Tuesday, December 16All That Matters

How Reddit Became the Enemy – w/ Apollo Developer Christian Selig

23 Comments

  • I’ve kind of made my peace with it. When Apollo breaks, I’m leaving Reddit. Maybe I’ll casually browse on my desktop occasionally, but I’ll be done for the most part. (It was the same when Twitter broke Tweetbot).

    It was fun, but it’s clear Reddit is moving in a different direction. I was on here way too much anyway.

  • It’s quite clearly a ploy to simply shut down third party apps in order to obtain centralized control of everything reddit related.

    I don’t even think getting users to mitigate to official channels is a main goal, they could lose potentially millions of users. It’s just a clear cut case of killing anything that could potentially maybe cause it to be non-advertiser and shareholder friendly. The consequences of this have been deemed acceptable.

    I speculate that the reason they didn’t shut down the API entirely is because some moneybags company which can spend tens of millions no problem, opposed to “indie” developers such as Apollo, could in the future enter a partnership and thus they want to keep that option open.

  • They could monetize the API as a paid account feature, letting you use whatever app you wanted. And since you’re a paid user, you wouldn’t see ads anyway.

    I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade and paid very little for it because the memberships offered very little for the price. Locking down the API (and old.reddit.com) would be enough to motivate me to pay for it.

    But it seems they are actually quite determined to kill Reddit entirely. It’s likely unavoidable anyway since the whole point of an IPO is to fundamentally change the purpose of things into a profit center. You can’t really have both.

    I guess I’m gonna have to start going outside.

  • My account is nearly 17 years old and I’ll probably delete it when third party apps go away.

    My relationship with Reddit and needing that dopamine hit of getting new information all the time is unhealthy, and its hard to quit. But I primarily access it via Sync and honestly I am hoping that when access goes away it will be easy enough to move on. I don’t want to see millions of ads and I certainly don’t trust those in charge to make the right choices.

    So kind of looking forward to it in a bizarre way.

  • Confused about how he is staying compliant with the 60 queries per minute limit. That’s one per second.

    He confirms that a typical kind of query would be one in which a page full of post titles is retrieved, or one in which a page full of comments is retrieved.

    If you had multiple users *n*, it basically means each user would have to wait *n* number of seconds for their turn to request a page.

    A workaround would be for Apollo to request a popular subreddit’s title page (1 query) and cache the results for say, 100 users who might want it. And then in the next second, cache another popular page, and so on.

    But those cached pages would need frequent refreshing, otherwise Apollo would be too laggy to use.

    So the obvious conclusion is Apollo *isn’t* adhering to the 60 per minute rule. And in fact he does later say they’re doing 7 billion queries per month.

    That works out to 259 million per day, when the limit is 86,400.

    So how can he say they are careful to not bump up against the 60 per minute limit, when he also seems to be saying they use 7 billion per month?

    For reference, the announced pricing is $12,000 per 50 million queries.

  • Why are people mad about this? Reddit say the cost of a user – Apollo cannot afford that.
    Reddit get nothing out of apollo user’s due to no ads. Why would Reddit pay X per year to make 0 back?

    It doesn’t seem malicious it just makes financial sense no?

    + If 20%+ swap to the Reddit app – it makes them money even if the vocal people quit.

  • I thought I saw the Apollo developer on another thread saying he was careful discussing this topic because he didn’t want to create a situation with reddit in case there might be room to change course…

    Guess that door must have been nailed shut since then.

  • What if all the developer of third-party Reddit apps came together and instead switch to their own Reddit clone or an existing one like [lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/)? They already have a user base that would seamlessly switch and they can’t do anything else with the app anyway when Reddit’s API goes paid.

  • I’m grandfathered into Apollo Ultra lifetime and I would pay just to keep using it… but the juice has to be worth the squeeze.

    This video makes me think that Reddit is totally disconnected from the reality that “WE” at large create what makes it valuable and the developers made the experience better in ways they could have never dreamed of.

    Without the developers I’m content to reduce/remover my usage! Thus removing the value…

    They just watched twitter crash and burn but learned nothing while also saying everything

  • Maybe I’m just old and out of touch but I’ve never understood the benefit of using an app to scroll through Reddit when I can just do that from my browser, and available storage on my phone is already at a premium.

    Honest question, what is the draw that I’m missing?

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