Apollo will close down on June 30th

Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by defen on Thursday June 08, 2023 @03:42PM (#36247638)

I'm shocked that people are interpreting this as not fishing for a payoff, honestly. "We can both skip off into the sunset" does not mean "rewrite the app to do fewer API calls", as he tries to claim later in the call. It means it's done, over, everyone is happy. And why would he say "mostly joking" if he actually meant doing fewer API requests? Nothing about this recording or transcript makes me think Selig is an honest person.

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Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by roflyear on Thursday June 08, 2023 @05:11PM (#36249136)

That isn't what he claims later in the call. He claims that he'd shut down the app for $10m. How is that unreasonable?

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Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by dbbk on Thursday June 08, 2023 @06:52PM (#36250370)

The app is getting shut down for $0 regardless, why would anyone pay $10m to shut it down?

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Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by actionablefiber on Thursday June 08, 2023 @09:15PM (#36251865)

I'm sure the price is negotiable. Off the top of my head, the reasons you'd pay any nonzero amount of money for it are:

1. You avoid all of this drama. Christian makes a post that says, "Reddit offered me a lot of money and I said yes because I want to have a lot of money. It's been a pleasure working with them and it's been a pleasure developing Apollo for you. Peace out." Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.

2. Reddit could rather enshittify Apollo gradually, and/or fold Apollo's subscription model into Reddit's own model to maintain a premium power-user experience. It is an absurdly well-polished app, even if you added advertisements to it. It is a better user experience if the app gets worse slowly than if it disappears all at once and forces everyone to migrate to a new app. Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.

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Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by haarolean on Friday June 09, 2023 @05:23AM (#36255349)

Enshittify! What a nice verb

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Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by actionablefiber on Friday June 09, 2023 @08:44PM (#36266347)

Thank Cory Doctorow[1] for that one.

[1]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

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Re:Apollo will close down on June 30th by roflyear on Friday June 09, 2023 @12:18PM (#36260107)

The goal of reddit here is to obviously shut down the app, he was saying "just pay me then" - he's obviously annoyed. Stupid thing for him to say for sure, it shut the "negotiation" down.

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