whelp, there it is
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Sad news. I use Boost which I love. But won’t be using Reddit anymore once 3rd party apps are cut off.
Same. There was a post on the boost subreddit indicating this place, so I expect there will be an influx (eg, me).
😊👍. I’m looking at it like home is where the heart is. And my heart just isn’t into Reddit pulling this stunt.
How do you get to the point where you’re accusing Christian of blackmailing you in this situation? You’re the 500lb gorilla who’s driving all these app developers out of business. Even if you really feel like these app developers have been free riding on your largesse, how do you have so little perspective to be this petty and spiteful?
I’m still not clear what the alleged threat was, that the app would… make API calls? earning reddit money? That Christian would say unfriendly things about the company that screwed him? What threat is an app developer to a corporation? It’s just patently absurd.
Weaponizing the community can be pretty powerful.
I love that Christsin had recordings. Can’t wait to see how spez’s AMA goes.
That AMA is immediately going to turn into ‘The Roast of Spez’ and I’m honestly quite looking forward to it. It won’t change anything since Reddit’s already too far round the ‘enshittification’ U-bend but it might be the last funny thing that’s ever posted there.
The AMA will be heavily moderated. I doubt any staff will let any saucy comments reach the CEO.
He knew things could go ugly. Good thing he made the recordings.
I listened to the recording, and read the transcript, and I can… I can see it. Not overtly, not intentionally - but the dev did not communicate clearly at all.
Twice the Reddit representative asking him to repeat himself, and still he failed to actually specify his intentions. The wording in the transcript never actually expanded what the dev was saying (‘buy out Apollo’). The evasive language made it sound like a shakedown, ‘pay me $10mil to make this all go away’.
I linked the dev’s own transcript above, but the actual quotes from the dev:
I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We’re good. [Low voice:] That’s mostly a joke.
Okay, if Apollo’s opportunity cost currently is $20 million dollars. At the 7 billion requests and API volume. If that’s your yearly opportunity cost for Apollo, cut that in half, say for 6 months. Bob’s your uncle.
I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that’s a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. 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. As is, it’s quite difficult.
Now, we know that what the dev is doing is essentially offering to outright sell Apollo to end the demand it represents to Reddit. He doesn’t expect them to take it, but a lot of users asked if it were possible, and he’s suggesting it anyway.
But the wording of all of this never specifies ‘buying Apollo’. It sounds like he wants Reddit to like… pay him his ‘protection fee’. I’m sure he means ‘go quiet’ as in like, ‘go quietly into that good night’ (shut down) or ‘stop being so demanding’ (be retooled), in fact he later clarifies he means the latter and the Reddit representative apologises profusely.
But man, that was worded so poorly, and he was given two opportunities to clarify, and he just… didn’t. Only when the Reddit stand-in asked if he was suggesting Reddit buy his silence and compliance did he clarify that wasn’t at all what he was saying.
It was completely unintentional, no doubt. But it was miscommunication of the highest order, and it damaged the lines of communication so irrevocably it probably incentivised Reddit to cease negotiations completely.
The problem is this, from the transcript:
Me: 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.
Reddit: Oh, go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry.
Me: Like it’s a very-
Reddit: Yeah, that’s a complete misinterpretation on my end.
Me: Yeah. No, no, it’s all good.
Reddit: I apologize. I apologize immediately.
The “threat” part was resolved right there. Steve just wanted to retcon the conversation as a way to dog Christian. He didn’t anticipate Christian was gonna roll in with receipts.
Yeah, I found that interesting. I generally don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, and I imagine either (or both) of these is likely:
- The ‘evasive’ language made everything feel implied, that when pressed to outright admit his intentions he falls back. He was evasive, evasive, evasive, pressed, fell back. Still he did not clarify he was selling Apollo, only that ‘go quiet’ meant ‘pay me off and Apollo stops making calls’. It’s possible Spez did not believe him and was trying to deescalate.
- Internally discussing the outcome of the call with other members on staff, they may have felt (1) was true, or Spez accepted the explanation but other staff didn’t; they discussed the implications of each possible intention; and they collectively decided they should probably treat it as a threat since it remained ambiguous. It’s possible Spez did want to believe him but other staff didn’t.
The conclusion doesn’t have to be that Spez believed him, then personally as an individual decided “oh, actually, fuck it” and decided to lie about it anyway. In fact I’d say that of the three possibilities, that’s the least likely.
Yeah, I felt the same when I read his post on Reddit. He worded things incredibly badly, and even I, when reading his post, got the impression that he wanted 10 million dollars to “make their problem go away”. It almost feels like he was testing the water by being vague about it, before backpedaling when he realized they weren’t into that.
I listened to the recording and it was … messy. Christian wasn’t clear at all and it seems his intention of making what he described as a lighthearted jest fell like a led balloon at the Reddit guys feet. To my mind it would have been a very important conversation and therefore if I was Christian I would have kept it business-like and clear. It still doesn’t excuse Reddit for weaponizing the conversation and screaming blackmail which makes the CEO come across as a man-baby throwing a fit.
I agree. When I read and listened to the conversation, it’s mostly clear that it isn’t what he meant but it could definitely be construed in a different way. I think it was a pretty poor choice of words to demonstrate how much of the userbase uses third party apps and how much sway they actually have.
That said, it is what it is. Reddit’s PR team is definitely going to try to spin this as negatively as possible even if the Apollo dev is only trying to make a point. At least there were recordings so we can come to our own conclusions.
I imagine his intend was to imply - or at least put pressure on - the idea of Apollo actually costing them $20mil was an inflated number. The idea that it was a real and on-going cost, and had been for a decade, and he’s basically daring them to buy Apollo. Because if that number was real, they should leap at the chance:
If you want to rip that band-aid off once. […] Beautiful deal.
I believe that’s why it was ‘mostly a joke’ - he never expected them to take it, he doesn’t believe it actually costs them that much. It’s not what he’s taking from them - it’s what they feel entitled to take from the users, and they blame him for being in the way.
Personally I agree it doesn’t cost that much - I believe they believe it does, but only because they look at Apollo’s userbase and activity, and decided “oh boy, if we could sell ads to those users and sell their data at those rates, this is how much we would make” and decided that means Apollo is somehow costing them that. I don’t think ‘opportunity cost’ is an appropriate concept to price on, because it relies on obviously false assumptions.
Apollo is definitely costing them server bandwidth, as are the other apps. And it seems all the devs were ready and willing to cover the costs, even negotiate how their users could still be a revenue stream. But Reddit believes they were owed the same profit of Apollo’s users that they would make off of their own, and I think that’s nonsense.
After all, if somebody pirates Photoshop, it’s stupidly naïve to think that every single one of those users would be willing to pay Adobe $80 a month (in some countries that’s more than they make in 3+ months). And if somebody goes to a friend’s house and watches a Blu-Ray with them, it’s absurd to expect they mail a check for $20 to their local theatre.
The expectation that somebody using something convenient/free would use it just as much if it was demanding/unaffordable is… like, they’re not stupid, right? They can’t possibly be that stupid to think that was even attainable profit for them. I just don’t understand why they think that ‘opportunity cost’ is real.
I think a back of the envelope cost for what each user makes reddit per month was something around $0.22 per month. Which is nowhere near the $2.5 per month their API pricing was suggesting.
This wasn’t a question of opportunity cost, and setting prices in good faith. They simply wanted to kill any competition and somehow thought they could get away with this. Hopefully we can show them they can’t with the blackout and migrating to other online communities.
This is really sad. I rarely posted on Reddit, and I mostly use it as an information source, but Apollo is how I mostly interacted with the platform, and when I did post, it was always through Apollo.
One silver lining is I found Beehaw as a result, and I like interacting and posting here, so I guess… thanks for being shit Reddit!
This is a big reason why I’m here as of today. I just can’t in good conscience support what Reddit is doing. I’ve been an Apollo user since it launched out of beta. I jumped at the chance to have paid Christian twice for both the original premium upgrade. And then the Ultra one later down the road. I just adore the app. When I switched to Android I still found myself missing it terribly. Since switching back to iOS. I’ve averaged 15-20 hours per week just using Apollo.
End of an era :(
Apollo is the epitome of Apple’s HIG. Quite literally the best designed app from a UX standpoint on the App Store.
I remember just falling in love with the design that day. I gave Christian money as soon as I could. I had been an Alien Blue user beforehand. And I just remember being so blown away by the speed of everything too.
I was planning on staying on Reddit until I lost the ability to use Boost, but it already feels too far gone, and I’m struggling to find anything engaging on there. End of an era indeed :(
I thankfully spend a good 90% of my Redditing on Desktop (old.reddit.com 4lyfe), but losing Boost on my phone hurts. Just spent the last hour hitting up all my most frequent subs and looking for all their discords or any alternate *anythings *they’ve set up regardless lol
Boost was the Android Reddit client I used the most. I thought it was great. I also liked Sync a bunch too. I paid for both and would rotate between them. But something about Apollo just stuck with me.
I’m a more recent Apollo user, having switched to iPhone last year. But I’m in the same boat. The third party apps are the only way to go on any platform.
I’ve also been a paying Reddit gold (now premium) user for, I dunno, maybe 10 years. It’s offensive that after all that, I can’t run the software I want to run to access the site. It’s a sign of enshittification.
And frankly, Apollo or not, Reddit isn’t what it used to be. It’s less friendly and welcoming than the narwhal days when /r/LucidDreaming was the hottest community. It’s more abrasive now, more childish. Like the rest of the internet, I suppose.
Yeah, it is completely different than what it used to be. There would definitely be times when a hivemind mentality would get borderline insane. The first subreddit I discovered was r/atheism. And it was nice seeing other people like me. But I remember asking honestly about a girl I was dating at the time being Lutheran and wondering if it could work. Some were supportive. But some people were vile. It was then I could see how nuts it would get.
The communities are so large it has almost gotten too big for its own good. It’s made the people who run the site into total monsters. I started off lurking the site about 14 years ago. And the finally made an account 3 years after. 11 years down the drain, I remember recommending the site to people all the way back then. Especially when I started discovering a lot of the meme subreddits that I would share with friends.
Yeah. You will always get hivemind on insular’ish communities though. Lemmy is probably already just as bad in that regard.
I see your Lutheran+/r/atheism example and raise you dating a capitalist on Lemmy.
I see what you mean. Admittedly, I’m not even 24 hours on here or Lemmy or Tildes. I’m just searching and hoping one sticks.
You might also check out https://kbin.social
FWIW, some friends and I are running our own Lemmy instance, but we’re not completely sold on it either yet. And just software-wise, some pretty important things are missing. There’s actually no way to see, besides going into the database and querying it directly, a list of users on your own instance, for example.
And of course community-wise, Lemmy.ml (the most popular instance, run by lemmy devs) has some questionable moderation. It’s probably better to read about that on another instance, since discussion of censorious moderation is itself subject to censorious moderation.
I made an account on kbin but it isn’t vibing yet. So far, both this and lemmy.ml as well as Tildes have been the ones to step so far in this early period of trying new things out.
It got popular and lost its sense of community. It used to be common, even in large subreddits, to see someone’s username and recognize it again on another subreddit on the site. I made friends this way. It was sometimes less common, but you sometimes would see someone you knew IRL – do you let them know?
Once karma became a currency, sometimes exchanged for real currency to buy influence, that’s when Reddit started changing. Like many things, it fell for commercialization.
Only a couple years ago, a friend of mine was at the top of reddit with a family photo he took. He eventually deleted it because of all the ugliness that inevitably comes from a huge thread where an adult woman and child are in it.
It used to not be that way.
beehaw admins prepare for another wave of users probably lol
I’ve been recommending that people come here!
Lol I have just joined because of that announcement. Hopefully we get more users on here
welcome to your new home!
Might be worth pointing people towards https://sh.itjust.works/ as they don’t have too much users yet and the admin claims to have a lot of compute at their disposal.
That’s what I thought and here I am lol
Definitely. Moreover, the domain name is just awesome
Just joined because of the cool domain name.
original post by Apollo’s dev: https://tedd.it/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/_/
Also on https://apolloapp.io/
Don’t see it there what are you seeing
The comments from FlyingLaserTurtle in particular were just AWFUL. Just straight up gaslighting.
Begun, the migration has.
It is sad to see an amazing app become rendered useless due to some companies greed. They were not even being reasonable with pricing nor did they really give the dev time to figure out what to do.
I really hope that everyone leaves reddit and comes to the fediverse. Mastodon had a huge boost and it completely replaced twitter for me. I am sure Lemmy can do the same.
I’m hoping Christian ports Apollo to Lemmy. I’m not sure what the feasibility of doing so is but I’d actually pay a monthly subscription for the ability to continue using it
honestly, me as well
I think he wants the apps to die with its legacy. Maybe he would make another app that does it. I hope he does and I would pay a modest subscription for it.
I hope that on June 30th, when it shuts down, the app doesn’t just give an error message but instead displays some kind of farewell message.
Yeah a farewell would be good. In my dream scenario, he would open source it and the community could port it. That might be unlikely though
Why do people keep mentioning apollo? It sucks. There are actually good 3rd party reddit apps
you are the only person i have ever heard express that opinion.
I think it’s just that it’s the most popular one on IOS, and a lot of the android ones are android only? And it was the first one whose story got picked up by the media.
Idk. I’ve never used it. But every app that isn’t RedReader is clearly inferior, what are ya’ll doing? /joke
This is just one of those harmless areas where opinions differ.
First time I have heard this take… are you actually spez?
I use 3rd party reddit apps that don’t suck. Stop calling me names. Rude
I used to use Alien Blue and then moved to Apollo and it was good enough for me. Id ask what app(s) you used but I don’t really care about reddit apps anymore 🤷♂️ Unless they upgrade to work with Lemmy
Which I really hope they do! I’m not really sure how much work it would take to pivot over, but I would pay for Apollo again if it would help haha.
Redreader will work with both reddit and in the future also lemmy
It’s not my favorite but I can see the passion of the dev in my app. It’s not fair to discount the whole thing because you think it sucks.
The changes of the api affects every 3rd party reddit app. Apollo is one of the least good ones. Focusing on the bad app is shitting on everyone who puts all of their passion into the good apps
Curious as to why you think Christian doesn’t put passion into Apollo?
What things about Apollo don’t you like?
Making foss is driven by passion. Making proprietary software is driven by passion for making money. One of these passions are not driven by greed. Guess which one. Also, guess which kind of software I prefer. I will never understand itoddlers
So if it’s rude when others call you names, how would you categorize what you just did?
Sure perhaps it’s not the best but for iOS it’s as close to a native app experience as possible, and ad free.
You have to pay 5 dollars a month to make posts. Pathetic
Yeah, I think possibly people don’t like swift ui and how that all looks tbf. After moving to iOS from Android it is a little bland compared to Material You.
Signed up to Lemmy today, but held off to see if the Reddit situation was going to get any better. Seems like it won’t, so one big hearty fuck you to them.
I’ll try and contribute as much as I can to this community.I’m in the same boat as you. I hope Lemmy can replace reddit for me completely, either way it will be a good thing for my reddit addiction I think.
Yup. After reading about Apollo going the way of the dino I took a quick glance over the Boost for Reddit subreddit, and while it doesn’t look like they’ve announced their shutdown it’s realistically gonna happen unless Reddit backs out last second.
I saw a thread there where someone recommended Lemmy so here I am. Gotta say so far it feels just like Reddit did, in a good way.
Feels a lot better than reddit tbh. Less toxic
Even if they back out. Screw them
That’s about where I am. Spez making up a blackmail/extortion accusation against the Apollo dev is just so completely damning. I have no faith left in anything the Reddit admins say at this point, and it’s hard to imagine what they can do to change that.
Yep, fool me once
Hoping Lemmy is able to re-create the feeling and community of early reddit. The reddit we’re all refugees from felt vastly different ten years ago. All of the venture capital funding has ruined something that used to be a replacement for fragmented forum communities. Maybe a mass exodus to federated Lemmy instances can help re-create that early feeling.
I feel like it has it very much already. I was lurking during the y-combinator days and it’s almost uncanny how the community here matches what Reddit had.
Looking forward to finding that new feeling again. The only way to have a good experience on reddit these days has been to quickly navigate away from the massive subs and into niche communities, but we’re already starting at that point so it feels nice.
The tragedy of the commons I suppose. I hope with Lemmy and Beehaw we have the opportunity to do things right this time.
That’s a very accurate representation of Lemmy lol
What’s also interesting to observe is that the vast majority of the comments here have been respectful, considerate, helpful, and constructive. Maybe I got too used to the massive user base of children that Reddit had, and no hate for the younger crowd, but I did miss the maturity that early days Reddit had and subsequently lost.
Don’t worry, the bots, trolls, and dingbats will follow once they realize the party is here. However, they first have to grok the fediverse/Foss thing.
We all got here before the trolls and bots. It’s so refreshing to have actual conversations without the hate.
Yup, Christian’s latest post about Apollo sealed the deal for me leaving. It’s a bummer, but hopefully it leads to something new and exciting starting here! I’m guessing there’s been a pretty big influx of Reddit refugees.
I read a comment that said the admins are holding an AMA soon to “address the concerns of the community”. Can’t wait to see that turn into a mega-shitshow.
“Popcoen tastes good”
God, I feel so bad for Christian. What a slap in the face….
Indirectly in the face of every user
You’re not wrong. A little more impactful for Christian though considering the time and effort he put in to arguably the best Reddit experience outside of old.reddit. Oh well… time for a new kid on the block.
“Swallow all your morals. They’re a poor man’s quality.” - spez, probably
this is very sad, such a great app.
So it begins…
