Yeah, Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. An in person meeting was likely totally worth it. I cannot believe they did all this stuff over the phone. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just ring him up. Insane.

> Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour.

If they wanted him to pay $20 million, they'd certainly have given him much better than a brief phone call.

But that's the point. They're revealing with their actions that they don't actually want him to pay the money. What they want is to shut it down. Charging a sum of money that they know he won't pay is just an easy way to do that.

'course it's not just him, but it's him and _everyone else_. i'm not sure what their overall intent here was, but it's been a shit show from start to finish, and they gotta at the very least start thinking hard about pausing the rollout till they can get their ducks in a row.

It's clear that they don't want any of the third-party apps to pay them a cent. They want the third-party apps gone, and the users to move to the official app where they can be directly monetised by Reddit. There was never going to be a deal; if Reddit was interested in one they would have approached this differently.

Then why not just shut down their public API?

Optics, both are functionally shutting it down, but one claims to add value while the other removes options.

You're assuming he can pay 20 million dollars. The point is that he can't, or even a fraction of that, so there's no point to wining and dining him at all.

That’s where negotiations come in. He has been very upfront about talking and negotiations but Reddit hasn’t budged on pricing at all.

You only approach this deal this way if you don't want the deal to go through at all.

A shocking amount of people here are assuming Reddit is launching this API program in good faith. This was not a transition third party apps were meant to survive; 30 days is nowhere near enough time for any business, let alone ones by single random software developers, to see their costs increase into the hundreds of thousands or even millions per month.

> Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.

I pay Apple more than a million a month and I don’t even have a contact email.

Just saying, a Christmas card would be nice.

Why should he be forced to do something he doesn't want to do?

He's made it abundantly clear why he doesn't want to do that, who are you (or anyone else but him) to say "No you're not allowed to have opinions, you MUST create your own alternative"?

> 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.

He’s allowed to do whatever he wants (including not starting a competitor). But it’s bad from a negotiation perspective to let that out

Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.

Reddit from 2017 or so is open source!

> But it’s bad from a negotiation perspective to let that out

It’s pretty clear that there’s no negotiating left, so I’m not sure what relevance this has anymore. A few days ago? Yeah maybe.

If the CEO is maliciously accusing you of threatening them, then there’s nothing left to negotiate. The relationship is beyond broken.

> Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.

He has already made it clear he’s not interested in building a competitor (the quote is literally right there in the comment you replied to), so, once again, what’s your point?

It’s plainly evident that Christian is done, and I don’t blame him.

The RIF and Sync devs are too, and I’m sure all the other apps will soon announce shutdowns at the end of the month too.

Why don’t we all monetize our hobbies? Why don’t we market our personal lives? Why don’t we each have our own line of branded merchandise? Why haven’t we written a memoir?

Because some people don’t want to! And that’s okay.

I don't think Apollo is just a hobby for Christian, given that he said that working on it is now his full-time job.

Trying to start a new social network (or whatever you'd call Reddit) from the ground-up is not only very likely to fail, but it's also a totally different skillset than building iOS apps. Of course he'd rather just find another job.

His point was that there is a big difference between building a product and operating a service. I can understanding not wanting to do the latter, because it's a COO job and unless you like doing that it is not fun.

And frankly it's a failing of society that we would ever need to.

Because sometimes, you don't want to reclimb the mountain you just hiked up and down.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Would you want to moderate Reddit? I get that Apollo is in a good position to take their users with them, but it's not like it's going to be easy to build a Reddit when what you've made so far has been a frontend for Reddit and some mobile widget spin-offs.

Many of us can make a frontpage for hacker news in a few hours, some might even be able to grow a userbase on it but that doesn't mean we can do what dang does.

Many of us would prefer dang only removed spam, or moved off topic post to bantz

Absolutely not, dang's work is nothing short of miraculous and I don't know of any other forumlike place that's this civil at this scale. Hope he keeps at it in this way for a long time.

The outcome of moderation here is very good, and changing policy has a high chance of damaging the value of HN. I would not risk secondary effects, myself.

But I would enjoy HN more with a soupcon of joking (currently considered zero-value). I benefit from my bread being leavened, I like programming tutorials with humour. So it's understandable why people might want to change the policy.

I thought he was pretty clear that he was done bargaining:

> ... I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.

If a bargaining chip is only useful in making a deal you've decided cannot be made, why bother holding onto it? Better to tell your fans outright that you're worn out and not interested.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

I suspect that both reddit and apollo know that most of the content generation happens on Reddit controlled properties.

Apollo users probably do not generate enough content to sustain a reddit-like website.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

In addition to what everyone else has said, he really has 1 month if he has any chance of siphoning off reddit users.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Yeah, what's the deal with this iOS developer not wanting to start a competitor to checks notes one of the largest websites in the world? Surely you just up and did that last week, it's no big deal.

I guess I should start getting used to saying "Jesus christ, HN" now that I won't be saying "Jesus christ, Reddit" anymore.

He can't start a competitor because he has no market power. Not enough will use the competitor product for it to be worth it. A past example of someone attempting to disintermediate Reddit was /r/changemyview which attempted to switch to changeaview.com and met immediate and total backlash. Reddit's SSO multi-forum user-generated experience is why people use it.

Can’t really blame the guy. If I had banked $X00k-XM in my early thirties I wouldn’t be doing jobs I didn’t want to do either.

Starting a competitor involves doing all the things that Reddit is doing (having a legal team, servers across the world and staff to operate them, making policy decisions, ...).

That is not at all the same as building an iOS client using an API as a one man show (or 1-3) and directly selling that.