I turned on my 1Blocker app for ios to block Reddit for the first time in months after this drama.

I only name drop the app because it has served me well for ad blocking and custom rules (like blocking Reddit).

> "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations

I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion.

It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.

Isn’t Patagonia privately owned though?

Not just privately owned, but given away irrevocably by said owner to charity, and done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate...

I didn’t know this before and now I’m inclined to buy Patagonia items at every opportunity.

Seriously- I’ve had my eye on a Patagonia black hole duffle and now I’ll pull the trigger.

If you are an REI member, they often have stuff in the used (Garage) site that is in excellent quality and also less expensive. Patagonia also has worn wear that does the same thing. Win-win - awesome stuff, no need to make a new one for you, and less expensive!

- The guy who now has too many nanopuff jackets, but I will die on this hill.

I found out about worn ware a couple weeks ago. I am now accruing nanopuff jackets at a dangerous clip.

Chouinard is probably marginally better than your average billionaire, but it was almost certainly not done in a way that didn't also very clearly benefit him, and, more importantly, his family.

https://qz.com/patagonia-s-3-billion-corporate-gift-is-also-...

That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.

Reading that interview, it just sounds like a tax-optimized donation. It still causes him to give up wealth that he could have kept, but he's minimizing the loss. Is this not the case? If it is for pure personal financial gain, should we expect Jim Simons to pull a similar maneuver with Ren Tech at some point?

You do realize that I'm responding to someone that made the assertion, also implied in the NYT article, that this "donation" was "done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill." Right? What you're saying directly contradicts that, which was my point...

This was very obviously not done "for pure personal financial gain..." But should billionaires be able to donate billions, tax-free, to exert political influence, which, generally (though, with rare exceptions, like perhaps Chouinard), they will use to directly benefit themselves and their family? And, should they be able to do so in a way that maintains that political influence for their family for generations to come?

Maybe Chouinard and his family have good intentions, but, like the article said, "one doesn’t want a constructed tax system predicated upon everyone being like the Chouinards."

nothing wrong with benefiting yourself and your family - the problem is doing that unfairly at the expense of someone else, which it appears he has tried hard not to do here.

Kinda ironic that the good deeds of Patagonia were written about on a website that we cannot even read because there is a paywall to access the information. Talk about seeing two sides of a spectrum haha.

Adam Connover has a video that pretty directly contradicts this assertion. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in-between. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cu6EbELZ6I

It's healthy to have a skepticism of "rich" people, but I think it's really uncharitable to view Chouinard's career as mere wealth accrual for wealth's sake. To not view him as a role model for how business can be ethical is, IMO, a missed opportunity.

Chouinard's goal was for his mission (the raison d'etre for Patagonia – to make high quality goods for outdoor activities, and to use the profits from this venture to protect outdoor spaces) to outlive his personal stewardship of Patagonia's control.

When that's your goal, the set of options available is rather narrow. You have to pass on control to people you trust, whom you've developed strong relationships with, and whom you trust to evolve and pass that mission down to the next generation. Most importantly, you want to avoid the kind of grifters that Patagonia has been allergic to in its history.

Plus, Patagonia already has a rich synergistic history of funding activism. It's not at all comparable to Gates, Carnegie, or Rockefeller who made their money and decided what "good" to spend it on in two discrete steps. For Patagonia, the most important thing is effective stewardship over an already-sailing ship

Chouinard has written a lot of material that you can read for yourself and form your own opinion on. He's remarkably direct and transparent, there aren't really smoke and mirrors to navigate.

That being said, anything he does with his "wealth" (itself an absurd idea, as he would never liquidate Patagonia shares and still never has) is going to rhyme with what other powerful people do with their wealth. You have to judge the people, not just the structures they're working within.

Conover is currently acting as mediator for the WGA strike. He has as much of an agenda as Chouinard.

That's the thing. A privately owned company can keep its morals if it has them, because the owners don't answer to anyone else. But as soon as a company accepts Venture Capital funding, or goes public, morals go out the window. The original owners no longer have control, and can't decide what the goal of the company is anymore. The goal is now to make money in whatever method is possible.

Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.

I don’t know the details of Patagonia’s ownership either now or before they put it in the trust, but Reddit is also privately owned (for now, anyway).

So is Reddit

Patagonia didn't take VC money, and reddit wouldn't have even survived this long if they hadn't

How true is that honestly?

The more I talk to people the more I feel like people just like to party/waste money more than work.

> The more I talk to people the more I feel like people just like to party/waste money more than work.

Is... that a surprise to you?

> and reddit wouldn't have even survived this long if they hadn't

The parts of Reddit that people actually like – a single lightweight web app (old.reddit.com) minus all the fluff (constant redesigns, broken video player, live streaming, overengineered mobile apps, avatars, NFTs, coins/gifts, messenger) – would have survived perfectly well without VC money.

How so? It costs money to store & retrieve this content, at reddit scale (100m active monthly?). Ads clearly weren't paying enough of the bills, so what's the next best option?

Reddit made $500M in revenue last year, yet is unprofitable. The reason isn't its AWS bill, but the "must 5x every year no matter what" mentality of their VCs who are looking for their exit. This pushes companies to overhire, add useless features and waste money on user acquisition just to chase that growth chart and have a successful IPO roadshow.

You know: solving the engineering problem you just described...

Fashion companies like Patagonia and online social platforms like Reddit are radically different with how they interact with network effects.

Fashion benefits from exclusivity and brand identity. It behooves Patagonia to brand itself as "not evil" or "not capitalist" or whatever, it's ultimately a fashion statement.

Social networks suffer from exclusivity, and brand identity is an afterthought. I'd wager that most Reddit users have a neutral/negative view of the Reddit brand, but they use Reddit anyways because of network effects (everyone is there) and the brand doesn't really impact their favorite subreddits. There have been many attempts at "exclusive" social networks with carefully crafted brand identity, and they always fail.

There's a theory that social media also has fashion phases, but I don't think we have enough data to back that up. MySpace lasted about 6 years. Facebook is 19 and Twitter is 17 and both are going strong.

Patagonia is pushing polyester with its associated micro-plastics, instead of the renewable natural fibers that they were using before like wool. Good, evil, depends on who is counting.

Patagonia is clear about that decision though [1]. Microplastics are bad but not the whole story. They still offer natural fibers which have their own problems. I don't think this is Patagonia chasing short term profits, I think they are trying to remain true to their corporate goals.

[1]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/an-update-on-microfiber-po...

Their statement sounds and looks good at first, but the actions amount to: you should keep buying our products, you should buy a new washing machine, you should buy a filter and we will keep thinking about it.

Patagonia do make high performance plastic products for activities where performance matters and in a better way than most, but have not been a performance focused company for decades. The original breakthrough of using plastic fleece in the wilderness due to it's non water absorbing properties doesn't really justify the size of their production with those materials today. They make most of their money selling plastic fleeces for people to wear to coffee shops. This segment of the market didn't realy exist before brands like Patagonia so they while they may offer a better alternative today, they are helped to create this particular problem.

And if you've ever seen their clearance lists, they're as bad as other fashion companies for overproduction - new colours every season which need to make way the following season.

Replacing plastics in their casual ranges and extending the lifecycles of the colours alone would make a bigger difference than a couple of research grants, but is risky for sales and less sexy. So take those statements with a pinch of salt.

I'm confused on what you think Patagonia should do differently. Should I boycott them for some reason? Should I feel bad about wearing their products? How bad are they environmentally on the scale of all apparel manufacturers from worst to best? Is Cotopaxi ok?

It seems to me the point is that they could do many things that would be better for the earth, but would impact short term or medium term numbers. And this is in contrast to the claim that Patagonia is somehow unlike other corporations.

They’re not. They’re also “evil” in this way. Perhaps less so. But it’s a property of money making endeavors to prioritize making money.

Can you name those things? Where are we supposed to get our clothes?

Patagonia helped Samsung modify their washing machines to reduce microplastic pollution: https://www.fastcompany.com/90904159/why-patagonia-helped-sa...

Not a perfect company, I mean almost all of their iconic garments are plastic, but they're doing far more than other technical outerwear companies.

I have one of their “iconic” puffy jackets. I wear it about a third of the year here in Seattle. In the five years I have owned it I have washed it maybe once and possibly never. I don’t even wear it in the rain often because I have a rain shell which is also plastic and also doesn’t get washed.

> Good, evil, depends on who is counting.

I'm gonna use that statement from now on.

It's hard to get to the billion dollar size and do literally zero things that anyone could criticize on moral grounds.

I would assert that there does not exist a company which is both larger than Patagonia, and more moral than they are.

Least bad is not necessarily good.

You could also say least bad is not necessarily bad. It's a platitude.

Do you believe Patagonia has done net harm or net good in the world?

It depends on how much harm their microfibers and microplastics have done to however many number of people who ingested them.

Doesn’t it depend on everything?

You are right, but as others have noted, I should have put a caveat on my assertion that the incentive mismatch is really there for companies with "outside owners", either in the form of a publicly traded company or large VC/PE investors.

If you keep a company private, and you don't take sizable outside funding, you can pretty much do whatever you want with your company.

For most corporations -- particularly the large ones -- I agree with you; however, there is also the B corporation route. Now, I have no idea if Reddit ever considered this path back in their earlier fund-seeking days, but it would have been an intriguing path had they done so.

I'm sorry but how exactly is it being evil to shut down 3rd party clients that use your content and your bandwidth to make (huge amounts of) money off of you?

Reddit owes absolutely nothing to those developers. This guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions, meaning he made millions, if not tens of millions, off of exploiting the API while not displaying Reddit's ads.

Poor Apollo developer, he's going to have to wipe his tears with Benjamins and blow his nose with his silk disposable tissue.

If you read his post, he presents all the information you need to know that this isn't true. Reddit themselves admitted that the cost isn't about server/bandwidth usage but opportunity cost per user on 3rd party apps. And it's not exploiting the API if you are using the API within the terms of service agreed to when registering the API token. Apollo wasn't exploiting or abusing anything.

1) Apollo exploited nothing. Reddit offered their API for free for years.

2) Sure, he made a ton of money running Apollo, doesn't make what Reddit did less scummy.

3) No requirement, but it's largely accepted as courtesy to notify developers of any changes to the API policy, especially when it comes to pricing. Giving the developer only 30 days to rework their business model, change app architecture/design/code, pass App Store Reviews with Apple/Google, migrate subscribers to a higher-priced tier to afford the increase in pricing, and more is tantamount to spitting in their face. Especially when it's a drastic change from 8+ years of more or less the same.

4) Even if the developer did update pricing to be able to afford the new API rates, the developer himself stated he would have to be $50,000/month in the red for months while he waits for current subscription holders to have their subscription terms expire and renew at the increase rate, and that doesn't count lost subscribers who just decide to not renew.

5) Reddit admins and their CEO slandered the developer in interviews, outright lied, and got caught as the developer recorded the audio of all of their calls proving those lies. Reddit has done this stuff before (Back in 2016 the CEO was caught editing comments critical of him in the production database).

6) Reddit has every right to do what their doing, as Apollo has every right to call them out on how shit this whole thing is, when just back in January they said they had no plans to change their APIs in the short or medium term.

Bad situation all around, but Reddit knows they're doing this to kill third-party apps. They just have to lie that they're being reasonable to save face so investors will buy them up when they go public in a few months.

> 3) No requirement, but it's largely accepted as courtesy to notify developers of any changes to the API policy, especially when it comes to pricing. Giving the developer only 30 days to rework their business model, change app architecture/design/code, pass App Store Reviews with Apple/Google, migrate subscribers to a higher-priced tier to afford the increase in pricing, and more is tantamount to spitting in their face. Especially when it's a drastic change from 8+ years of more or less the same.

Doubly so if you've been repeatably telling developers you're not changing it & that developer has reach out specifically to say I know you have an IPO soon. Anything we can do on our end.

Reddit had no mobile app for years, and yet a ton of mobile users on 3rd party apps. Their own mobile app used to be a 3rd party app that they bought out. So without even getting into other creative uses of the API, they definitely owe some of their popularity to 3rd party mobile app developers. How much? Who can really say how Reddit would have evolved if it had no public API.

you must be aware that old.reddit.com is on the chopping block in the next few months/years, right?

Is that official, or just an assumption?

Just an assumption, but i.reddit.com was recently binned.

There's been a great deal of talk about it on reddit after they closed i.reddit.com (Despite saying they wouldn't). It wont get announced officially, it will just vanish at some point.

I'm probably rationalizing here, but i.reddit.com was exceeeeeeeedingly old. It was an iOS 3.x era mobile web design that had never been updated.

And yet it was infinitely better than the monstrosity of the “modern” Reddit front end on mobile.

It was still far more usable than the enshittified ‘proper’ version of the mobile web that does nothing but nag you to use the even more aggressively enshittified app.

Honestly, I'd rather they do it sooner so I have a greater impetus to leave Reddit; to go outside and touch the grass for once.

Yeah. I old.Reddit into specifics subs. Other than that it is too radicalized nowadays. Once you are starting out you care about user experience, but once you are too big to fail then you pretty much don’t care - see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube they all designed UI around how THEY want the user to use the platform instead of how user would actually want to use it.

I enjoyed the .compact version of old.reddit.com until they recently got rid of it. Since then my engagement has plummeted, which is probably a good thing...

I'm hoping at least we'll start to see some alternative communities to reddit pop up. I've been on the lookout for new smaller communities for a few years now, but the only interesting things I've found are a couple of Discord servers. While they are nice, Discord has a very different vibe from public anonymous forums.

There are plenty of old school forums. Example: I recently got into leatherworking. There are a couple of subreddits for it but also a large and active forum at https://leatherworker.net/forum/.

Reddit has discoverability and single sign on for a bunch of forums. It also has some fun nice to haves like a mixed feed of all your interests. But old school forums tend to be less commercial and sometimes can be a lot more tightly knit.

The biggest annoyance I have with old school forums is the single threaded nature of them. Reading through an entire 200 post thread to see if anyone actually responded to the one question that was asked in the third post is just incredibly inefficient and annoying.

Reading the transcripts and listening to the audio and seeing how Reddit is behaving is a fucking wild ride.

I use old.reddit.com on mobile and desktop so I'm not directly effected by these changes aside from the likely steep decline in moderation quality as longstanding mods lose their tools.

I feel compelled to migrate from reddit and only utilize it as a resource for knowledge when it's the only resource for some obscure niche thing or sub-culture. That last statement alone speaks volumes about the danger of centralizing communities as reddit has done.

Maybe a federated internet is back on the table for the future.

Reddit for amusement is a blackhole.

For the best really to leave.

I second this. I’ve deleted all the social media, except Reddit. When I see an organisation acting like this - its toxicity. Deleting reddit. I look forward tothe hours of my life back.

Bye bye.

Two quotes come to my mind.

1. From Marcus Aurelius, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit. I remove that pool of thought from my lived life and arguably my happiness ought to increase.

2. From Epictetus, "It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them." I'll admit do a lot of mindless browsing on reddit. In the past I've used site blockers to block loading reddit for me and I'd have the muscle memory of cmd+t then typing in "old" to load reddit. That all too common doomscroll of post after post, reading comment after comment, still has a pronounced grip on me. It would serve me well to reclaim that time and my unconscious self away from reddit.

This APIgate honestly, in an entirely self-serving way I'm thankful for it. For it to give pause to reflect on my own relationship with reddit.

If they're doing this, old.reddit.com is on the chopping block too, might as well get ahead of that sooner than later.

I know this whole situation is doing a lot of harm and there's a lot hurt over for folks, especially financially, but I'll take this as an opportunity to grow.

> There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit.

I think there's something weird that goes on with having a sub be a part of a whole and subject to the norms of the whole to some degree. Subs can keep things good, but it takes effort. There's some subs I'm part of where it's just super toxic all around. Part of that is because of the nature of the sub (for a game where the users constantly feel ignored and a little put upon by the devs), but that only partially explains how bad it gets.

What browser do you use for mobile? I just tried old.reddit on Brave and Firefox mobile and it was.....not pleasant, relative to my current 3rd party app.

For desktop, it's the best, and I'll seriously consider ditching Reddit for good when it's killed, but it seems to be extremely poorly optimized for mobile (unsurprisingly)

I use old.reddit on iOS safari, works well

I can’t access any other form of Reddit using mobileSafari. It’s bizarre, and probably intentional.

also an exclusively old.reddit user - and my account is 17 years old...

But I deleted my primary account some months ago after an admin hijacked my mod status in a sub that has 2MM users...

as far as I am concerned, /u/spez can go eat a dead baby as he so much stated in the early days of /r/cannabilism. Maybe reddit WILL be the dead baby he gets to eat.

-

I have never used a 3rd party app - but everyone always spoke highly of apollo - but this post just shows that apollo's founder has more class than the entirety of reddit's staff (or at least c-suite) combined.

I imagine they got some sort of 'consultant' or some stupid MBA firm like McKinsey or something telling them their KPIs were failing...

They needed to increase the revenues from their API to pay the consulting fees for their 'experts'

And frankly - reading the comments from spez and other reddit respondents in that thread, read like the idiots in Succession when they went to LA

I would not be surprised if they announce an end to support for Old Reddit soon. They are gearing up for an IPO and want to get rid of all the non-moneymaking cruft.

Essentially what they are doing is trying to reach equilibrium in terms of users and income sources so it all looks tight on the books. They won’t IPO until they can figure out final changes in user numbers, etc.

How long do you expect old.reddit.com to stick around after they force everyone to use their own app for mobile?

"Imminently" reasonable and rational? What does that mean?

They mean "eminently" (i.e. "very")

Homophones strike again

They are not homophones, the first vowel is very different.

Well that's just like your opinion man

Uhm no, I checked the IPA transcriptions given by dictionaries.

Eminently.

FWIW there is suggestions that old.reddit.com is next on the chopping block. If that happens I dont think I could use the site anymore. The redesign is outright hostile.

I suspect as much too. Third party mobile clients dying saddens me for sure, but most of my usage is on old.reddit.com. When that inevitably goes away it'll be the true end for me. While I don't exactly look forward to the day, I'm oddly excited about the opportunity to put my time elsewhere. Maybe I'll finally start reading books again.

I just logged into old.reddit.com w/Safari on iOS. The difference between that and Apollo is the difference between using reddit on my phone and not.

That said, I have to think something is wrong: I seem to have been served the desktop version in Safari. I do have 1Blocker and AdGuard running in Safari.

old.reddit no longer has a mobile version. The mobile interface was redirected to the new-style quite a while ago.

> the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational

honestly that's why Apollo is one of the rare apps I've actually fully paid for - iamthatis aka Christian is such a solid dude, always keeps his cool, no drama, gets his work done, cares about his users, like - it's a tragedy that Reddit is killing off his masterwork. They ought to be hiring him to do their mobile apps for them.

I've never even heard of Apollo (not on reddit much) but taking this post as honest, I actually come away with the opposite view.

All the "evil" accusations going around seem to be less related to Reddit wanting to reign in an app using 7B requests/month and more to do with the allegations from the CEO.

The author says he offered to sell Apollo and the CEO responded by "espousing a different reality." There's just one problem with that narrative: his own recording and transcripts show that he did not offer to sell Apollo for $10M so Reddit could shut it down.

The CEO asked him to repeat his statement three times. Over all three times, he not once offered to sell the business nor did he explain that rationale.

What he said was (paraphrased): I hear you saying these API calls are costing you $20M/yr. If you pay me $10M - the cost of 6 months of traffic - I'll make them go quiet.

I understand the author might think he said something different and genuinely thinks the CEO was being disingenuous. But that's not what the evidence shows. The evidence shows a direct request for $10M to stop harming the company. Colloquially speaking, that's blackmail.

When the CEO asked him to clarify, it's clear to me he wanted to make sure he heard correctly. All he was clarifying was "go quietly" (are you threatening to go the press?). As soon as he was sure he got the message, he ended the call politely and immediately.

I think the users that will be leaving reddit are worth 100 normal reddit users in terms of content value. Drain them and the rest will swirl down quickly.

This is an interesting point. I use free Apollo, and realized when I tried to post, that its a paid feature.

So you have to figure that all the revenue is largely from contributing users and the dynamics on social media go something like 5-10% of people post all the content. Also, i heard it has great tooling for mods as well.

We'll see how big of a blow this is but yeah, you're right, a lot of Apollo users are probably high value reddit users.

That’s an often overlooked factor. The mods that do all that free work for Reddit especially need good tools—which the official app is not.

It’s why I like working for privately owned companies. They’re mostly about enriching the owner, but for that to happen optimally the company has to actually be functional.

I’m certain old.reddit will be next on it chopping block