? If Apollo switched to a subscription model on which they charged $2 a month to users, would they be able to pay Reddit's API fees? (Assuming those API fees would drop by at least 50% after non-paying users quit using Apollo.)

The issue is that the actual numbers are closer to 2,000%, not 80%. [0]

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

- Reddit is charging the equivalent of 20x its published revenue per user for the API.

- The new API agreements ban the display of any advertising by API users. (Apollo did not show ads, but other third-party clients did, and Reddit claims the low quality of ads was harming Reddit by association.)

- Charging $5/month would be break-even given the API pricing, and only for new customers. Apollo would still have to serve earlier subscribers at a huge loss. API fees would certainly not “drop by 50%” — the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users, so the average API usage per customer would _increase_.

There's a lot of strange stuff happening in your comment. On the one hand, let's take for granted that Reddit is charging 20x its revenue per average user for the API. But that's just the average user; as you yourself point out "the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users". Surely they are worth much more to Reddit than the average, extremely casual user?

The underlying problem explained in the post is that the author pre-sold access to Reddit through an app to users, while this access was actually conditioned on the continuing availability of access to the Reddit API. No doubt this does put the author in an uncomfortable position! Given that the current plan is to shut down the app anyway, surely cancelling active subscriptions should also be on the table? Subscribers are going to lose access to Reddit through Apollo either way! So realistically, what we're talking about here is whether $5/month is a reasonable price point for power users. My answer is... maybe?

I think my instinct is to say that this is all ultimately the place where negotiations are supposed to happen. Reddit needs to go from making zero dollars off the API to making something. Is what they want to charge too high? Probably so. But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.

Is that the case? Every reaction I have seen has been to the magnitude of the price, which is much, much, much more than what Reddit makes off of users

Now, even if they backtrack on this later on in a few months or years, they burned the good will, so I doubt developers are going invest the time to make a good Reddit client after this.

Truth, being perhaps the most interesting, because the main personality behind it sort of compelled it to be semi-well-known simply because of media coverage. The other attempts do not share that effect, however.

You're right that early movers have some advantage but it's a big world and the Next Big Thing doesn't have to win the whole market on day one - only enough of it to plant seeds that can grow over time.

A text website is easy to run.

Its greed that they got here. They made choices, and then as a concequence of those choices they made choices that are significantly reducing the value they provide to their users. Its enshittification, its killing the golden goose, its destroying a public good for the benefit of investors who don't care about anything other than making a return.

Wikipedia is pretty fantastic. Signal is pretty great. I'm pretty happy with NPR. Archive.org makes me happy.

Appeal to people with money (the professional class) and then beg.

I feel like the next great social media platform will result from a rich person disillusioned by reddit (a Bryan Acton type) creating a platform resistant to "next quarters profit"-ism.

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

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 really beyond the pale.

From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?

And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good.

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 of it either.

Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?

Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.

But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo

1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat

2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App

A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit

3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper

You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.

likely untrue. its not just 3rd party apps it affects. it changes api access for anything using the API

for instance modtools will be affected which means literally everyone can be affected desktop or not https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/12rt5f8/how_wil...

some subreddits make heavy use of bots

these are all going to be hugely affected

Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.

And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.

Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good

Yeah, but that adage has never been true. It's just something said by people who get bad press to make themselves feel better.

Reddit is not a bank account

I argue bases on them but they do not matter to me.

I do not use a 3th party App. For me it makes sense. But if they lied they will hurt themselves anyway

Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?

We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.

The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.

The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.

It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.

It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”

Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.

plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:

If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.

you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)

voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.

Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)

Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.

that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.

If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.

But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.

Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?

Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing

Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing

The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".

I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.

So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.

It is when you're about to restate what I've said...

> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term

Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?

> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".

Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?

> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either

> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO

> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people

Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"

It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.

My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.

I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.

It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.

In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.

To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.

If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.

Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.

What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.

Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.

Reddit won’t work without API access… it just turns into a 4Chan-like cesspool over night without auto moderation.

After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."

That's not what made Reddit seem like a cesspool to me. It was the commenters.

Mods can be great, and many of them are. But... there's plenty of bad ones out there that make participating in some communities stifling at best.

I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.

Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.

This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.

"Dumb question, but why is OS or browser support necessary? Couldn't an HTML canvas element and some JS that can parse the file format display any kind of image that you might want?"

Persecuting people who ask sincere and relevant questions is Reddit-like, and it happens right here on HN. And of course, when I asked why this guy's question was downvoted, my question was attacked.

That is pathetic. I don't know exactly what the solution is, but people are abandoning Stack Overflow for similar BS. I'm just not going to go quietly.

Downvote away.

That one is not downvoted currently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203733

Sometimes posts get downvotes "in the noise"; I've had some of my posts go to -1 or even -2 before jumping to >30. It happens; people have axes to grind, think you're stupid for asking a question, etc. and by chance sometimes they cluster just after you posted. Don't assign too much value to it; it's very rare that I see a normal on-topic question like that downvoted.

That currently stands at -3. And heaven forbid someone decry THAT. I mean, my comment two above this one stands at a negative. That's shitty behavior. So yes, I will call out those who bring down this site by attacking other users.

I've written an entire Stack Overflow rant on "a basic but valid question getting downvoted"[1] and this kind of stuff is one of the main reasons I no longer contribute there, so I do sympathize, but HN is not Stack Overflow; downvotes "mean" less here in the first place, and it doesn't seem to be a structural problem. I've asked plenty of basic questions over the years, and I've rarely been downvoted for it, and some of the replies have been very detailed and excellent.

At the end of the day it's impossible to get all thousands of people that can vote on HN to act reasonably, so sometimes unfair things happen. It is what it is.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

Oh --- wow --- another SNI clause!

A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.

Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.

https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/

HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.

I know reddit is pushing it's all but even that is not 3th party apps.

I just hope they don't get rid of old.reddit.com

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255714/reddit-app-dau-w...

Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless

Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.

Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?

Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.

As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.

I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.

In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.

Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019768/us-retailers-app...

I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.

The app sucks.

I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to

Apparently all five of them use my little web browser extension with Reddit-specific features, requested by users.

But I can guarantee that your estimate is totally wrong.

I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.

As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.

And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.

The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.

But he will be the person to increase revenue anyway.

Because he can now say that whatever app survived this is now paying for it instead.

As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.

For me I will continue to use reddit as I have before.

For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.

is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.

I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.

But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.

What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.

The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.

Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.

Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.

So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.

If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.

There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric

Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.

they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.

I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.

That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...

Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.

Hmmm ...

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?

They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.

I could speak (or write) for half an hour about how the API changes are a net benefit, & how they will force Reddit to internalize the support systems & anti-abuse infrastructure they’ve dumped on users for a decade, as well as improve user privacy. I have a position.

My position is simply summarisable as “This is a Chaos Ladder Festival which will rob oxygen from the rightful problems that should be protested”.

This is Pride month. The anti-LGBTQ legislation going up around the US has a precedent in post-Weimar Germany. The people promoting these blackouts over “Reddit is ending abuse of their API” sure aren’t protesting hatred and legalized harassment. This should be a month where people are politically organizing on Reddit to defeat hatred. This convenient dead-cat-issue now has stolen all the protest oxygen.

But let’s sidestep that approach to the issue for a second.

There’s a very pertinent point buried in this protest: the official Reddit websites and app are nigh-on useless for visually impaired people to use. The app especially is garbage. You know what would never get protested widespread by hundreds of subreddits? Reddit being unavailable to the visually impaired. It’s practically a footnote in this protest. It’s included as an afterthought, a backshore to prevent challenges to the good faith and legitimacy of the protest. Blind people aren’t getting usability out of this protest; the unusability of the new website and the app is a direct result of the development frameworks they use to abstract the development of the website and the app. The framework devs aren’t going to change their frameworks.

Yet another thing is that two-day boycotts … don’t … work. It’s “we’re going out of town for a weekend”, except at scale. It just shows Reddit that some moderation teams will participate in a power-flex protest that is a result of some folks angry that Reddit is no longer their golden goose, no longer laying golden eggs for them.

p.s. I

A coordinated blackout on Reddit to protest the new Ugandan anti lgbt legislation wouldn't make as much sense or be as effective. There are regularly posts voted to the front page of reddit about these new laws and other human rights issues and what you might be able to do to help if interested.

These different issues don't have to be in competition and aren't analogous to each other.

Nuke reddit (only on the edge extension store it looks like) is giving their frontends a workout.

You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.

They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream.

For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO)

the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business.

If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc.

In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams.

To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.

My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.

That's an effective end-run on Godwin's law. Well played, sir.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand, and to be frank, I get enough LGBTQ propaganda firehosed at me every other which way, thank you very much.

Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat.

Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...

Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...

In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.

I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.

And do you think if Steve had made this offer and Christian had accepted it, would we have even heard a second of this recording?

It was not Steve on the call, it was an unnamed Reddit employee. Christian makes this clear in his post.

The misinterpretation came from the ‘quieting down’ expression, which referred to the API usage (I think quite obviously).

instead of your thought experiment, I'd request you just pose your impartial take on the most charitable view for Steve and explain why in that view it was a reasonable act of good leadership for him to make these comments. Otherwise I don't think we're really talking about the same thing.

You've quoted the transcript elsewhere for people to "decide for themselves" and I'm not sure how you could be convinced we all did in fact read it and already did, and just don't agree with you.

There's a common error where, because one believes they have been aggressed upon, they can behave as if they actually have been aggrieved without actually examining realistic positions of actual evidence. I've seen this sort of thing happen in a variety of circumstances. Whether or not the Apollo developer intended to threaten or not doesn't actually change the behavior of the person who took whatever was said as a threat, and acting in a reconciliatory manner when one feels threatened is actually a very reasonable thing to do.

> 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."

In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.

You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.

If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.

And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.

Christian: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.

I just listened to your audio link several times, and I totally disagree that it sounded like a threat.

Also, the call was not with Steve, as Christian explained:

> Have you talked to CEO Steve Huffman about any of this?

> I requested a call to talk to Steve about some suggestions I had, his response was "Sorry, no. You can give name-redacted a ping if you want."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0

I think that interpretation is incorrect and based on Christian's attitude towards the whole thing. More likely it's projection on the part of Reddit's CEO.

It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.

Of course this was a threat. It wasn't a language issue. And the post-hoc explanation was nonsense. It was an obvious and indisputable threat.

And it’s even more amazing when people think they are smarter “than the average” and go the exact opposite way just because, failing a proper evaluation.

(for the record, I almost feel like he's in the right to do so. Still weird how this is being presented)

It seems like he was trying to invoke a sort of ironic use of quiet down to ease the situation, but ironic extortion is still extortion.

The alternative is that he has no choice but to shut down the app, given that they've announced what the price will be 30 days before it's introduction. Even if he'd said nothing there would have been a shitstorm; the timing would be obvious.

Reasonable notice of the price increase would have given 3rd party developers time to monetise and meet the new costs. A more reasonable price could have been borne by 3rd party apps with very little fuss. Making API access a premium Reddit feature would have put even more money in Reddit's pocket. Buying out the 3rd party apps would have been unpopular but would give Reddit the appearance of being less incompetent, underhanded, and duplicitous.

Instead, Reddit made literally the worst possible choice in this situation: alienating their users and the moderators that do most of the work on the platform.

I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...

"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."

That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.

Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.

It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.

The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.

To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.

They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Reliance-based_estopp...

At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.

The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.

I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?

> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.

Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?

For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.

I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.

But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!

No, but sarcasm is a tool and using it carries its own meaning, especially in negotiations.

Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.

Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.

Days afterward, spez got on a conference call and falsely claimed that Christian was blackmailing him. An employee of Reddit itself affirmed that he said it in a summary of the call they posted to a (private) sub of high-level moderators, replicated here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...

(The summary in the main thread was written by members of the community on the call, the comment I linked is Reddit’s own summary.)

Reddit has also repeated the same claim off-the-record to multiple journalists.

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)

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.

Bit soon to whitewash history.

Uh, no. Turns out that there's a noticeable percentage of Americans who are white men for whom education is apparently not relevant, but they're far from a majority - they're just obnoxiously loud and in your face.

And I'm not going to say that they're dumb, but it's undeniable that approximately half of people in the USA are of below-average intelligence.

Think of the average Mexican, the most average you can picture. Now think that half of the population is WORSE than that (in terms of education, culture and "dont give a shit about you")

Its frankly scary to realize the situation of at least half of the world.

In the US, the male to female ratio is roughly 97 to 100. This means that in most areas of the country, there are slightly more females than males.

White men make up 31% of the US population.

Just under 90% of Americans have a high school diploma or GED: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

A year of high school history about how the south actually were totally the good guys with slavery and it wasn't that bad has turned out to not be the wonderful enlightenment we should strive for.

What are they buying? What would be advertised to them, and by whom?

I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.

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 Simmon 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/

Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that.

I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with.

likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.

Not against a private company, no. Reddit is still owned by Conde-Nast, I believe. What to do with it is up to them.

Also in general *employees* don't bring shareholder lawsuits. Even if you own significant stock, getting fired for suing your boss is usually a losing proposition.

I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.

It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?

How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn't seem possible.

> Why not just increase the price of Apollo?

> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.

> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.

> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.

> 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.

We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.

Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.

This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.

The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.

Nobody really cares about your opinion on him or a monthly subscription; he explicitly said it's not going to happen and at the end of the day that's his decision to make, not yours.

He doesn't even need to give a reason. It's his project to manage.

It's also clear you haven't read the article, because he explicitly calls out a bunch of criticisms you have of him directly.

> 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."

> Your initial post in April sounded quite optimistic. Are you dumb?

> In hindsight, kinda yeah. Many of the other developers and folks I talked to were much less optimistic than I was, but I legitimately had great interactions with Reddit for many years prior to last week (they were kind, communicative, gave me heads up of changes), so when they said they were aiming to have pricing that would be fair and based in reality, I honestly believed them. That was foolish of me in hindsight, and maybe could have had a different outcome if I was more aggressive in the beginning. Sorry. /canadian

> (And to be clear, they did indeed say this. They used the word "substantive" and I wanted to make sure we had the same definition of something "having a firm basis in reality and therefore important, meaningful, or considerable")

> > Reddit: "That's exactly right. And I think, thankfully, the word is exactly the right one. It's going to have a firm basis in reality. I also just looked it up. We're going to try to be as transparent as we can."

Reading this with 15 years of corporate experience the developer was at best naive. In corporate speak Reddit is completely consistent in their actions and words. It's a crappy situation and I'm sure the developer is a great person and I agree Reddit did them dirty but also that's how these things work. You don't take dependencies on third parties without a lawyer and a contract.

> There's not gonna be any change on it.

Nobody can make this promise, those are just words to make you feel good.

> There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.

Plans can be made quickly. Action can be taken without a plan. What is the guarantee on lead time?

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

Define improvement. Improved for who?

> It's going to have a firm basis in reality.

I have no doubt that Reddit based the API pricing on them making money on it. We can debate if they got it right.

> We're going to try to be as transparent as we can.

Try is a weasel word, this sentence is meaningless. Zero transparency can be provided and still meet the standard of being "as transparent as possible". "Try" here even gives them the opportunity to be less transparent than possible. The Glomar defense ("We can neither confirm nor deny") is "as transparent as possible" and actually meets a higher standard than Reddit promised here because the CIA didn't just "try", they successfully provided the most possible transparency (almost none).

> I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you.

Y'all need to find a better hobby. As per his own words, he also clearly realizes that in hindsight he should have been more pessimistic. But that's all moot now. The past is in the past. Pointing it out is not going to do anything.

Reddit could simply treat them reasonably and things would be fine. There's no need for favoritism, they just need to stop being actively harmful. And part of that is the fees (they're not reasonable).

It's like, I know this funded company that's doing a lot of work using intel SGX, if intel kill it, about 80 people lose the jobs and several million in VC goes up in smoke. It's insane to me that people are building businesses that can be killed by 3rd parties that they have no hope of influencing, and have no contracts with.

Another chapter of the internet drama concludes, I suppose. I wish them all the best and I'll be curious to see if reddit survives.

How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? Or a business having to renew their contract with the power company?

You pay for your cloud provider...

First being Reddit wouldn't have suddenly needed to stop supporting 3rd party apps for free - apps that only cost Reddit money and generate no income. If the API made Reddit money, instead of costing them money, there would be no need for a sudden change. The "suddenness" of this change is due, in no small part, to the cost of supporting basically free-loading 3rd party apps that consume resources but offer nothing in exchange.

Secondly, Apollo would have formed a business model that supported paying for API access, be it monthly subscriptions, freemium, etc. The current model of pay-once-use-forever is simply unsustainable (on an obvious level) - and the $12.99 annual subscription equally so. The Apollo model, as it was, required free API access.

Even if Apollo had been paying for API access all along, and Reddit decided to suddenly hike the prices - Apollo would have been in a better position to raise their own prices accordingly, and would have had a userbase more accepting of paying.

Paying for API access also compels the business to be more efficient in their calls. As it was, there was little-to-no incentive to operate large content caching on your own servers/services, etc. I have seen, but do not know their credibility, that Apollo was not very efficient in it's API calls and essentially hammered the API far more than was necessary. If you're not paying for it, why would you bother designing a more efficient system?

The API fees were inevitable. More are coming - be sure of that, as corporations tighten their figurative belts and look for ways to stop bleeding money.

And the "hammering" is addressed and strongly countered in the article.

Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications...

$12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low.

$12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.

If the polling was the bulk of the traffic they could just remove that feature.

And there's no way the compute burden is an entire dollar to do 4000 requests.

Specifically, the $12.99/year model is floating a ton of free users, in addition to paying for server resource usage. None of that $12.99 currently was allocated to paying Reddit, and we know Apollo calculated an approximate cost of $2.50 per user per month with the new API fees.

This $2.50 fee seems to align costs with what we can reasonably expect Reddit to earn per user on their platform. Reddit prices Premium membership at $5.99 monthly, which among other benefits removes all ads. $5.99 likely indicates a $2-3 profit when all ads are removed but user engagement remains constant.

The typical mildly engaged Reddit users probably easily spends an hour a day looking at ads via the app - so while the math may be fuzzy, it seems like Reddit possibly based their API pricing off something like this.

At a minimum, that is $2.50 x 12 = $30 of cost annually per user. This means all users need to pay Apollo $30 a year to break even on just Reddit fees, or some subset of users needs to pay a lot more than $30 a year to float a bunch of free users. Apollo has other expenses too (labor, servers, etc.).

Even if the API fees were reduced 80% down to $0.50 per user per month, that's still $6 annually per user - and Apollo has a lot of free users.

All of this is to say, the $12.99/year membership for Apollo was never going to work with any API fees.

I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.

These things are different though, we must admit. Imgur used to be much bigger, but today hardly pulls the same audience volume that Reddit or Twitter do, for instance. I don't think Imgur could get away with API pricing like Twitter is, and Reddit will soon be.

> I expect that the reddit premium price is far above the ad revenue from a mildly engaged user.

Given the number of ads you see while browsing via the official app, I would peg it around $2 per user per month (which mostly aligns with my previous statements and estimates, as well as with API pricing), for someone that uses Reddit for 1-2 hours daily. I suspect, without evidence and can be wrong, that 1-2 hours daily is typical for a mildly engaged Reddit user.

Apollo doesn't need to drop free users - they need to get revenue from them. If not directly, then via ads. Although that seems antithetical to what Apollo was trying to create... but reality has come knocking.

He probably could, but not in 30 days.

> but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.

Or chose not to.

Reddit will begin charging for access to its API (nytimes.com) 303 points by alexrustic 51 days ago | 339 comments --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617763

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... was posted April 19th.

https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates

> ANNOUNCEMENTS Staff • April 18, 2023

> ...

> To ensure developers have the tools and information they need to continue to use Reddit safely, protect our users’ privacy and security, and adhere to local regulations, we’re making updates to the ways some can access the Reddit Data API:

> We are introducing a new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.

The prices themselves were announced May 30th. I guess if you’re feeling generous, that would be 32 days notice.

He had notice there would be a change and was explicitly told:

> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.

There is absolutely no actionable information there, and everything they said indicated that it wouldn’t be an unreasonable change.

30 days is ample notice to Apollo's users.

Apollo has had since April to figure out how to make a monthly subscription work, on a technical level. Now... having done nothing smart in the meantime, are left with very little time to make the changes. That is 100% on Apollo.

You shift the blame like there’s no tomorrow. At this point you either work for them, or are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to defend them. That’s the only reasonable explanation for why you’d be pushing the blame so hard.

Even if he had a full system set up, 32 days is an unreasonably short amount of time to make any sort of material change to your terms, let alone raising the cost exorbitantly.

Hilariously, your first comment wishes people would pledge to pay for Apollo. How we got from there to… this bullshit is beyond me. At least it only took a few hours to show your true colors.

Your "32 days" timeline you keep going on about is false no matter what way you look at it.

Apollo has known since April API pricing was coming, and there was no way their existing "pay once, use it forever" or even the $12.99 per year model was going to be sustainable - particularly given how many free users they float monthly.

Not knowing the exact fee in advance is completely irrelevant. The infrastructure needed to be built to support a monthly subscription model, freemium models, or whatever they needed to do to pivot and remain in business.

100% of the reason people use Apollo is because of the data and community Reddit has built. Apollo basically leached off that data, and made a profit while doing so. Any sound business operator would understand and plan for risks that endanger their business. Apollo failed to take action in a timely manner, and failed to mitigate risks to it's business.

Now they're being asked to pay for the API access that makes Apollo's business possible - and even if the API fees were 1/4 of the proposed amount, Apollo was going to need to change their model. That is the point you, and many others seem to be missing - Apollo was not going to survive paying anything for API access - Apollo had no plan.

I cannot make it any more clear - Apollo failed to plan for, and mitigate risks and failed to take corrective actions in time to save their business.

Apollo was run like a hobby side-project - not a business.

Not everything has to be run like a business, you understand that right? You’re acting like this is a big when it’s a feature.

This is a project run by a single person. And has been, since its creation. On purpose. You clearly don’t like that for whatever idiotic reason and your entire premise hinges on the fact that you think every single project in the world needs to be run like a perfect megacorp. Guess what? The world doesn’t work like that.

The rest of your BS has already been debunked. Multiple times. By multiple people. You restating it continues to be just that, regardless how many times you insist on it.

If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your obvious shilling for no discernible reason.

Sure, that is reasonable. But then the victim card cannot be played when the business fails to act accordingly, no?

> The rest of your BS has already been debunked

Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.

> If you want to work for Reddit so badly, try applying for a job.

Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.

What business?

It’s not a fucking business. Stop insisting it is. We literally just went over this.

> Besides your insistence on alternative facts, I do not see anything "debunking" anything I have written. Again, just because you don't agree does not make it not true.

The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death, and that multiple people have pointed out your straight up lies should tell you plenty about who is dealing in “alternative facts”.

> Generally, you will be better off attacking someone's argument instead of their motivations.

Yeah that hasn’t seemed to work with you for the past half day, so I don’t understand why you would expect people to keep trying when you clearly don’t bother with things like “taking things to heart”, “having a discussion in good faith”… or really “reading”.

Next time, stick to actual facts and don’t pretend everything is a business that needs to be maximally efficient.

Apollo was/is a business, handles hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and has a huge customer base. We cannot make up definitions and then insist others agree.

> We literally just went over this.

You mean, you did. Sorry to not play into your fantasy universe - out here in the real world, shouting something louder doesn't make it true.

> The fact that half of your comments have been flagged and downvoted to death

You make the mistake of placing stock in whatever button people click on a website - usually based on emotion, but not always. Either way, Internet Points are not real...

You may not like the facts - but that's why they are facts. They do not change even if you hate them. Calm down, re-read the original posts, and then we can discuss things more civilly.

https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/

Apparently Apollo has paid subscriptions as a way to finance it.

He would have to turn off the functionality if there is no subscription in order to avoid spending too much for API calls.

Currently this subscription is described as:

> second is Apollo Ultra, the highest tier, which includes everything in Apollo Pro plus additional features. Apollo Ultra is a subscription offering of $1.49 USD per month (or $12.99/year, or a lifetime unlock option is offered in the app) and is a subscription due to options within it having ongoing monthly costs to me, the developer.

The approach would be to do a subscription price change for Apollo Ultra from $1.49/month to $10/month (or whatever the math works out to be - I'm using $10 as an example).

About subscription price changes - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252

> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.

Everyone who is subscribed would get an alert and no payment would go through.

However, the code is already there to work as a subscription app.

---

I would also draw attention to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/141mjij/lets_tal...

> My last thing I wanted to address, and I might be burying the lede a bit here, is some of misleading, or downright inaccurate and untruthful claims that the admins have made in regards to these changes..

> > Apollo could reduce their cost by 3.5x if they were as efficient as these other 3P apps.

> So I have not dug into Apollo specifically as I didn't have an iOS rooted device handy. BUT, my guess as to the "increased calls" is due to them more frequently checking if a user has messages, and/or less caching of comment sections and more re-pulling them for the latest on navigation. Could Apollo not check for messages as frequently? Sure.. Reddit is Fun used to check for messages on any refresh it seems, and they sometime somewhat recently seem to have changed that and for game day threads which I frequently use it for, I often miss responses to my comments for a very long time because it seems to only do it now every so often.

> ...

> Edit: it was brought to my attention that Apollo does push notifications for messages even when you aren't using the app. This is almost certainly the main discrepancy between it and other apps API usage. And it could have been a back end change then related to the polling for those notifications that caused a reduction in API calls

Some of the architecture for that is described https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...

> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.

> I understand the logic in not charging for basic system features such as camera usage, but push notifications require a server in order to function, and servers aren't free (in fact they get costly quick). I also offer a completely free system that does not use a server so those who don't want to have to pay can have their device function as the server and use local notifications (which are slightly delayed as it uses Background Fetch and using the device uses more battery), but remote notifications necessitate a server.

As it is designed, Apollo is very heavy on active polling for notifications.

This is described by Christian here - https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1729 that it is polling reddit once every 10 seconds for each user of Apollo constantly.

Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say.

The relationship is broken.

Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.

HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.

That's entirely on Apollo...

Monetisation of social networks only works via ads/tracking.

You're just being an unconstructive critic.

And you have no evidence it's temporary.

Right - and in 10 years everyone will still be using Reddit, Apollo will just be a distant memory, and nobody will give any thought to the API pricing model.

Just reality...

The 30 day window was not enough time to rectify that and would cost him 50k in the first month to cover the diff. The author suggested he needed at least 3 months to implement changes and switch at least some portion of yearly subscribers to a higher price.

If they came out with a reasonable set of conditions to do API access, people would be a lot less upset. But they didn't. And those API fees are guaranteed to go only up, up, and further up.

Time to get out of reddit when the gettin's good.

https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...

Well, no, options don't make them shareholders unless they're exercised. RSUs don't make them shareholders at all, because they're not actually stock (they're stock units).

Reddit's cap table is probably a mess at this point, so I imagine that some current employees are also shareholders, but I don't know if all are, and RSUs don't make them shareholders.

What? As the grandparent implied, when RSUs vest, they turn into shares of stock, which makes the employee a shareholder.

Most RSUs for private companies (especially those issued by companies as old as Reddit) are double trigger, not single trigger. They don't turn into stock at vesting because that would be a taxable event. They turn into stock after the second trigger, which is a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition).

Yes, I said that in my original post.

Those 3rd party apps are leeches that are playing surprised_pikachu.jpeg when the blood supply is cut.

The simple fact that this guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions shows the insane amount of money he made off of the back of Reddit.

Hypocritical much?

Are shipping companies leeches in your worldview?

Correct.

He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.

Like, I can't remember a time that there _hasn't_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that's for sure.

I'm sure a few will but, I can't name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it's just a job and pays money. And pays well.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/zynga-to-employees-give...

Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.

This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.

So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats & Reddit getting the approaches covered, & this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content & in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.

Oh please. Let's be honest, this is not financially going to hurt the company.

An old-school investor would be fuming right now, but VCs only care about IPOs and they probably blessed this strategy already.

That's been the economy in the US for two decades now.

It would definitely impact my view of the company as an investor.

Guess no more bathroom reddit for me. 4chan still works.

Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.

§205 : https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-05-20-28/KAPITTEL_2-...

EDIT: See now that he was in Canada when it was recorded, and they have the same kind of laws.

You can sue anyone for anything anywhere, but I cannot imagine the Canadian police being interested in a citizen doing something lawful in Canada if the California (or wherever) cops call to complain be broke a Californian law.

And I can even less imagine a civil action demanding damages or court actions in Canada for doing something legal there. It would be like a Saudi company suing a US driving school that teaches women.

I don't think there's a there there as far as liability or worry. IANAL, of course.

So, my understanding is that third party apps are supposed to have the user authenticate via OAuth (or some other means), and then the app requests content from Reddit’s servers under the user’s authentication, because the user’s authentication is what determines whether the user can see the contents of i.e. private subreddits and mod privileged post/comment views, & take mod actions.

My understanding is that anyone using a phone/tablet third party app isn’t going to even get close to the 60 items per minute limit that existed.

It’s also my understanding that moderators would hit the 60 items a minute limit if they were using Toolbox to action a bunch of comments in a post, or were actively clearing the mod queues of several large, active subreddits, simultaneously.

The only way I can imagine that Apollo would be charged premium firehose api access is if Apollo was being a man-in-the-middle between Reddit’s servers and their user base — if Apollo was running a server, which server was authenticating as the users, and then the Apollo server was sending material back to the phone/tablet client app.

Which … should not be happening, for oh-so-many reasons.

For one, if Apollo is doing that to remove Reddit’s advertisements and/or insert their own advertisements … that would be shenanigans.

If Apollo is store-and-forwarding user data — are they complying with California user privacy & GDPR requirements?

etc etc etc

If I’m using a third party app to access Reddit, I do not expect that the API calls made by the app to go through the app publisher’s systems.

So I’m really not grokking how this state of affairs is a crisis for a third party app publisher, unless the third party app publisher architected their app in a completely upside down fashion, or is pulling some sort of MITM shenanigans, or the publisher completely misunderstands what the changes to the API will mean.

In short, “where’s the fettucine?”

Reddit has never provided access to its ads to third-parties, and now third-party apps are banned from showing any advertising at all.

Why?

I'm also sure all those pre-ipo employees are just going to quit because other people are having temper tantrums. /s

You are right that there is no agreement of course, but the way they're treating the dev sounds, in the most charitable explanation, extremely disorganized and a bit rude.

Like Apollo. He could build a backend himself.

Subreddits are run by volunteer moderators and are entirely at the whim of reddit. If any substantial subreddit tried to shut down or go dark permanently reddit would just remove the moderators responsible.

There are lots of permanently dark/private subreddits out there that have been "lost" to some dispute or another.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/144jp3w/_/

I'm not throwing in the towel like most people are, but I will just relegate myself to viewing it only in a desktop browser. We'll see how long old.reddit.com lasts after this

One day I looked at it, not logged in.

Turned out there was a post, "pinned by moderators", at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.

I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.

I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.

Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!

Bloody hell.

At that point I knew Reddit could not be trusted.

*their sub.

It's my understanding that Apollo users make up a fraction of a percent of active users. Reddit almost certainly doesn't care. Fact is they've taken in over a billion in funding and aren't really returning a profit, charging for API access starts moving them in the right direction though.

Why would he lose his job? Realistically, it's a smart business move to monetise their users. It's Reddit, them being pissy about having to pay is part of the course. There is a reason they're the lowest valued social media users.

>EDIT 3: 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? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.

What would he have a claim for? He wasn't paying for the API. He could pay for the API and continue to operate. You can't sue someone because they stopped letting you use their services for free. You sure can't sue a business for asking your for-profit company to pay expenses.

Realistically, these app users would have made tens if not hundreds of thousands a month if they just added subscription model to their app and only had paying customers. These apps could still exist and be extremely profitable for a one-man apps.

Simple maths $5 a month subscription $2.50 to reddit $1.50 to apple and $1 to the app developer. Say 10% of their users convert which seems very reasonable considering the reception a price increase to $6.99 seem to get on the Apollo subreddit. That would have been $100,000 a month profit. But instead, they shut it down.

It's unclear why anyone would want to survive humanity, except if they think of themselves as god.

But survivalists are well armed, organized, and fiercely competitive. When the time comes, it's likely they'll hunt one another. We'll all be long dead while they'll still be hiding in their holes wondering if they have enough ammunition left.

And eventually, they too will die.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...

This is the inevitable outcome of a human who has never been told no or punished for their misdeeds. This is what it looks like for a spoiled child to run a company.

We have a lot of that lately.

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.

Voting rights are relatively irrelevant for minority holders. It's all the other rights, granted by contract and more importantly law, that tech employees can be generally regarded on to not exercise (or bullied into not exercising by management).

Is there a running list of subs (over a certain high number of subscribers, to keep it focused) that aren't in the blackout list? That would be interesting to see. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, at least while the API is still free...

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...

I bet he was making enough that he didn't need another job but not significantly more than that.