Oh! I was wondering how I never even heard of Apollo until this debacle. It being only for lockdown platforms explains.

&gt; 
I would if it wasnt only available on iPhoneThat makes sense to me. I was also wondering how come I had never heard of this app.It also changes the calculus significantly: how many users does Apollo have, and how many users does Reddit have?Reddit just might not even notice the content produced by Apollo users.

I would if it wasnt only available on iPhone

Haven&#x27;t used the app myself, but the website[0] seems to have a trailer video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;MKbPZVDg-Z8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;MKbPZVDg-Z8</a> Apparently posted 5 years ago, though.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apolloapp.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apolloapp.io&#x2F;</a>

Can someone please record a video of using this app? I&#x27;d love to have a record of what we are losing.

That explains why WWDC was popping up while searching for &#x27;Apollo&#x27;!Reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;141mdvt&#x2F;apollo_on_wwdc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;141mdvt&#x2F;apollo_o...</a> (Video with timestamp: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=2780" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=2780</a>)(In other news, TIL Youtube search seemingly looks through transcripts. Nice!)

A lot. I&#x27;ve watched both the keynote and also the Platforms State of the Union and not only did I hear it by name in the keynote, I&#x27;ve seen its icon in the background in both the keynote and the PSotU.

Funny that this was just demo&#x27;d in Apple&#x27;s Keynote this week

One thing I&#x27;ve noted is that online forums have expanded and consolidated a few times over the decades. We saw expansion to start, back with BBSes, then consolidation to FidoNet, Usenet, and services like AOL. Web forums took us into expansion. Link aggregators and meme sites moved toward some consolidation. Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0.I suspect we may see another round of forum expansion again as people want to carve out their own niche communities again. We might not see Usenet 3.0 for a bit while we let people expand then let a new site come along and consolidate.

Don’t be. Sometimes businesses such as Reddit must make bad decisions so that new players emerge. That’s exactly how it’s been, and people jump to alternatives when such platforms start acting out.

Just unbelievable. This is just sad. I have no other words.

&gt; Do not build your entire business on someone else&#x27;s APIFor iPhone apps this isn&#x27;t really an option in the first place.

Too bad you are being downvoted. You are rather accurate.

The closer you are to the final customer the better is your chance to bill for the value you deliver (standing on a fragile cobbled together set of third party components). The short term rewards strongly favor relying on others. The business dynamic compounds this as it places a premium on first movers. Going against this dynamic must be carefully considered and only makes sense in isolated cases (where it is the winning move).

Maybe for Reddit and Apollo case, this is alright &amp; makes sense. But at the risk of sounding pedantic, don&#x27;t generalize it.Most of our commodity software is built &amp; deployed by packages, APIs and frameworks we have very little control on. We just hope things don&#x27;t break&#x2F;change as drastically and we can modularize our projects as much as we could, to bear some shock or disruption. Unlikely anyone can build &amp; maintain consumer grade softwares ab initio

Or do, but have a contract in place that ensures longevity. Of course not applicable in this case, but just addressing the generality of the statement, &quot;Do not build your entire business on someone else&#x27;s API.&quot;

They also cite themselves within that citation. That second citation contains a citation also written by them. Citationception!

&gt; (Ps. your obsession with citing yourself is one of the worst parts of reading HN)Good. I don&#x27;t care.It is a priceless prediction that became true. Hence how unsurprising this is.

The tired “don’t build on someone else’s api” lesson doesn’t apply to this case because Apollo is specifically a method for accessing Reddit: Apollo wouldn’t exist without Reddit. The outcome here is sad, yes, but the author built a wildly successful app and made great money for close to a decade: a disappointing end does not discredit the journey.(Ps. your obsession with citing yourself is one of the worst parts of reading HN)

Which other api&#x27;s should he be using?Or are you just saying third party clients shouldn&#x27;t be considered viable to begin with?

Just imagine what&#x27;ll happen when sideloading eventually makes its way to the US - the less-illegal sister of piracy, scraping, is going to make a huge resurgence.

A lesson to be learned. Do not build your entire business on someone else&#x27;s API.The outcome was unsurprising and it is unfortunate. But this is why third-party apps are always at a disadvantage. The same happened with Twitter and they made that clear and now so did Reddit.Like I said before in [0]&quot;Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it.&quot;[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36087219" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36087219</a>

Power users who generate the content that makes Reddit valuable to begin with.

Most of the content on reddit is created by power users who are more likely to use 3rd party tools. Most people who use the official app only consume content.

Reddit&#x27;s whole value proposition is user generated content (and moderation).Labeling that as &quot;only costs&quot; is extremely shortsighted.

I&#x27;m sure Digg had the same line of thinking. Worked out great for them.

Others are saying &quot;power users&quot;, but... I agree with you. It is just an assumption that the &quot;power users&quot; make the product better, although a reasonable one. However, Reddit was pretty awesome, arguably much better, before there were semi-professional power users and moderators.

That&#x27;s the thing, to use an overused adage: it&#x27;s a feature not a bug. They want these people gone. They calculated their contributions and decided it won&#x27;t hurt, or hurt badly enough, for them to care. They&#x27;ll all make millions on the IPO, step away, and sell. None of this makes a difference to that master plan. The sooner everyone accepts this the less time will get wasted on trying to convince Reddit this is a mistake. It&#x27;s not a bug.Reddit is a shell of what it was when I started on the platform 14+ years ago.

The opportunity to stand out from other enshittified platforms. But I guess now we need to find a new thing for VCs to fund for us. Maybe an app that pretends to use AI to create memes or something.

It’s an ads business, so the game is always “giving away a huge number of requests for free to monetize an extremely tiny portion of those requests.” So as soon as bean counters look at the books, it’s easy to be tempted to just identify cohorts of those requests that are unlikely to convert and cut off those users.It takes someone who is more than just a bean counter to realize that maybe, just maybe, the only reason people are interested in those free requests in the first place is because of the communities on Reddit that bring all the actual value.And who knows, maybe one day everyone will realize that the “free social media monetized by ads” business just totally sucks and can only ever lead to situations like this.

Not being able to understand indirect value as a business is seriously why so many businesses fail.

Those users generate content. They’re literally the ones creating value, reddit doesn’t have a product without them.

Mods. People working for free running the site.

And exactly what are they losing from business perspective? Few users that generate only costs?

Bad move from Reddit&#x27;s end. Apollo is one of my most used apps because I absolutely refuse to use the official app. Just like the new Reddit experience on desktop version, the mobile app is just as terrible. Clunky, slow, not user friendly. No thanks.

People have tried to create alternatives to Reddit numerous times over previous controversies. It never sticks. I don&#x27;t see this time being different.

It&#x27;s moves like these that will create the alternative to Reddit. It was this style of anti-consumer moves that killed Digg. History is repeating itself.

&gt;Do I support the protest&#x2F;Reddit blackout?&gt;Abundantly. Unlike other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter who pay their moderators as employees, Reddit relies on volunteers to do the hard work for free. I completely understand that when tools they take to do their volunteer, important job are taken away, there is anger and frustration there. While I haven&#x27;t personally mobilized anyone to participate in the blackout out of fear of retaliation from Reddit, the last thing I want is for that to feel like I don&#x27;t support the folks speaking up. I wholeheartedly do.&gt;It&#x27;s been a horrible week, and the kindness Redditors and moderators and communities have shown Apollo and other third-party apps has genuinely made it much more bearable and I am genuinely so appreciative.&gt;I am, admittedly, doubtful Reddit wants to listen to folks anymore so I don&#x27;t see it having an effect.Man this is just a bummer to read.

I agree. I&#x27;m not a mobile dev but I am a software dev and I&#x27;m continually impressed by how good an app Apollo is. It&#x27;s one of the apps I use that seem like they should be the standard for quality.

Might be a pretty big legal argument if he just copied Reddit backend functionality. Would probably have to redesign the front end from the ground up as well to make it clear it’s not just a rip off.

He addressed it in the post, he&#x27;s not really interested in that kind of work.

Technically possible, but not really feasible due to the way Reddit is set up and people who signed up for the app agreed to. It would be a gigantic mess, and I reckon he&#x27;s not interested in creating a new social platform&#x2F;link aggregate which is why he would rather refund the ~$250k.

You should read the post, he addresses this in it.

This never struck me as a realistic option. The Apollo user base is orders of magnitude less than Reddit, and, even though Apollo is an incredible iOS app, the primary benefit of a large social network like Reddit is the social network.

I had never heard of it before this. Could he just make a backend for it and take his users with him?

I always enthusiastically recommended it to my friends telling them it felt more like a native first-party Apple app than any actual native first-party Apple app.

.........aaaaaaand Reddit Sync &quot;will shut down on June 30, 2023&quot;RIP<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditsync&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144jp3w&#x2F;sync_will_shut_down_on_june_30_2023" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditsync&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144jp3w&#x2F;sync_wi...</a>

I use both Apollo for iOS and Sync on Android and I would give the edge to Sync for polish, aesthetics and customizability.

That’s one advantage of the janky mobile site and the official app — I spend way less time on Reddit!

Totally agree. In fact, it was so good it allowed me to enjoy Reddit far more than I could have without it. And spend far more time on Reddit than I would have.  Killing Apollo kills my desire to use Reddit.

Apollo is such an incredibly high quality app — in fact, it’s so good that I haven’t had it installed on my phone in a couple of years because when I have it I spend way too much time on Reddit.The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.

It&#x27;s a weird balance right?You&#x27;d think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app.Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they&#x27;re the one&#x27;s submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform.With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the number of actual visiters to the site will also go down. Thus lowering potential revenue.

Other social media companies seem far less ethical to me. Facebook still has tons of employees even though they treat users much worse than reddit. In the end reddit is a business that exists to make money. They were never going to let third party apps that undercut ad revenue exist forever.

Good point, I totally forgot that he was caught editing posts directly in the production DB <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;13739026&#x2F;reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;13739026&#x2F;reddit-ceo-stev...</a>

My memory on this is murky, although do I recall correctly that his reply to criticism of the production db comment edit amounted to something like “it was just a prank bro”?

This seems like an even more egregious act, it&#x27;s like attempted character assassination of a developer beloved by the community. This app got shouted out in WWDC and Spez&#x27;s decision shortly after is to concoct an alternate reality where Christian is a villain and present it as fact, and then get caught almost immediately.It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven&#x27;t been caught multiple times first.Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they&#x27;re an extortionist liar from your comfy office.

What an extremely strange equivalence you&#x27;ve drawn.

He&#x27;s doing an AMA about the API changes tomorrow. Bring popcorn.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144ho2x&#x2F;join_our_ceo_tomorrow_to_discuss_the_api&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144ho2x&#x2F;join_our_ce...</a>

&gt; Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?

Apple automatically grants refunds unless you opt out. Tweetbot did a big push trying to get people to opt out of the refund.

I would not ask for refund. This app is a jewel on iOS, extremely well polished and gave me hours and hours and hours of enjoyment.

Most users won’t opt for a refund from Apollo. People are on his side.

They&#x27;re not under any obligation legally - but they&#x27;ve been intentionally misleading at every step to try to make Apollo the bad guy

Yes, but he also should listen to Ru Paul and not duck it up.  Or maybe not digg it.

Putting aside why Reddit&#x27;s behaviour is objectionable. Reddit did this in a way that will cost them money and harm both their reputation and quality.Had they set out a reasonable timeline for the new prices, they would have had a new revenue stream. Instead they killed it and at the same time created an incentive for some of their most active users to leave.

What kind of obligation is Reddit under to allow Apollo to continue? They’ve made a decision they think (rightly or wrongly) is in the long-term interests of the company.How long will Reddit survive if they don’t do this? I have no idea. But I do know the CEO has to deliver more than happy users.

&gt;yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefitThis is *literally* what is expected of someone running a company with intitutional investors - anything other than this and investors are not interested.What more proof do we need that there is nothing more important to a small group of humans that own all the money, than them getting more money?

Considering some of the bad hiring decisions they have made in the past, I&#x27;m guessing not that great.

I&#x27;ve known a couple of people who previously worked at Reddit and I can&#x27;t imagine they&#x27;d quit over something like this. I think most employees don&#x27;t feel any personal responsibility or sense of control for the situation and are happy to get paid a comfortable salary.

&gt; I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this.What is the employee culture like it Reddit?I’ve never gotten the impression that people working at Reddit better care all that much about the community. It’s just not something that ever came across from the site… rather, I’ve suspected just the opposite.Statements by some admin’s make me wonder if they’ve EVER dealt with a community before … and their decisions based on personal relationships, rather than anything else.

I don&#x27;t think lifetime access is getting refunded since that was just a one time unlock. He says the $250,000 cost is to refund all &quot;subscriptions&quot;.

I generally agree with this type of analysis regarding for-profit ventures, but as a lifetime purchaser, I’m not going to try to get a refund here. I got my money’s worth out of Apollo, and Christian is handling this like a steely-eyed capitalist. He’s not asking the community to bail him out from his business decisions or Reddit taking things in a different direction, and I respect that a lot.Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.

&gt; A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they&#x27;re forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is&#x2F;was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.

Reddit is stupid, and the whole situation is bad, but shouldn&#x27;t the man behind the biggest app for the biggest forum in the world, in the lucrative ios ecosystem have made himself wealthy enough so that 250k is close to nothing?Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space?If he isn&#x27;t &quot;10+ million&quot;-wealthy that&#x27;s extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.

&gt; Why would they?&gt; A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they&#x27;re forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.That&#x27;s practically the definition of tortious interference.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.findlaw.com&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;liability-and-insurance&#x2F;tortious-interference.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.findlaw.com&#x2F;smallbusiness&#x2F;liability-and-insuranc...</a>&quot;The most common form of [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance.&quot;

&gt; Why would they?I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?&gt; Reddit: &quot;So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we&#x27;re talking like order of years.&quot;
&gt; &quot;There&#x27;s not gonna be any change on it. There&#x27;s no plans to, there&#x27;s no plans to touch it right now in 2023.At least for the yearly subscriptions

&gt; Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder?Why would they?In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of &quot;lifetime access&quot; while having ads being pushed.A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they&#x27;re forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it&#x27;s commitments.

Reddit had an easy way out for the issue of 3rd party apps not showing ads, they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients, so they could have made the API exclusive to users with a subscription. People would have been upset, but not this upset.

Because you can&#x27;t IPO for a zillion dollars and leave suckers holding the bag that way

I wonder if Reddit ever considered and calculated options like showing ads, selling reddit gold and merchandise through partner apps. Maybe it could be coined into win-win-win but ended as it is.

Because I&#x27;m not so sure that it&#x27;s true. Reddit isn&#x27;t massively profitable but it also doesn&#x27;t have to lose a ton of money. IIRC they were able to run a much tighter ship and operate off of just Reddit Gold and ads for at least a decade before they started this recent hypergrowth phase

because they&#x27;re going public, saying &quot;we&#x27;re broke, please invest&quot; isn&#x27;t going to work for them — at this point everything they do is to more or less prop up the value until everyone can cash out

There&#x27;s a step before this. They&#x27;re losing a lot of money because the choices they made to take investment to earn more money. They could&#x27;ve gone the route of wikipedia. They could&#x27;ve stayed extremely lean. They took $1.3 BILLION in funding, minimum. They have 500-1000 employees.Its greed that they got here. They made choices, and then as a consequence of those choices they made choices that are significantly reducing the value they provide to their users. Its enshittification, its killing the golden goose, its destroying a public good for the benefit of investors who don&#x27;t care about anything other than making a return.The worst part is the investors don&#x27;t care about anything other than making the numbers look good in the short term so they can dump their investment onto other investors. Its like all of corporate america decided to watch The Wire and go &quot;Oh see how they&#x27;re pumping up the numbers to make them look good for the mayor, but not actually solving crime? THAT should be our business plan!&quot;. Providing value is a side effect of making money, on the false equivalence that making money means you&#x27;re providing value, so therefore making more money means you&#x27;re providing more value.

Yeah. The wikipedia approach to an online platform seems ideal.Wikipedia is pretty fantastic. Signal is pretty great. I&#x27;m pretty happy with NPR. Archive.org makes me happy.Appeal to people with money (the professional class) and then beg.I feel like the next great social media platform will result from a rich person disillusioned by reddit (a Bryan Acton type) creating a platform resistant to &quot;next quarters profit&quot;-ism.

The fees aren&#x27;t small, they also forbid 3rd party apps to show their own ads and will be blocking NSFW subreddits from API (none of those things apply to their mobile app).So ultimately they want 3rd party to use subscription model to ultimately get worse experience.

Reddit should try honestly.&quot;We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn&#x27;t bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don&#x27;t show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps.&quot;I don&#x27;t know what why it is so hard to say that...

At this point, I&#x27;m just glad Apollo&#x27;s author will be able to get some indemnification (and cover his refunds) with the likely lawsuit that will come from this lie.

I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is smallI&#x27;m using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don&#x27;t think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.

Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, &amp; there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome &amp; Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API.They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read &#x2F; maintain &#x2F; debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.

After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn&#x27;t a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.---
I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can&#x27;t share that sentiment. I&#x27;ve listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I&#x27;m not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, &quot;if you want Apollo to go quiet,&quot; did come across as a threat.Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding &quot;in terms of API usage,&quot; but the damage was already done. Steve&#x27;s side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn&#x27;t hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat.
---Transcript of the call: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;christianselig&#x2F;fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f915e6a5c7014" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;christianselig&#x2F;fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...</a>Audio: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;christianselig.com&#x2F;apollo-end&#x2F;reddit-third-call-may-31-end.m4a" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;christianselig.com&#x2F;apollo-end&#x2F;reddit-third-call-may-3...</a>

&gt;Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually,At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like &quot;winners don&#x27;t cheat, and cheaters don&#x27;t win&quot;, &quot;crime doesn&#x27;t pay&quot;, or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.

Spez has always made Ellen Pao look like a genius CEO

&gt; It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly &quot;I just want to be very clear about what you&#x27;re saying&quot; and then said &quot;that&#x27;s sounds like a threat&quot;. The wording doesn&#x27;t really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with &quot;I&#x27;m just going to hope that&#x27;s not what you meant.&quot; which is generally how someone acts when they think you&#x27;ve threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to say it&#x27;s a blatant lie. And wouldn&#x27;t you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?

&gt;It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lieSpez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and responseThis is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)

&quot;Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?&quot;I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there&#x27;s nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.

&gt; It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.I think there&#x27;s a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as &quot;you do all the work, we make all the money&quot;, which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don&#x27;t give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.That&#x27;s an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.nytimes.com&#x2F;dealbook.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;buyout-firms-profited-as-simmons-debt-soared&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.nytimes.com&#x2F;dealbook.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;...</a>And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow&#x2F;</a>

It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is really beyond the pale.From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good.Edit: not to mention Christian&#x27;s full-time job has just been ended by this policy change. How especially and thoughtlessly cruel to now also make him out to be an extortionist liar, and for nothing really.

&gt; Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value?Not against a private company, no. Reddit is still owned by Conde-Nast, I believe. What to do with it is up to them.Also in general *employees* don&#x27;t bring shareholder lawsuits. Even if you own significant stock, getting fired for suing your boss is usually a losing proposition.

They can definitely be nerfed. Go private and no one gets invited. They can also block any new content except if on a post approved list, which could be as few as the mods. Each in effect would kill a sub.

Can you script a mass-delete after privating (via API, while you still can)?

Subreddits can&#x27;t be destroyed, only made private, and then requested by someone else.

Did you read the thread? It includes a section about increasing the cost and how it wouldn&#x27;t really do much.&gt; Why not just increase the price of Apollo?&gt; One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10&#x2F;year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1&#x2F;month each in Reddit fees. That&#x27;s $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.&gt; So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.&gt; I hope you can recognize how that&#x27;s an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5&#x2F;month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple&#x27;s fees that would just be enough to break even.&gt; Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That&#x27;s a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it&#x27;s just not economically feasible. It&#x27;s much cheaper for me to simply shut down.

It would be a cheap shot for me to just say &quot;you didn&#x27;t read the post, did you?&quot; but he does explain it.Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn&#x27;t say.The relationship is broken.

Right now, I would only pay for a subscription if there was a way for reddit to get none of the money.

Seems stupid to reward Reddit&#x27;s decision. The $5 ends up in Reddit&#x27;s pocket. I&#x27;d much rather fund a decentralized competitor to Reddit.

The post details how yearly subscriptions is one of the major issues, not monthly ones. There is already an update to monthly prices from 1.99 to 5.99, but the people on the yearly subscription locked in 0.99 or something like that.The 30 day window was not enough time to rectify that and would cost him 50k in the first month to cover the diff. The author suggested he needed at least 3 months to implement changes and switch at least some portion of yearly subscribers to a higher price.

Do you know what happens when you pay blackmail or protection money? It keeps happening, and at more cost each iteration.If they came out with a reasonable set of conditions to do API access, people would be a lot less upset. But they didn&#x27;t. And those API fees are guaranteed to go only up, up, and further up.Time to get out of reddit when the gettin&#x27;s good.

Folks - if you want Apollo to survive, go make it known you are willing to pay $5 a month for access.I know it&#x27;s popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn&#x27;t seem possible.

If employees are getting paid salary, getting health insurance, getting retirement contributions, they’re by-and-large not going to quit

That money is pennies to reddit. Apollo was around long before the official app and established a majority mobile userbase which you could argue helped build reddit into what it is today. I guarantee you it 100% made reddit more money than it made the developer of the app. Reddit is the bad guy for slandering him and gaslighting their users at every turn, yes.

Reddit literally only makes money of other people’s content. They contribute absolutely nothing themselves.Hypocritical much?

Weird taken given that it was a resource provided for people to use that benefited Reddit to offer.Are shipping companies leeches in your worldview?

&gt; So the bad guys are not the ones making an alternative client that makes money off of Reddit while not displaying their ads? Oh, okay.Correct.

So the bad guys are not the ones making an alternative client that makes money off of Reddit while not displaying their ads? Oh, okay.Those 3rd party apps are leeches that are playing surprised_pikachu.jpeg when the blood supply is cut.The simple fact that this guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions shows the insane amount of money he made off of the back of Reddit.

&gt; Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.

I was using RiF myself. Reddit is unusable for me without a 3rd party up as their interface is a clusterfuck. I can&#x27;t complain, I was spending too much time there anyway and it&#x27;s easy to cut off now.

It is not surprising to me that a product intended for social drama (news) aggregation has basically been steeped in drama its whole life.Like, I can&#x27;t remember a time that there _hasn&#x27;t_ been some sort of drama going on behind the scenes at Reddit. Really seems like one of the last places I would want to work, that&#x27;s for sure.

Well, Zynga was an example.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;smart-home&#x2F;zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stock-or-youll-be-fired&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;smart-home&#x2F;zynga-to-employees-give...</a>

&gt; I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this.I&#x27;m sure a few will but, I can&#x27;t name any time in the last 20 years when a tech company did something bad that enough employees quit over it for it to be notable. For 95% of tech workers, it&#x27;s just a job and pays money. And pays well.

Their willingness to exempt screen reader &#x2F; accessibility capable or accessibility focused third party apps from API pricing is good faith IMO.So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats &amp; Reddit getting the approaches covered, &amp; this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content &amp; in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.

They still repeat the “Apollo threatened us” lie, even though Christian’s recordings prove that they apologised and accepted that misunderstanding.

See this response reddit posted <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;143sho8&#x2F;admins_claim_apollo_threatened_them_whats_the&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;143sho8&#x2F;admins_c...</a>Seems the threat of mods to shut down subs holds some weight after all, and they are backtracking on some things. Most third party apps will still not work, but they are supposedly going to improve mod tools in the app, and there will be plenty of API exceptions for mod bots, non-commercial apps and accessibility focused apps.This seems a lot more reasonable, although the API pricing is still bonkers.

It&#x27;s a large and protracted public backlash and another example of the CEO being incompetent and dishonest right before an IPO.It would definitely impact my view of the company as an investor.

But it has generated enough bad PR and user bleeding to significantly push competitors, which eventually will financially hurt Reddit - or possibly even kill it.An old-school investor would be fuming right now, but VCs only care about IPOs and they probably blessed this strategy already.

&gt; Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?Oh please. Let&#x27;s be honest, this is not financially going to hurt the company.

An appropriate place to read 4chan, I suppose.

&gt;#1 Reddit Android app &quot;Reddit is Fun&quot;Guess no more bathroom reddit for me. 4chan still works.

Isn&#x27;t he a citizen and current resident of Canada?

Christian (the maker of Apollo) is from Norway, and if the recordings was done in Norway it’s legal as far as I know.Even a specific point in the law that specify that you can record audio without informing about it, as long as you are part of the conversation yourself.§205 :
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lovdata.no&#x2F;dokument&#x2F;NL&#x2F;lov&#x2F;2005-05-20-28&#x2F;KAPITTEL_2-6#KAPITTEL_2-6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lovdata.no&#x2F;dokument&#x2F;NL&#x2F;lov&#x2F;2005-05-20-28&#x2F;KAPITTEL_2-...</a>EDIT: See now that he was in Canada when it was recorded, and they have the same kind of laws.

&gt; Realistically this is the right time for the large subreddits to move onto a different platform.Like Apollo. He could build a backend himself.

Realistically this is the right time for the large subreddits to move onto a different platform. The moderators and the community ultimately have the power here, not Reddit. And in the sense that those communities are just forums, good old PHPbb could be the answer.

... or the community would spin up a new one with a slightly different name and a new set of moderators if the demand is there.There are lots of permanently dark&#x2F;private subreddits out there that have been &quot;lost&quot; to some dispute or another.

&gt;I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.Subreddits are run by volunteer moderators and are entirely at the whim of reddit. If any substantial subreddit tried to shut down or go dark permanently reddit would just remove the moderators responsible.

Sync too; the true gold standard of Reddit apps.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditsync&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144jp3w&#x2F;_&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditsync&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144jp3w&#x2F;_&#x2F;</a>

Reddit has been mired in controversy since day one. It is also regularly touted on HN as THE ONLY trustworthy place on the web to find, for example, honest product reviews; where Google, Amazon, Yelp, Wirecutter etc are hopelessly corrupted. I&#x27;m not buying that a brief fit of bad PR will hurt them; and in the meantime Reddit thinks there&#x27;s 20m of revenue on the table they will recapture when the app goes away.

This has been my Reddit app for ages. I&#x27;ve paid for the Pro version a long time ago. Sad to this go.I&#x27;m not throwing in the towel like most people are, but I will just relegate myself to viewing it only in a desktop browser. We&#x27;ll see how long old.reddit.com lasts after this

Reddit Sync as well - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditsync&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144jp3w&#x2F;sync_will_shut_down_on_june_30_2023&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditsync&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144jp3w&#x2F;sync_wi...</a>

I run a small sub, about 50 people.One day I looked at it, not logged in.Turned out there was a post, &quot;pinned by moderators&quot;, at the top of the post list, exhorting people to join the sub lounge - that real-time chat thing Reddit was pushing.I never made that post, nor did I approve it, nor did I ever see it in the mod list of posts.I logged in, and went to the mod list of posts - and lo and behold, somehow pinned to the bottom of the list of posts, so before the oldest post, is this post.Reddit made that post, pushed it into my sub, pinned it, and hid it from me, not only by forcing it last in the list of posts, but also because when I log in as admin, the post is not shown to me!Bloody hell.At that point I knew Reddit could not be trusted.

&gt;I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.It&#x27;s my understanding that Apollo users make up a fraction of a percent of active users. Reddit almost certainly doesn&#x27;t care. Fact is they&#x27;ve taken in over a billion in funding and aren&#x27;t really returning a profit, charging for API access starts moving them in the right direction though.

I mean, Tortious interference can apply when a service which could reasonably have been expected to charge reasonable amounts suddenly increases their prices for no reason, if it prevents a third party from being able to fulfill a contract. I have no idea if one of this is one of those cases though, I wouldn&#x27;t expect so but IANAL.

&gt; EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?Why would he lose his job? Realistically, it&#x27;s a smart business move to monetise their users. It&#x27;s Reddit, them being pissy about having to pay is part of the course. There is a reason they&#x27;re the lowest valued social media users.&gt;EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I&#x27;m sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.What would he have a claim for? He wasn&#x27;t paying for the API. He could pay for the API and continue to operate. You can&#x27;t sue someone because they stopped letting you use their services for free. You sure can&#x27;t sue a business for asking your for-profit company to pay expenses.Realistically, these app users would have made tens if not hundreds of thousands a month if they just added subscription model to their app and only had paying customers. These apps could still exist and be extremely profitable for a one-man apps.Simple maths $5 a month subscription $2.50 to reddit $1.50 to apple and $1 to the app developer. Say 10% of their users convert which seems very reasonable considering the reception a price increase to $6.99 seem to get on the Apollo subreddit. That would have been $100,000 a month profit. But instead, they shut it down.

Why would he have learned from something that didn&#x27;t punish him in the slightest? That edit, ellen pao, that time they tried to hire someone who I think was a known pedophile or something... None of it has stopped reddit from bringing cash and clout to the people in charge, and none of it has prevented them from getting to the point where they will most likely walk away after the IPO with plenty of millions of dollars each.This is the inevitable outcome of a human who has never been told no or punished for their misdeeds. This is what it looks like for a spoiled child to run a company.We have a lot of that lately.

I am astounded that Steve Huffman would do this. There was the incident ~7 years ago where he silently edited a post that criticized him, but I thought he would have learned from that, and this is so much worse.

It all depends on the terms of the equity grant. You may get RSUs, but voting rights are retained by the founders or someone else.

&gt; could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlookTech employees are somewhat notorious for not enforcing their shareholder rights. Most companies, for example, ignore their books &amp; records requirements under Delaware law, or force private sales to occur at terms favourable to management and the Board’s friends.

What he said is definitely defamation, all other damages notwithstanding.

&gt; Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letterIs there a running list of subs (over a certain high number of subscribers, to keep it focused) that aren&#x27;t in the blackout list? That would be interesting to see. Wouldn&#x27;t be too hard to implement, at least while the API is still free...

You can buy a year of Apollo Ultra in advance and 50,000 people have done just that.I bet he was making enough that he didn&#x27;t need another job but not significantly more than that.

What refunds will he need to provide?I paid for the app years ago - it was $5 or so and I don&#x27;t expect to get anything back. That&#x27;s just how the game works.I know he also had some sort of monthly subscription - it seemed quite absurd for whatever additional trivial features it provided, but then again there apparently was some sort of Apollo fanboy group who got a lot of excitement out of new app logos, which seemed to be the main updates in the last few years, even at the expense of serious bugs that lingered for months.I&#x27;d assume those subscriptions would just stop being charged going forward. So again, who is getting $250k in refunds?Furthermore, if he is refunding that much money, I wonder what kind of revenue and profits he was pulling in? I had kind of assumed he was making a very good living (deservedly - it was a good app) - maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but now I&#x27;m wondering if he was making a order of magnitude more than that...

Why even wait. Id shut it down on the 12th.

Just deleted my 11 year old account. End of an era.

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recording his calls with them for over a year (legally I might add). Reddit has 0 wiggle room here.EDIT: Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value? I feel like this is going to significantly reshape Reddit as moderators of large subreddits will be furious and quit if not destroy entire subreddits. Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ModCoord&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1401qw5&#x2F;incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ModCoord&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1401qw5&#x2F;incomplet...</a>EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I&#x27;m sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.EDIT 4: #1 Reddit Android app &quot;Reddit is Fun&quot; is shutting down too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditisfun&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144gmfq&#x2F;rif_will_shut_down_on_june_30_2023_in_response_to&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditisfun&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144gmfq&#x2F;rif_wi...</a>

Locking comments on a website built on the commenting system. Something hilarious about that.

Reddit leadership desperate to dump the pig on public markets, pulling out all the stops. Literally their only path forward is to find some other greater fool to hold the bags, regardless of what they have to say to make it happen.Edit: Maybe keep an eye on what they say to catch them performing material securities fraud? Wayback early, wayback often!Edit 2: Damage control mode: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144ho2x&#x2F;join_our_ceo_tomorrow_to_discuss_the_api&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144ho2x&#x2F;join_our_ce...</a> (r&#x2F;reddit: Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API [Locked])

How long do you think Reddit would have kept Apollo ad-free? That would cost them whatever Apollo cost and have the same result. The value proposition of Apollo is that Reddit doesn&#x27;t own it. They already have a client. It sucks. Why would this be better?

They didn&#x27;t even need to do that. They could simply have changed the terms so that user-facing clients like apollo either need to show reddit ads, allowing no ads for users of reddit premium. They approve api users anyways, supposedly, so mod tools and the like could be exempt, and they could introduce higher cost efficient bulk export of comments for large scale generative AI machine learning use cases.Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.

Reddit could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat simply by purchasing Apollo and making it available as an official app. So many people would have paid a significant monthly fee for an ad-free, quality mobile reddit experience. But no, they had to go full-on maximalist destroy-all-intruders mode, and now they&#x27;ve got an unnecessary PR nightmare on their hands. From the perspective of fiduciary responsibility, reddit is completely deficient. What a bunch of idiots.

Honestly this is the tipping point for me to just move on. Reddit is an ad-filled cesspool, with a morally bankrupt C-suite. Growing up I actually looked up to this guy. . . how pathetic and sad. Such a fall from grace, and for what?

&gt; Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:&gt; Steve: &quot;Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.&quot; Steve: &quot;This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He&#x27;s threatening us.&quot;&gt; Wow. Because my memory is that you didn&#x27;t take it as a threat, and you even apologized profusely when you admitted you misheard it.Wow, I didn&#x27;t know it&#x27;d gotten that bad.

The allegations of bad faith on Reddit&#x27;s end will make the upcoming subreddit protest shutdowns more spicy.

I&#x27;ve heard there&#x27;s a terrific service out there that&#x27;s a real sleeper.  USENET, I think it&#x27;s called.

I&#x27;ve been using hackernews as a great alternative to reddit. When they shut off compact reddit I completely moved to HN.

Tildes.net is similar but not a replacement

I think Tildes is a good secondary alternative to Reddit, It was developed by a Reddit intern and RiD developer.

For me, both Twitter &amp; Reddit require a not-inconsiderable effort to extract value while ignoring&#x2F;digesting the annoyances.Maybe fewer global social platforms and less time spent on them will do a lot of people more good.I&#x27;m guessing Reddit gets less global and ubiquitous, in the same way Twitter is more of a slice of a niche crowd now too. Maybe that&#x27;s okay.

Seems like things are currently migrating towards smaller, more closed communities. Things like Discord servers, any of the various services that popped up when Twitter went bad, invite-only chats on any of the various chat services, even web forums are still hanging around. Honestly can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m sad about this transition, I tend to think smaller communities are healthier.

Depends, could be a cart leading a horse situation.As in: Maybe Lemmy has bad UX which is why it craters adoption.Spending some resources on an Apollo version with Lemmy support sounds like a good idea assuming the dev time can be recouped.Since Apollo is a paid app I think there&#x27;s a more direct path to financial relevance than number of eyes in ads. :)

Probably not financially viable to do so.

You mean Lemmy in general? Lemmy.ml is just one of many Lemmy servers. Though there&#x27;s some discussion coming up on how things are going in Lemmy regarding anything surrounding any criticism of China or Russia.So far, there&#x27;s been attempts to spin up new servers to mitigate issues on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml while others are looking to Kbin which also federates with Lemmy but uses separate software.

No, but great third party apps for Mastodon definitely keep me using Mastodon more than I was with the official app. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s a similar story for many others.

Tapbots building a good app for Mastodon after Tweetbot got killed didn&#x27;t suddenly push Mastodon into a top-tier social network.

In the thread he said he rather let it die because he is already tired.

can Apollo just switch to supporting Lemmy.ml? That would be nice their UI kinda sucks at the moment.

The Reddit website frequently resets itself back to the feed page when I&#x27;m scrolling up&#x2F;down through posts.  That amount of clueless disruption during routine use is a deal breaker for me.  Goodbye Reddit.

Apollo&#x27;s design is influenced heavily by Apple&#x27;s&#x2F;iOS&#x27;s Human Interface Guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guidelines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guideline...</a>

That’s an opinion that I’m not really sure matters for the conversation at hand. It’s not about if Apollo is good, it’s about how Apollo is being treated.You are free to use what ever you want, and that’s the point. This removes everything but the Reddit app.

The official Reddit app, at least on Android, is a buggy mess from a UX experience.- Half the time, clicking on a push notification takes me to the front page instead of the post that was interesting enough to click on. And then the notification is gone, and I can&#x27;t get to said post easily at that point- Sometimes, there&#x27;s two articles that show up on the main screen that I want to read. I have to pick which one I want to read more, because there&#x27;s a 50&#x2F;50 shot that when I hit back, I will get a fully refreshed home page instead of being taken back to where it was.- Overall it feels less natural to navigate through than the Reddit web interface, let alone the &#x27;classic&#x27; (old.reddit.com) user interface.- Probably not related to the design of the mobile app, but the hostile behavior of web reddit on mobile, constantly trying to force me into their subpar mobile app, is also irritating and painful.

Swipe to upvote&#x2F;downvote puts it leagues ahead of the official app already.

The Apollo app had much better performance than the official Reddit app. However, the design of the app was amateurish and hideous to look at. The official Reddit app is actually designed by designers and it shows.

Unless there is another job offering with similar compensation&#x2F;benefits&#x2F;etc. I&#x27;m not sure most employees will be able to do anything. &quot;Leaders&quot; and bold-faced lies are a duo as old as time. Macroeconomic conditions have many chained to their shitty bosses.

given Spez has a long history of lying they probably dont care, they&#x27;re just as complicit as he is.

I wonder how the employees will feel when they realize they were lied to, now that Christian has released an audio recording of the call.

The same CEO that explicitly confessed to editing users&#x27; comments? I can totally believe that.

Its the same guy who has let the entire platform be exploited for years at the expense of the people just wanting to connect about subjects online.

Isn’t this the same guy who went and edited comments of users who were critical of him on Reddit? If someone shows you who they are believe them…

That’s a private sub, but boy I’d love to see that bloodbath of a comment section after Christian released the call recordings.It is always remarkable to see what an absolute bankruptcy of ethics some corporate leaders are burdened with, and a relief to see the consequences hit them in the face.

&gt;It’s an extraordinary amount of data, and these are for-profit businesses built on our data for free.No spez you utter cunt. The data is not yours. It&#x27;s my posts on your website. Your own fucking terms say I grant you a right to copy it, not that it&#x27;s fucking yours.

From the linked post:&gt; We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrowIs that a threat, lol?

&gt; We will exempt any mod tool or bot affected by the API change.What&#x27;s the definition of a mod tool?If a mod uses Apollo to keep up with the posts on their subreddit, is Apollo going to be exempt?Or should Apollo pivot, add more moderation features and rebrand itself as a mod tool?

They also made the same claim in r&#x2F;partnercommunities too, not just internally.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;143sho8&#x2F;admins_claim_apollo_threatened_them_whats_the&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;143sho8&#x2F;admins_c...</a>

Maybe with text snippets, but I don&#x27;t see how somebody can listen to the conversation and come away with the idea that the dev was blackmailing anyone.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;christianselig.com&#x2F;apollo-end&#x2F;reddit-third-call-may-31-end.m4a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;christianselig.com&#x2F;apollo-end&#x2F;reddit-third-call-may-...</a>

And the Apollo dev would be well within his right to _actually_ threaten them like that, because that&#x27;s what Reddit is doing to him.

I don&#x27;t understand, what is the threat on Christian&#x27;s part? His project is being killed, that&#x27;s not a threat but something that is actually happening. He suggests that they pay him a small fraction of what he has cost them to shut down without compromising the reddit API as a whole. What&#x27;s the threat, that he keeps operating? That&#x27;s not an option, they are FORCING him to shut down.

To be honest it sounded like that to me too. It&#x27;s very hard to differentiate between some honest clumsy phrasing and fishing for a payout, and the &quot;clarification&quot; doesn&#x27;t help with that since it could also be an excuse to save face.

The author doesn&#x27;t want to look at it this way, but this is a really weird thing to say. My interpretation was that they&#x27;d make an offer to sell the app to reddit, but the specific phrasing there really is not that.edit: I still think it was the wrong way to approach the situation. Consider this from reddit&#x27;s perspective,
it would only make sense for Reddit to pay for the traffic if they think they would lose it if it Apollo went away, but then it&#x27;s not opportunity cost.It doesn&#x27;t make the change any better of a look for reddit, and you can certainly question whether it&#x27;s true that Apollo users would just use reddit, but if you accept that then I don&#x27;t think you can claim the moral high ground if you offer to accept payment to &quot;make it go away&quot;. The developer should have approached this from the perspective of the value that Apollo offers users and reddit instead of the cost to make the problem go away. I imagine the dev doesn&#x27;t accept that Apollo users would just switch over, but they shouldn&#x27;t have made their statement in those terms then, and I think that was a mistake.

Is it really a threat to offer to sell Apollo rather than face the public backlash that will happen by forcing it to shut down?

I don&#x27;t see it that way.  That was just a proposed business transaction: reddit pays a fee, and in exchange, the Apollo dev doesn&#x27;t comment publicly on the API changes.   What&#x27;s the threat, real or implied?  The alternative is he goes public, which is only a problem for reddit if they know what they&#x27;re doing is wrong.

Are you deliberately ignoring the next few lines of the conversation, then?

&gt; What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that &quot;Christian will shut down the app and go quietly&quot; is the only answer that makes sense in context.They&#x27;re buying Apollo. Then they can shut it down and make the app stop making API requests.

I&#x27;ve listened to the voice call [1] linked in [2] and I interpret it the same way that Reddit staff apparently did -- as a veiled threat.Here&#x27;s why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to &quot;quiet down&quot;, then to &quot;make it easier&quot; on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian&#x27;s offer is for Apollo to &quot;go away quietly&quot;, as in he personally won&#x27;t make noise about it. I&#x27;m not honestly sure that there&#x27;s another sound way to interpret this.Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It&#x27;s not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.This &#x27;clarification&#x27; that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will &quot;go quiet&quot;, doesn&#x27;t make sense, because Reddit doesn&#x27;t need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that &quot;Christian will shut down the app and go quietly&quot; is the only answer that makes sense in context.We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren&#x27;t necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: &quot;Vote for our initiative or else we&#x27;ll stop funding you and fund your opposition&quot;? No, almost certainly not. They&#x27;d say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he&#x27;s offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It&#x27;s not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. &quot;Buy me out or else I&#x27;m going to cause even more public fuss about this&quot;. The way that it&#x27;s communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;christianselig.com&#x2F;apollo-end&#x2F;reddit-third-call-may-31-end.m4a" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;christianselig.com&#x2F;apollo-end&#x2F;reddit-third-call-may-3...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144f6xm&#x2F;apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apolloapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;144f6xm&#x2F;apollo_w...</a>

It was certainly telling when Apollo guy offered what seemed like a pretty lighthearted open in a potential negotiation, and reddit claimed this as &quot;blackmail&quot;.When I negotiate the price on a piece of real estate, I often will include things that I want the owner to fix before closing (this is very common). The implication is &quot;fix this or I won&#x27;t buy the property&quot;.Is that &quot;blackmail&quot;? Apparently according to Spez it is.

Not only do the receipts contradict the Reddit CEO, but even if they didn&#x27;t, the Apollo dev is well within his rights to offer an ultimatum that either Reddit acquires his app, or he shuts it down. If he has enough leverage in that situation for Reddit to feel as if that&#x27;s &quot;blackmail,&quot; then it actually means that Reddit is the one blackmailing him with the pricing changes.On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it &quot;blackmail&quot; - meaning they&#x27;re losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can&#x27;t they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo&#x27;s costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?

&gt; Steve: &quot;Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.&quot; Steve: &quot;This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He&#x27;s threatening us.&quot;I can&#x27;t believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn&#x27;t happen.

Apollo will close down on June 30th