As a long-time Apollo user, this whole thing really bums me out. I was only a casual user until I started using Apollo, and the way that Christian would listen to the community and implement features and ideas was so refreshing.
Apollo made browsing an information-rich site like Reddit so much easier on mobile than on a desktop machine, and that’s no small feat! It - and the wealth of great 3P apps - will be missed.
And all for what? Greed?
The way that Christian and other developers were treated by reddit, their administrative team, and their CEO, is just abhorrent. There’s no justification to explain their behavior. It’s just so cold. To attack someone from a position of power for simply defending themselves, after attacking them for a mutually beneficial compromise, is just morally bankrupt behavior.
I don’t blame him (and others) for just wanting to stop the relationship with reddit. Even if they backpedaled, there would be no trust left.
Reddit relies almost exclusively on hobbyists and volunteers to both manage, moderate, and create content for the site. They’ve burned a lot of bridges with this stunt by blatantly giving the finger to a bunch of those hobbyists and volunteers.
I suspect reddit will survive as long as subreddits come back and won’t go dark indefinitely. Karmafarmers, reposters, actual OC content creators and bots need to delete themselves from that platform as well. Are majority of people going to do that? I seriously doubt that. Considering that majority of subreddits that have gone dark have decided to only do it for a few days speaks volumes what will happen next.
Reddit isn’t going anywhere.
Its going to be a different environment though.
The people who don’t understand or care about whats going on will stay, and they will consume the influencer style content that is going to hang around and fill the void. Reddit wants profit, so its changing to a model where they have end to end control and stripping the 3rd party development and modification.
Hopefully the development community packs up and moves to the fediverse.
Reddit has just culled its nerd population.
@LChitman I’m sure this was intended to get rid of the users that aren’t easy to qualify into revenue.
Absolutely, I agree. Whether or not it is good or successful, I reckon the owners will consider Reddit more marketable to advertisers in a couple of months. The ‘milquetoasting’ of Reddit has been going on for a long old time now but I think they’re close to their endgame.
Its pretty wild though that he claimed that reddit isnt profitable right now if they are indeed planning on an IPO in the near future.
I know the world has a short memory, but its a pretty bad claim for a CEO to make who wants to sell off the platform
Apollo is the only iOS app I have bought lifetime for and continued tipping every couple months. I’ve been on Reddit since 2010 and just deleted my account this morning and I will never be back on the platform. The way Reddit leadership has defamed Christian is absolutely unacceptable and I refuse to give them any more data.
I also bought lifetime for Apollo and did all my modding from that app. I literally can’t mod (I have been for 7 years) now, so what can I do? I’m not going to go out of my way to go on my laptop just to mod, I’m not getting paid. So today I set all the subreddits I mod to private indefinitely, deleted 8.5 years of comments and posts and logged out.
The way they treated Christian was the worst type of behavior I’ve ever seen a company (shit bag CEO) ever treat a developer that literally created an app to help serve the website better, like wtf.
As with many, I am also leaving reddit. I’m skeptical that the blackouts will make them change their ways and in some ways I hope they don’t and it ends up tanking reddit. I was a part of reddit for 13 years and enjoyed it a lot but it was definitely much better back then. Spez needs to lose big with all his bullshit lies and greed. With all the other sites available for people to switch over to, I think we can create another great community without all the bots and hopefully build a better community for all. Fuck u/spez
Christian has been the public face of this and therefore has borne the brunt of it. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it would be in his shoes.
I do also wish the best for the Android app devs.
I’m a “rif” user for over a decade, so a special shout-out for talklittle. (I hear he’s developing an app for Tildes, a link aggregator.)
Can’t wait for his next project – Christian is a class act, and Apollo was the only thing keeping me on Reddit.
Follow his Mastodon account here: @christianselig
How can I follow Christian on this kbin platform? I’ve only just joined and don’t know my way around but I feel confident that if he lands on a platform he likes I will like it too so I want to follow after tomorrow.
You can follow his Madison (edit: Mastodon) account from kbin (yay federation!): @christianselig
Standup response, I hope Christian finds a promising career ahead of him.
If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t be nearly so kind to Reddit following his ordeal. Even if Reddit renegs on the API pricing completely and go back to making it free, the trust has already been sufficiently broken that I wouldn’t return. They won’t stop monetizing the site just because they lost some users and pissed off their developer partners. They’ll just be subtler, quieter the next time they try to screw you over.
Second chances are important, but there are limits to trust. Reddit slapped their users across the face today; despite any promise or apology they make in the meantime, there is no indication that they won’t do it again tomorrow to get what they want.
I agree, I don’t think they would just keep the API free forever, they’ve already said that Reddit is not profitable, and so they will continue to add more “features” to be more like tiktok.
Third party devs have said they don’t mind a reasonable API rate, but both the cost (~$20 million/year just for Apollo) and the timing (30 days to make the pricing changes, update the app, work out bugs, get Apple to approve it, etc) were just stupid.
It was done this way to kill the third party apps, period.- If Reddit didn’t insist on hosting all pics & videos themselves, they would probably already be profitable.
- If the API pricing was reasonable, users & third party devs would happily pay it.
- If Reddit had given more time (3-6 months) for third party devs to implement changes, then they could and would do so (assuming reasonable API price).
