The Apollo dev “joked” that Reddit should buy Apollo for $10 million dollars because, according to Reddit’s pricing of their API, the opportunity cost of Apollo existing to Reddit was $20 million.

$20 million per year.

spez accused the author of Apollo (Christian) of trying to blackmail reddit. Christian responds[0] and has a recording [1]. There was a misunderstanding, Christian clarified, spez apologized.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...

Just for clarity, the timeline was in this order:

Christian suggests that if Apollo is costing reddit $20m/year, they could just buy it for $10m as a win/win for everyone

Reddit interprets his referring to "going quiet" as some sort of extortion/blackmail

Christian clarifies, everyone apologizes for the misunderstanding and the conversation moves on

Weeks later, Reddit admins publicly accuse him of blackmail

Christian releases his statement and a snippet of a call recording

Additional context that Christian was referencing the _app_ being "noisy", as in the _noisy neighbor_ effect, when a client is misconfigured to cause more activity and bring more a burden than it should [0]. Reddit interpreted this as "noisy" = "we will complain and raise hell", but this was literally immediately worked out as a miscommunication in the transcript [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_issues#Perform... [1]: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...

>Weeks later

Weeks later, after Christian announced to his community the most likely impact on the app of the upcoming API changes and a summary of his conversations with Reddit.

Reading this comment makes me wonder if Steve genuinely believes the ongoing outrage from Reddit's community is somehow to any extent Christian's fault. "Look, it was a threat after all. He's doing what we thought he would and what he said he wouldn't do."