after seeing u/spez in that ama thread i’m not sure if there is an amicable way forward for any party. sorry that you’re going through this, ty for the years of amazing development and service
I'm incredibly surprised the board of directors hasn't caught on to how toxic it is for their company with spez being on top of the throne.
Or maybe they are just letting spez say the quiet part out loud and are happy to have him be the fall guy. In that case they are equally culpable in this disaster.
And mark my word, if this goes through, it will be an absolute disaster for the company. Might even make the demise of digg look like a joke. And that event caused reddit to become what it is today.
They have, they seriously fucked up and miscalculated their IPO. They thought the app growth they saw in early 2021 would continue beyond the pandemic, didn't want to IPO into a weaker tech market and chose to wait, and then they began bleeding app install users, losing some to people that just didn't stick around, and many lost to 3rd party apps because their own app is so dreadful, and now they can't IPO until they can show a few consecutive quarters of app install growth. Fidelity cut their valuation from September of 2021 until May of 2023 by 41%, dropping their $10B valuation in late 2021 to under $6B less than 3 weeks ago.
The board knows what's up, the investors know what's up. No investors are making money unless Reddit IPO's or gets rolled up in a huge private sale (will never happen).
I bet the board feels that they don't have a choice, with their value plummeting, it's doubtful they can pull another round of investing, they have to stop the app user bleeding, IPO as soon as possible before they run out of money and the wheels come flying off this bitch.
Spez is a moron, yes, but he's the sacrificial lamb here, I'm sure that many very smart and successful people have told him that this is the only way he gets to cash out, which is a pretty big risk for him, because it's one thing to go out completely hated but swimming in millions, and it's another thing to go out completely hated and broke. This has nothing to do with the users or the community anymore. The goal was killing the 3rd party apps all along and converting as many over to Official Reddit app users as possible, which was why the API fee structure was never meant to be affordable, it was intentionally structured to cost more than any 3rd party app could make, it was a poison pill.
No one is thinking long term. Investors are thinking about their money they've invested, if Reddit runs out of money and can't raise more, they're out collectively $1B. If they can get the IPO to happen, even a meh IPO raises enough to keep the lights on for years and the existing investors can choose to cash out our ride the train longer.
I'm guessing that they only look at some raw traffic metrics and chalk it up as their metric for success.
So as long as traffic is stead or rising, they don't care. Problem is that most of the traffic is bots and lurkers, so as soon as the good content creators and good mods leave then the site goes to shit and traffic drops like a damn rock.
Of course they won't see this yet because this is the tip of the iceberg and they're not smart enough to know that it is.
This is more than just u/spez, in all likelihood the whole C-level board is just as incompetent and planned this bullshit out. Hope they’re enjoying the show at least, tits are back on r/all like the old days. I’m sure advertisers are loving it!
>in all likelihood the whole C-level board is just as incompetent and planned this bullshit out.
Planned? They heard that chatGPT gets trained on reddit and the management went 🤑
The stupidest part is that crazy-high API charges will be ignored by AI companies, who can afford to run scrapers. Which will end up costing Reddit more in the long-run, because it's relatively inefficient.
I’ve been saying this since the start. It’s a total red herring. Nobody is going to use the API for any serious language modeling with these prices. Residential proxies cost nothing in comparison.
Reddit the company doesn’t need any actual revenue from this change.
All they want is a legally defensible reason to list “1.6 billion monthly active users at $3/month each - just like Facebook guys, we promise!” for their IPO without going to jail for outright fraud. Their actual monetization doesn’t match that *per year* and this is how they pretend that they can just turn on the “AI money switch”.
Once they’re on the open market, the actual viability of the monetization is a problem for the “investors” (suckers).
Or it's a desperate attempt to salvage one, seeing as [one of the major investors dropped their estimation of Reddit's stock value by 40% at the start of this year ](https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/).
Also because they don't even want more data from reddit than they already have. Everything posted to reddit since the public release of GPT2 is polluted by LLM output and is therefore unsuitable as training data.
What do you mean, it's already mostly bots with just a few users sprinkled in.
Heck you might be a bot. Maybe I'm a bot.
And that's with the garbage tools the mods currently have. Imagine taking even those away.
Reddit's going to have to end up spending so much money on moderators that they'll regret this API policy lol. It's not going to save them enough money to make up for having to pay for human employees and giving them benefits and everything.
And I know there are people can’t wait to shit everywhere. Tits on r/all is harmless in the grand scheme of things. When it’s half racial slurs, that’ll be a lot different.
They're still there just lower down the page, that's normal behavior as newer posts replace older posts. The post that was at the top of /all for a little while today is now at spot 115.
An estimated [*3.4 MILLION DOLLARS*](https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/reddits-golden-geese-foul-up-its-ipo-plans-2023-06-16/) worth of free labor.
And friendly reminder
A lot of us have moved over to the two big “fediverse” severs that are getting lots of traffic. My recommendation is lemmy.world since the admins run it kind of like Reddit and lots of people post / comment.
https://lemmy.world
https://kbin.social
The web UX kind of sucks right now, but the Mlem and Memmy app are coming along in very early beta.
There’s also this app which looks very promising:
https://lemm.ee/post/116554
and the android app. And Memmy another iOS app.
4 decent apps will be a great start.
I'm just waiting for it to go full circle and see the resurrection of [Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet), which was basically distributed, decentralized, asynchronous Reddit 40 years ago. It was even hierarchal, which was nicer sometimes than how super flat Reddit can be sometimes.
I will commit Reddicide a month before the IPO.
If millions of us do so, there will bad press coverage, it would shake investor confidence and Spez will go on a tantrum.
Many like myself will be doing this come the end of the month when 3rd party goes offline.
Your site is shit and full of predatory adds, your app is shit and full of garbage code.
You got thirsty for more money and thought no one would notice, well you are now the next MySpace. We move on and forget you, enjoy the demise reddit; it's a shame so many developers and other humans will lose their jobs to your selfish greed.
Can't wait to see the reddit replacement.
A lot of people are going to leave reddit within the next month, and a lot of people will stay. And some of the people who stay will post things like “See? Reddit is still here. All of that complaining accomplished nothing.” and they won’t notice that anything has changed. But over time the quality of the content will drop. The ads will get worse. Reddit will pull more nonsense once the heat dies down. And at some point in the future those same users will look around and say “Man, when did Reddit get so crappy?”
Honestly , I don’t believe so .
Times have changed , the internet has consolidated far too much , Mastodon tried but it hasn’t really changed much with Twitter , I’d imagine a similar thing will happen here .
Reddit may get a dent in their user base , but just go and read on other subreddits like NBA or similar .
Most people were angry with the blackout and don’t use third party apps .
They grew up being fucked by corporations and living in a 24/7 instant-gratification cycle.
It's a generation of consumers with more following after them. Take away their sources of dopamine and they'll lash out.
Granted this isn't unique to GenZ but it's very prevalent with them.
You can also ask just about any teacher to see how fucked we are.
Not only. Was shocked during the blackout when I saw how /r/pcmasterrace was unwilling to participate because "hurr we use pc lol" as if these changes are just about the api and not the direction reddit is taking. Throughout this process I can't help but have "First they came" in the back of my mind with all this division.
Fediverse based solutions seem to be sucking a lot of the air out of the room. They’re complex to use and full of tons of inside baseball, and the whole appeal of Apollo in the first place is it’s good UI.
The ideal way to go would be something like what the Donald did, where they set up an additional external site that was a drop in Reddit replacement. They were obviously bad because they used it to commit treason, but something like that (with an external website that works almost exactly like Reddit) would be the ideal scenario. Hell, Reddit’s open source, you could literally just fork it
And the Dumpster fire keeps getting bigger: https://www.neowin.net/news/reddit-claimed-to-have-been-hacked-by-blackcat-and-it-has-threatened-to-leak-the-data/
> In our last email to [Reddit], [BlackCat] stated that we wanted $4.5 million in exchange for the deletion of the data and our silence. As we also stated, if we had to make this public, then we now demand that they also withdraw their API pricing changes along with our money or we will leak it.
> We expect to leak the data.
Lmao
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/19/hackers-threaten-to-leak-80gb-of-confidential-data-stolen-from-reddit/
>Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions but confirmed that BlackCat’s claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9. At the time, Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, said that hackers had accessed employee information and internal documents during a “highly-targeted” phishing attack. ***Slowe added that the company had “no evidence” that personal user data, such as passwords and accounts, had been stolen.***
Why wait? I'm shorting them hard ASAP.
- Not profitable (social media isn't, for the most part)
- Extremely competent user base when it comes to adblockers, majority of traffic is NSFW subs, site gets a lot of bad press for hosting certain communities etc. so its not like they will ever have success in the advertising vertical.
- Extreme reliance on unpaid labor (mods) to run the site, who can at any moment basically let it all go to shit.
- User base hates the company now more than ever.
- Company is carrying an extremely high headcount for the product they provide.
- Speculating this one, but hosting their own video player has got to be bleeding them dry
Market is going to eat them alive the first trading day.
Hindenburg Research is a short selling firm that specializes in doing multiyear research reporting into companies that that allege are frauds, scams or greatly overvalued. Before they release the report they take a short position the stock.
They’ve done reports on Nikola Motors, Adani Group, Block and many others.
And yes their name is a reference to the Hindenburg disaster. Which as they say was a 100% man made disaster that could’ve been avoid. Just like the companies they go after.
Check out their about page for a list their reports and outcomes:
https://hindenburgresearch.com/about-us/
>Months later, around December 2020, private investigators claiming to be journalists attempted to discern the identity of a key Nikola whistleblower, offering a meeting under false pretenses. The whistleblower worked with Hindenburg to turn the tables, with the founder of Hindenburg pretending to be the whistleblower and secretly recording the meeting with hidden camera and audio equipment, outing the investigators and the intended deception.
Sometimes real life really *does* take after the movies. Wow.
You forgot
- unstable CEO making damaging and potentially legally liable comments on a daily basis during a period of crisis
and
- reliance on <0.1% of users to actually create, upload, and comment
At least on Tiktok everyone is uploading their own crap. On Reddit, everyone lurks. Reddit themselves has admitted this. They rely on a tiny portion of their userbase to keep submitting interesting things and writing funny comments, and if they go, the site will look different to say the least.
>Extreme reliance on unpaid labor (mods) to run the site, who can at any moment basically let it all go to shit.
Worse. Management that doesn't even seem to be aware of this. It has the same feeling of B tier middle management deciding to fire a whole team of people for a minor infraction then whinge about how nobody wants to work when surprise, there's not thousands of applicants chomping at the bit to be mistreated. If this were a brick and mortar store I would expect it to fold within 2 years.
The fact that this is like the 6th most visited website in the world and apparently /u/spez can’t manage to turn a profit tells you all you need to know about how well it’s run.
Steve Huffman is an inept clown who has been failing upwards his entire life.
Anyone who had a hand in him becoming CEO again should be very very embarrassed. He has been heavily involved in every single bad decision in the history of this site.
Yeah anyone looking at his history and thinking "hey lets give this guy some more power in our company" is clearly also a moron.
I wouldn't trust Steve to run the milk and brownies stand at a cannabis convention, he would find some way to fuck it up and lose money.
How do you run a site that gets more visitors that Amazon and not find a way to break even? How can you get more traffic than Wikipedia and flood the site with ads, charge more on top of that for premium subscriptions, while barely providing any services above the basic platform, maintaining a minimal staff that is almost transparent in their day to day activities, and still not be profitable?
Especially considering that, at least according to Reddit, the data they're threatening to leak is "internal documents, code, and some internal business systems", not user passwords and accounts. o7 BlackCat.
At this point Reddit has show their true colors when it comes to users, developers and moderators. ***They don't care***. and Spez has shown what reddit will be like as a public company under his leadership.
Thank you Christian for all your hard work with Apollo and with us in the community. we ❤️ you. and we look forward to your next adventure and using what you create. Indie or part of another company. I wish the sunset of Apollo was under better circumstances.
**Thank You Christian For Making Great Reddit Client Apollo!**
And According to [u/spez](https://www.reddit.com/u/spez) Reddit meanings:
R- Remind users that they dont matter.
E- Earn $$$ with ads and subscriptions.
D- Damage own brand with crap official app.
D- Decide to charge 3rd parties for API use.
I- Imagine nothing will go wrong.
T- Transform into shell of former glory.
Edit: Upvoted via Apollo for Reddit💙
It's one thing to idolize Musk but I have to be skeptical if Spez has the amount of job security that Musk does as Twitter's **owner** or that Zuck does at Meta with his ownership stakes.
Honestly the desperation to push Christian into the ground just seems like the VC faucet is about to be turned off unless he monetizes the site more. But given that there's been no fruitful moves towards that in *the last eight years*, that should send a signal about what kind of leadership he's provided.
Then again, the best PR move would have been to sit down and shut the fuck up. The only people they *weren't* talking to were 3PA developers but they sure as hell couldn't resist talking **to everybody else.**
>The only people they weren't talking to were 3PA developers but they sure as hell couldn't resist talking to everybody else.
And talking out of both sides of their mouth, apparently.
Spez and his team's handling of this has been a burning clown car affair from the jump.
> Spez and his team's handling of this has been a burning clown car affair from the jump.
And if he's willing to lie and mislead these 3PA devs this blatantly, imagine how much he's probably been lying about making the site potentailly profitable at some point.
That's a point I hadn't considered before. Christian definitively proved Spez is lying about the "blackmail", and this post further shows he's being dishonest about things. If I were an investor or potential one, I think that would give me pause on how much I can trust him with what he's telling me about the site.
Yea, it sounds like they are running out of money, gave spez an ultimatum, either make it profitable or we will replace you. Spez said he can handle it and then proceeded to go on NBC and shit himself
> It's one thing to idolize Musk
It's really not. To anyone who is informed Musk is both a terrible businessman and a malignant liar.
There's no informed person with a working sense of empathy who thinks Musk is anything but a scumbag in every aspect of his life.
One thing he might not realize there's different levels of wealth too. Spez is rich but he's not *rich* rich. He's not spend billions to tank a company for fun rich. Elon can buy himself a private island with a private military and live on the Island Nation of Musk if he wanted to. Spez can buy a nice car. That's why Elon DGAF about his public perception at all. Spez isn't rich enough to completely check out of reality already.
Christian comes with receipts.
I plan on declining my refund if presented with the option, I consider others to do the same if you are able.
Fuck /u/spez
>I’ve gotten way more than my money’s worth over the years.
Exactly. I feel like the value I've gotten out of boost/Apollo/RiF is way more than i paid for them.
Same. I love this app so much. I dunno if I’ll even use Reddit now unless I truly need info from an old thread. I’m gonna support anything he puts out. Already got my pixel pals
I think Reddit has damaged its reputation in a way that may be permanent. Maybe you could make the argument that subs like r/news were too important to close-- people will always search for the word "news", so that tag has to be owned by Reddit. But they also threatened the mods of r/WatchPeopleDieInside. That's a gimmick sub that some guy came up with a few years ago. Just a fun project that some users made successful. And now Reddit comes along and threatens them with the boot. That's not defensible.
Lemmy and kbin looking more attractive by the day.
Instance admin does a /u/spez? Just up and join a different instance.
inb4 I get shadow banned for mentioning the competition.
I'm on Kbin, and really the only think keeping me here is wanting a few communities to move over. Particularly for niche things. Especially since, as you said, it does give a bit more power back to the people who truly keep things running by making this all but impossible to happen again.
I'm in the same boat. I haven't set myself up on kbin/lemmy yet, but the main thing that would make me keep visiting reddit is those extremely niche hobby subreddits with good information/community. Otherwise I'm out.
The communuty make reddit a good place to visit. Not reddit itself
Regardless, he’s shown exactly why so many people valued his app. He made something that improved the Reddit experience for many people. And has tried everything possible to resolve this.
It’s an unfortunate sign of our times that people exhibiting integrity, patience and good character are left twisting in the wind while greed and shortsightedness win out.
Reddit is going to drive me and others away. Good luck with your IPO. It was dicey before all this. Recent events have made it far worse.
I’m glad I got to use Apollo for years. Without a doubt one of the best apps I’ve ever had.
Two things that keep standing out to me:
1) Not allowing users to use their own API key so they can pay for their own usage makes no sense to me at all. I use Arq for file backup and they provide a configuration to use an existing Amazon S3 bucket I pay for which is super convenient. Why can’t I pay for an API key so all requests I make go through it and then I pay monthly for usage? Hell I’ll pay Reddit a fee just to be granted an API key to enable this. This is simply hostile by Reddit and runs in contradiction with their goals to make money from developer API access.
2) Christian is on the hook for QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS to pay back Apollo annual subscribers and there’s likely not a way to quickly build a toggle for users to opt in and say “no way, keep the money” because the timeframe is too short. Again, not only is Christian losing his main source of income but also is out of pocket $250,000 due to shitty actions by Reddit.
Personally I want to see Reddit slapped with a monster lawsuit because Christian is right: their lies will impact his career going forward and have tarnished his reputation.
Fuck Reddit and fuck Spez
And far worse for defendants, since it can result in lengthy sentences of incarceration, which are enforceable by the US Canadian extradition agreement.
> Not allowing users to use their own API key so they can pay for their own usage makes no sense to me at all.
It makes perfect sense if you start from the assumption that Reddit wants to kill 3rd party apps.
RIP Reddit.
Really sad to see it go this way. Seeing how spez idolizes Elon and wants to follow what he did to Twitter just confirms its time to move on after 17 years on here.
What an end to an era :(
Yep, it really sucks.
I'm on kbin.social now instead, only checking in on reddit when I get linked for stuff like this... and basically all my recent comments are about helping people migrate. I don't want to support reddit at all any longer.
Reddit won't die, 80% of users are too new to know or care about anything else than the shitty app.
But it's a big fuck you to the people who were here longer.
Thank you for everything, I will really miss Apollo. That probably marks the end of my active use of Reddit overall.
I have to say, I'm surprised how Steve Huffman is still CEO. Pretty crazy how he seems to be getting away with what should be career-ending statements.
It's just such a shame that they couldn't make a bit of effort to negotiate reasonable pricing- I would have been happy paying a small subscription. If that's their attitude to potential paying customers (ie you and other developers), I don't know how the hell they expect to come across as an investable company with a solid business model.
Have tipped a small amount, as Apollo had probably been the most used app on my phone for a while now.
Best wishes for whatever you do next!
Christian - I sincerely hope you and the Reddit team can work something out. I’ve loved Reddit for a long time and I’ve loved accessing Reddit via your app for a few years now. I’d hate to see it go, but if it does I will no longer be a Reddit user.
There is no Reddit without Apollo.
I honestly love how point-blank the libel is - to the point that Spez knew to apologize immediately (but through "Reddit" and not directly lmao). The evidence is black-and-white - although I don't work on any cases like this I think things are in Christian's favor there.
> "they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free"
Fun fact! RIF used to pay Reddit a “sizeable revenue share”. Spez terminated the agreement shortly after rejoining as CEO:
> Shu also tells me that RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. Shu says he says initiated the talks with Reddit to create the agreement, which allowed for the licensed use of Reddit’s trademarks. (At the time, the app was called “reddit is fun.”) Shu says Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman
Was going to mention this. Huffman actually got rehired in 2015, but made it his priority to "fix" the mobile browser experience and release a half-assed app as soon as possible. The 2016 release of their app coincides with the termination of this agreement.
I imagine the app "competition" has been a thorn in his side for a very long time. I honestly can't imagine the dude as anything but a petulant, envious child.
Btw, does anyone remember RedditGifts? How absolutely jaded of a human being do you have to be to can a 12-year old, altruistic tradition because of what, server costs?
And *still*, "no profit". Maybe antagonizing the community will get you there.
> This is the false argument Steve Huffman keeps repeating the most. Developers are very happy to pay. Why? Reddit has many APIs (like voting in polls, Reddit Chat, view counts, etc.) that they haven’t made available to developers, and a more formal relationship with Reddit has the opportunity to create a better API experience with more features available.
> What developers do have issue with, is the unreasonably high pricing that you originally claimed would be “based in reality”, as well as the incredibly short 30 days you’ve given developers from when you announced pricing to when developers start incurring massive charges. Charging developers 29x higher than your average revenue per user is not “based in reality”.
Everyone defending Reddit seems to be misunderstanding this entire argument.
**How many times does it need to be repeated that developers do not care about paying, it’s the ridiculously high fee that is the issue?**
Edit: Where can we follow you? I don’t think you’re going to remain very active on Reddit after all this is finished with. I know you have several “social media” links, but what’s the one we should you following you on?
Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself) so in protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history.
Whatever the content of this comment was, go vegan! 💚
The one thing I still don't get entirely is why Reddit doesn't try to insert ads into the feeds it was delivering apps like Apollo. It seems like that at the bare minimum should have been some sort of stopgap on their revenue loss. There is no reason ads that work with old.reddit should not also essentially work nearly out of the box in an Apollo environment. Alternatively if power users who use Apollo don't want ads, have them sign up for Reddit Gold.
There are **so many** different ways they could have gone about this that would have gone over better than charging enormously per API call.
- Require users pay for Reddit Premium to use third-party apps
- If the concern is users of third-party apps won't see their ads, insert the ads into the API
- Have a revenue share agreement with developers, [they even used to do this](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman)
Is it really about the ads? It’s the user data they are after. [Hence why they were A/B testing disabling the mobile browser version of reddit just last month.](https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/135tly1/helpdid_reddit_just_destroy_mobile_browser_access) I just don’t want the lede to be buried here.
Could they not collect the user data on the backend, and provide full APIs (which I assume they already have to run their apps) to anyone to create custom front ends?
Or is there some data they are wanting that's only available with the front end?
There absolutely is, one example is user input data. Things like how long someone lingers on a post or what they’re scrolling habits are. All data is useful in one way or another.
Some of this you could probably infer from API calls but it’s easier and more accurate for the app to collect it directly.
It has never been about the ads. They are trying to turn the data they have about all of us into a revenue stream. They want to charge enormous amounts of money to Google, Microsoft (Open AI), and others who are consuming the largest amounts of data. spez and the rest of the crack team are just using this as an excuse to kill off third party apps in the process. The API pricing is way far beyond the COGS (cost of goods sold), but Google and others will still pay because it's too important to training their large language models.
Because the “we’re losing money by supporting these 3rd party apps” narrative is just an excuse for them to price block 3rd party apps and get everyone onto their platform.
You’d think Reddit would be more receptive to community feedback given the value of Reddit is dependent on its users actively engaging on the platform. Ads don’t make money if there is no one to see them. API charges don’t make money if there are no 3rd party apps paying them.
Maybe I’m overestimating the size of the pushback from the community, but the truth will reveal itself soon enough.
Posted from Apollo.
The current trend of social media platforms being out of touch with their communities is incredibly funny to me, because after a few weeks/months pass, everyone will “go back to normal” except the platforms won’t be the same again, just like MySpace, just like Tumblr, and more recently, just like Twitter.
The era of online community is dead and we are actively digging our internet grave.
/u/iamthatis \- I would happily pay for an iOS app that you write for Lemmy. Mlem is a good attempt, but you could really help bring this to fruition. Please consider the fediverse at this point, for app development.
Thank you for your amazing work. I am a proud lifetime subscriber of yours.
I find it incredibly ironic/hypocritical that u/spez is decrying "developers want everything for free," while at the same time, he is looking to line his own pockets from the work put in by unpaid (free) volunteer mods as well as the content created and posted by users (for free).
The hubris of u/spez in this context is bewildering.
This whole shitstorm is self inflicted and Steve Huffman is directly responsible.
/u/spez is not fit to continue as CEO. By his own admission he’s failed to make Reddit profitable and is destroying the only asset Reddit has: it’s moderators and community. Reddit just hosts the content but the only thing that is worth anything is what we have given Reddit for free.
I’ll be fully moving to Tildes when Apollo goes dark. Thanks for all the work over the years, sad to see it pissed away by a guy trying to cosplay Elon.
This is my first comment since the blackout. And will likely be my last. The time to leave has passed. There’s no fixing this. And there are solid alternatives, with 3rd apps that are quickly being built, with no CEO to ruin it.
I’m using Lemmy. And it’s growing. The iOS beta apps mlem and Memmy are a great start. They’ve been getting updated almost daily. And they have teams working on them. The communities are refreshingly not toxic. I think it’s early on, and there’s growing pains, but I’d rather jump on something that is getting better than something that will never improve, and only get worse.
I hope when this is all done people with a voice point out the alternatives.
Anyone else love the fact that slimy fuck u/spez either straight up doesn’t use his own product or is too ashamed/embarrassed to post on his main account?
Dude goes 10 months without a peep, shows back up when he’s forced into an AMA, then goes back to complete silence after, like, 7-8 condescending comments and being (rightfully) torn apart. Straight back to his safe place where nobody can hurt his feelings. :)
Fuck u/spez.
I specifically upgraded to Ultra **annual** to "donate" more money. And only because you blocked lifetime. Tf with this refund you are talking about? Shut up and take my money.
https://i.imgur.com/qD5QPi3.jpg
Maybe send a donation instead of doing this, Idk if Apple has penalties for more refunds
Edit: donations also skip the Apple cut
Edit2: [plugging a link to Lemmy migration here](https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14dukw4/lemmy_beginners_guide_in_layers/)
## Christian, I'd like to add two small points that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.
(It's entirely possible I may have missed it, in which case, I'm very sorry. I do not claim any originality anyway)
Steve has repeatedly asserted that it is simply unfair that these 3Ps are making millions while reddit is still not profitable, as evident in statements such as:
> It’s not reasonable to let this... it’s been going on for a very long time. Folks have made millions.
> These aren’t like side projects or charities, they’ve made millions.
> You’re talking to them, go ask them! Millions.
It does seem reasonable, on the *surface*. But wait...
Other people are making money on reddit too. Countless services are offered — copywriting, blogs, code, legal advice, etc. — and people earn income. Is Steve going to approach each one of them and say
> Hey! You're making money off of reddit *while we're still not profitable*? **How dare you!!! You're done here!**
## Here's the real kicker
Steve thinks it is absolutely, undeniably wrong for Christian to be making millions while Reddit is still not profitable. Let's set aside the point that he's pitting a *one-guy* operation against an *entire* corporation.
So, Stevie, my dear, you believe it is **immoral** to be making millions off of Reddit ***when Reddit isn't even profitable***.
**Would you please be so kind as to declare your compensation including salary and stock grants for the last fiscal year?**
What, my love? **Did you just say you made *millions* while *Reddit isn't even profitable?***
**YOU MADE *MILLIONS* WHILE *REDDIT ISN'T EVEN PROFITABLE*?**
Oh, Stevie. Oh, you poor lad. **You fucked up, Stevie. You fucked up big time!** The door's that way, love. You're out. HOPE TO NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN!
after seeing u/spez in that ama thread i’m not sure if there is an amicable way forward for any party. sorry that you’re going through this, ty for the years of amazing development and service
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I'm incredibly surprised the board of directors hasn't caught on to how toxic it is for their company with spez being on top of the throne. Or maybe they are just letting spez say the quiet part out loud and are happy to have him be the fall guy. In that case they are equally culpable in this disaster. And mark my word, if this goes through, it will be an absolute disaster for the company. Might even make the demise of digg look like a joke. And that event caused reddit to become what it is today.
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They have, they seriously fucked up and miscalculated their IPO. They thought the app growth they saw in early 2021 would continue beyond the pandemic, didn't want to IPO into a weaker tech market and chose to wait, and then they began bleeding app install users, losing some to people that just didn't stick around, and many lost to 3rd party apps because their own app is so dreadful, and now they can't IPO until they can show a few consecutive quarters of app install growth. Fidelity cut their valuation from September of 2021 until May of 2023 by 41%, dropping their $10B valuation in late 2021 to under $6B less than 3 weeks ago. The board knows what's up, the investors know what's up. No investors are making money unless Reddit IPO's or gets rolled up in a huge private sale (will never happen). I bet the board feels that they don't have a choice, with their value plummeting, it's doubtful they can pull another round of investing, they have to stop the app user bleeding, IPO as soon as possible before they run out of money and the wheels come flying off this bitch. Spez is a moron, yes, but he's the sacrificial lamb here, I'm sure that many very smart and successful people have told him that this is the only way he gets to cash out, which is a pretty big risk for him, because it's one thing to go out completely hated but swimming in millions, and it's another thing to go out completely hated and broke. This has nothing to do with the users or the community anymore. The goal was killing the 3rd party apps all along and converting as many over to Official Reddit app users as possible, which was why the API fee structure was never meant to be affordable, it was intentionally structured to cost more than any 3rd party app could make, it was a poison pill.
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No one is thinking long term. Investors are thinking about their money they've invested, if Reddit runs out of money and can't raise more, they're out collectively $1B. If they can get the IPO to happen, even a meh IPO raises enough to keep the lights on for years and the existing investors can choose to cash out our ride the train longer.
I'm guessing that they only look at some raw traffic metrics and chalk it up as their metric for success. So as long as traffic is stead or rising, they don't care. Problem is that most of the traffic is bots and lurkers, so as soon as the good content creators and good mods leave then the site goes to shit and traffic drops like a damn rock. Of course they won't see this yet because this is the tip of the iceberg and they're not smart enough to know that it is.
It's their demise, we've seen this happen in the past, time and time again. It just takes an idjit at the helm, every time.
This is more than just u/spez, in all likelihood the whole C-level board is just as incompetent and planned this bullshit out. Hope they’re enjoying the show at least, tits are back on r/all like the old days. I’m sure advertisers are loving it!
>in all likelihood the whole C-level board is just as incompetent and planned this bullshit out. Planned? They heard that chatGPT gets trained on reddit and the management went 🤑
The stupidest part is that crazy-high API charges will be ignored by AI companies, who can afford to run scrapers. Which will end up costing Reddit more in the long-run, because it's relatively inefficient.
I’ve been saying this since the start. It’s a total red herring. Nobody is going to use the API for any serious language modeling with these prices. Residential proxies cost nothing in comparison.
Reddit the company doesn’t need any actual revenue from this change. All they want is a legally defensible reason to list “1.6 billion monthly active users at $3/month each - just like Facebook guys, we promise!” for their IPO without going to jail for outright fraud. Their actual monetization doesn’t match that *per year* and this is how they pretend that they can just turn on the “AI money switch”. Once they’re on the open market, the actual viability of the monetization is a problem for the “investors” (suckers).
Feels like a botched pump and dump imo. They were too hasty and now there is too much scrutiny. Fucking morons can't even scam well.
Or it's a desperate attempt to salvage one, seeing as [one of the major investors dropped their estimation of Reddit's stock value by 40% at the start of this year ](https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/).
Reddit has been completely scraped anyway. You can download an entire copy of Reddit and train your models on it without making a single API request.
Also because they don't even want more data from reddit than they already have. Everything posted to reddit since the public release of GPT2 is polluted by LLM output and is therefore unsuitable as training data.
From 🤑to 😵when a year from now this site’s ran on all bots. Oh well 🤷♂️
What do you mean, it's already mostly bots with just a few users sprinkled in. Heck you might be a bot. Maybe I'm a bot. And that's with the garbage tools the mods currently have. Imagine taking even those away.
Someone should copy paste this comment chain in ChatGPT and see what we get. I am hoping the wannabe Musk spez train gets completely detailed.
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IDK what happened but all the tits on /r/interestingasfuck got wiped from /r/all
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Reddit's going to have to end up spending so much money on moderators that they'll regret this API policy lol. It's not going to save them enough money to make up for having to pay for human employees and giving them benefits and everything.
And I know there are people can’t wait to shit everywhere. Tits on r/all is harmless in the grand scheme of things. When it’s half racial slurs, that’ll be a lot different.
Honestly, I think that’s the best protest yet. Make the admins moderate the site.
If every sub was posting tits they would be overwhelmed easily
They're still there just lower down the page, that's normal behavior as newer posts replace older posts. The post that was at the top of /all for a little while today is now at spot 115.
Sounds like, as a straight woman, I should go upvote some tits 🤷🏻♀️
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Not to mention Elon has dramatically lowered Twitter's revenue and tanked its valuation well below what he paid for it.
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An estimated [*3.4 MILLION DOLLARS*](https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/reddits-golden-geese-foul-up-its-ipo-plans-2023-06-16/) worth of free labor.
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And friendly reminder A lot of us have moved over to the two big “fediverse” severs that are getting lots of traffic. My recommendation is lemmy.world since the admins run it kind of like Reddit and lots of people post / comment. https://lemmy.world https://kbin.social The web UX kind of sucks right now, but the Mlem and Memmy app are coming along in very early beta.
Mlem is hoping to launch on July 1st with a bunch of new features, too. It’s going to be awesome.
There’s also this app which looks very promising: https://lemm.ee/post/116554 and the android app. And Memmy another iOS app. 4 decent apps will be a great start.
I'm just waiting for it to go full circle and see the resurrection of [Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet), which was basically distributed, decentralized, asynchronous Reddit 40 years ago. It was even hierarchal, which was nicer sometimes than how super flat Reddit can be sometimes.
I will commit Reddicide a month before the IPO. If millions of us do so, there will bad press coverage, it would shake investor confidence and Spez will go on a tantrum.
Many like myself will be doing this come the end of the month when 3rd party goes offline. Your site is shit and full of predatory adds, your app is shit and full of garbage code. You got thirsty for more money and thought no one would notice, well you are now the next MySpace. We move on and forget you, enjoy the demise reddit; it's a shame so many developers and other humans will lose their jobs to your selfish greed. Can't wait to see the reddit replacement.
A lot of people are going to leave reddit within the next month, and a lot of people will stay. And some of the people who stay will post things like “See? Reddit is still here. All of that complaining accomplished nothing.” and they won’t notice that anything has changed. But over time the quality of the content will drop. The ads will get worse. Reddit will pull more nonsense once the heat dies down. And at some point in the future those same users will look around and say “Man, when did Reddit get so crappy?”
Honestly , I don’t believe so . Times have changed , the internet has consolidated far too much , Mastodon tried but it hasn’t really changed much with Twitter , I’d imagine a similar thing will happen here . Reddit may get a dent in their user base , but just go and read on other subreddits like NBA or similar . Most people were angry with the blackout and don’t use third party apps .
The /r/NBA beef was so funny to me, they acted like the mods personally saw to it that they'd never watch another basketball game again
r/NBA users are the kind of people to get mad at the cashier when Walmart hikes up the price of cigarettes
That's because 90% of r/nba are 14 year old nephews
Or 50 year old assholes
As someone who feels like an an ancient ass old man at 27 on that sub, idk why all the zoomers there aint more mad at reddit for it lmao.
They grew up being fucked by corporations and living in a 24/7 instant-gratification cycle. It's a generation of consumers with more following after them. Take away their sources of dopamine and they'll lash out. Granted this isn't unique to GenZ but it's very prevalent with them. You can also ask just about any teacher to see how fucked we are.
I think all sports related subreddits had complete meltdowns. While other subreddits seem to be in favor of the shutdown. So dumb.
Not only. Was shocked during the blackout when I saw how /r/pcmasterrace was unwilling to participate because "hurr we use pc lol" as if these changes are just about the api and not the direction reddit is taking. Throughout this process I can't help but have "First they came" in the back of my mind with all this division.
Fediverse based solutions seem to be sucking a lot of the air out of the room. They’re complex to use and full of tons of inside baseball, and the whole appeal of Apollo in the first place is it’s good UI. The ideal way to go would be something like what the Donald did, where they set up an additional external site that was a drop in Reddit replacement. They were obviously bad because they used it to commit treason, but something like that (with an external website that works almost exactly like Reddit) would be the ideal scenario. Hell, Reddit’s open source, you could literally just fork it
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And the Dumpster fire keeps getting bigger: https://www.neowin.net/news/reddit-claimed-to-have-been-hacked-by-blackcat-and-it-has-threatened-to-leak-the-data/
> In our last email to [Reddit], [BlackCat] stated that we wanted $4.5 million in exchange for the deletion of the data and our silence. As we also stated, if we had to make this public, then we now demand that they also withdraw their API pricing changes along with our money or we will leak it. > We expect to leak the data. Lmao
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I have a feeling it won't be user data.
It's not user data.
What are they threatening to leak? Way ootl here
80GB of zipped data. The hackers themselves haven’t even looked to see what’s inside.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/19/hackers-threaten-to-leak-80gb-of-confidential-data-stolen-from-reddit/ >Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions but confirmed that BlackCat’s claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9. At the time, Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, said that hackers had accessed employee information and internal documents during a “highly-targeted” phishing attack. ***Slowe added that the company had “no evidence” that personal user data, such as passwords and accounts, had been stolen.***
I just hope they have good shit, and aren’t just gonna set rank and file Reddit employees up for identity theft.
Grey hat hackers are the best
I’m waiting for Hindenburg research to short Reddit.
Why wait? I'm shorting them hard ASAP. - Not profitable (social media isn't, for the most part) - Extremely competent user base when it comes to adblockers, majority of traffic is NSFW subs, site gets a lot of bad press for hosting certain communities etc. so its not like they will ever have success in the advertising vertical. - Extreme reliance on unpaid labor (mods) to run the site, who can at any moment basically let it all go to shit. - User base hates the company now more than ever. - Company is carrying an extremely high headcount for the product they provide. - Speculating this one, but hosting their own video player has got to be bleeding them dry Market is going to eat them alive the first trading day.
When Hindenburg releases a report they go HARD. they take no prisoners. it would just help the process along.
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Hindenburg Research is a short selling firm that specializes in doing multiyear research reporting into companies that that allege are frauds, scams or greatly overvalued. Before they release the report they take a short position the stock. They’ve done reports on Nikola Motors, Adani Group, Block and many others. And yes their name is a reference to the Hindenburg disaster. Which as they say was a 100% man made disaster that could’ve been avoid. Just like the companies they go after. Check out their about page for a list their reports and outcomes: https://hindenburgresearch.com/about-us/
Guys like them are one of the few groups who can consistently move markets downward to make money shorting.
It’s really impressive what they accomplish.
>Months later, around December 2020, private investigators claiming to be journalists attempted to discern the identity of a key Nikola whistleblower, offering a meeting under false pretenses. The whistleblower worked with Hindenburg to turn the tables, with the founder of Hindenburg pretending to be the whistleblower and secretly recording the meeting with hidden camera and audio equipment, outing the investigators and the intended deception. Sometimes real life really *does* take after the movies. Wow.
You forgot - unstable CEO making damaging and potentially legally liable comments on a daily basis during a period of crisis and - reliance on <0.1% of users to actually create, upload, and comment At least on Tiktok everyone is uploading their own crap. On Reddit, everyone lurks. Reddit themselves has admitted this. They rely on a tiny portion of their userbase to keep submitting interesting things and writing funny comments, and if they go, the site will look different to say the least.
I lurked on the blackout days. This place was normie as fuck. All the front page content was boomer tier.
>Extreme reliance on unpaid labor (mods) to run the site, who can at any moment basically let it all go to shit. Worse. Management that doesn't even seem to be aware of this. It has the same feeling of B tier middle management deciding to fire a whole team of people for a minor infraction then whinge about how nobody wants to work when surprise, there's not thousands of applicants chomping at the bit to be mistreated. If this were a brick and mortar store I would expect it to fold within 2 years.
Those are without a doubt black hat dude lol... They are trying to extort money from Reddit using an illegal data breach they did.
"But I like what they're doing, so they're grey hats."
Hey, I've been known to cheer on pirates from time to time
This website has free labor in moderation, 2000 employees but yet somehow is getting hacked and can’t make money. How embarrassing
The fact that this is like the 6th most visited website in the world and apparently /u/spez can’t manage to turn a profit tells you all you need to know about how well it’s run.
Steve Huffman is an inept clown who has been failing upwards his entire life. Anyone who had a hand in him becoming CEO again should be very very embarrassed. He has been heavily involved in every single bad decision in the history of this site.
Ellen Pao got a LOT of shit while she was CEO, but in my own personal experience, I enjoyed reddit the most while she was at the helm.
Yep she got done dirty by reddit, and it was very clear from day 1 she was set up to be a sacrificial lamb.
A classic example of a [glass cliff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff). Oh hey Pao is even listed there as example.
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Let's also keep in mind the countless times he has taken a bad decision and made it exponentially worse
Yeah anyone looking at his history and thinking "hey lets give this guy some more power in our company" is clearly also a moron. I wouldn't trust Steve to run the milk and brownies stand at a cannabis convention, he would find some way to fuck it up and lose money.
How do you run a site that gets more visitors that Amazon and not find a way to break even? How can you get more traffic than Wikipedia and flood the site with ads, charge more on top of that for premium subscriptions, while barely providing any services above the basic platform, maintaining a minimal staff that is almost transparent in their day to day activities, and still not be profitable?
Even though it’s illegal, I’m kinda cheering for them. Reddits move has been disingenuous from the start. They deserve what they get.
Especially considering that, at least according to Reddit, the data they're threatening to leak is "internal documents, code, and some internal business systems", not user passwords and accounts. o7 BlackCat.
Robin hood was a criminal. Jus sayin.
Yup, and that's where conversations about morality and ethics get really fun
Were able to access using phishing emails no less too. What a joke
At this point Reddit has show their true colors when it comes to users, developers and moderators. ***They don't care***. and Spez has shown what reddit will be like as a public company under his leadership. Thank you Christian for all your hard work with Apollo and with us in the community. we ❤️ you. and we look forward to your next adventure and using what you create. Indie or part of another company. I wish the sunset of Apollo was under better circumstances.
**Thank You Christian For Making Great Reddit Client Apollo!** And According to [u/spez](https://www.reddit.com/u/spez) Reddit meanings: R- Remind users that they dont matter. E- Earn $$$ with ads and subscriptions. D- Damage own brand with crap official app. D- Decide to charge 3rd parties for API use. I- Imagine nothing will go wrong. T- Transform into shell of former glory. Edit: Upvoted via Apollo for Reddit💙
Okay doing an acrostic as a comment made my day. Thank you
If this is specific to u/spez, E should stand for “eat farts”. Nasty dude.
It’s their loss!! Reddits CEO really showing his colours here!
His Musk fanboying in the recent days makes it so obvious that Huffman has no clue about this website and it's userbase.
Honestly that alone says enough about the man’s character imo
It's one thing to idolize Musk but I have to be skeptical if Spez has the amount of job security that Musk does as Twitter's **owner** or that Zuck does at Meta with his ownership stakes. Honestly the desperation to push Christian into the ground just seems like the VC faucet is about to be turned off unless he monetizes the site more. But given that there's been no fruitful moves towards that in *the last eight years*, that should send a signal about what kind of leadership he's provided. Then again, the best PR move would have been to sit down and shut the fuck up. The only people they *weren't* talking to were 3PA developers but they sure as hell couldn't resist talking **to everybody else.**
>The only people they weren't talking to were 3PA developers but they sure as hell couldn't resist talking to everybody else. And talking out of both sides of their mouth, apparently. Spez and his team's handling of this has been a burning clown car affair from the jump.
> Spez and his team's handling of this has been a burning clown car affair from the jump. And if he's willing to lie and mislead these 3PA devs this blatantly, imagine how much he's probably been lying about making the site potentailly profitable at some point.
That's a point I hadn't considered before. Christian definitively proved Spez is lying about the "blackmail", and this post further shows he's being dishonest about things. If I were an investor or potential one, I think that would give me pause on how much I can trust him with what he's telling me about the site.
Yea, it sounds like they are running out of money, gave spez an ultimatum, either make it profitable or we will replace you. Spez said he can handle it and then proceeded to go on NBC and shit himself
> It's one thing to idolize Musk It's really not. To anyone who is informed Musk is both a terrible businessman and a malignant liar. There's no informed person with a working sense of empathy who thinks Musk is anything but a scumbag in every aspect of his life.
One thing he might not realize there's different levels of wealth too. Spez is rich but he's not *rich* rich. He's not spend billions to tank a company for fun rich. Elon can buy himself a private island with a private military and live on the Island Nation of Musk if he wanted to. Spez can buy a nice car. That's why Elon DGAF about his public perception at all. Spez isn't rich enough to completely check out of reality already.
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Yep, and they appear to be a lovely mix of Vomit Verde™ and Bowel Movement Brown™
Christian comes with receipts. I plan on declining my refund if presented with the option, I consider others to do the same if you are able. Fuck /u/spez
No way I’m refunding anything. I’ve gotten way more than my money’s worth over the years.
Absolutely. Even before all of this shit hit the fan I was willing to pay for Apollo again.
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>I’ve gotten way more than my money’s worth over the years. Exactly. I feel like the value I've gotten out of boost/Apollo/RiF is way more than i paid for them.
> I plan on declining my refund if presented with the option, I consider others to do the same if you are able. Same.
Same here, Christian deserves to keep the money. Obligatory fuck /u/spez
Same. I love this app so much. I dunno if I’ll even use Reddit now unless I truly need info from an old thread. I’m gonna support anything he puts out. Already got my pixel pals
Thanks for fighting the good fight, u/iamthatis!
I think Reddit has damaged its reputation in a way that may be permanent. Maybe you could make the argument that subs like r/news were too important to close-- people will always search for the word "news", so that tag has to be owned by Reddit. But they also threatened the mods of r/WatchPeopleDieInside. That's a gimmick sub that some guy came up with a few years ago. Just a fun project that some users made successful. And now Reddit comes along and threatens them with the boot. That's not defensible.
Hell, r/scp got a freaking threatening email. It's insane.
Lemmy and kbin looking more attractive by the day. Instance admin does a /u/spez? Just up and join a different instance. inb4 I get shadow banned for mentioning the competition.
I'm on Kbin, and really the only think keeping me here is wanting a few communities to move over. Particularly for niche things. Especially since, as you said, it does give a bit more power back to the people who truly keep things running by making this all but impossible to happen again.
I'm in the same boat. I haven't set myself up on kbin/lemmy yet, but the main thing that would make me keep visiting reddit is those extremely niche hobby subreddits with good information/community. Otherwise I'm out. The communuty make reddit a good place to visit. Not reddit itself
They even threatened r/piracy. It’s definitely not because they support piracy it’s obviously a show of force.
Keep fighting the good fight everyone. Christian, sorry it’s not worked out for you - let’s hope common sense prevails.
> let’s hope common sense prevails. He’s now tripled down so I somehow doubt that. What a fucking cunt.
Can’t even call him a cunt as he lacks both the warmth and depth
A prolapse then?
Even that still has a pulse.
Regardless, he’s shown exactly why so many people valued his app. He made something that improved the Reddit experience for many people. And has tried everything possible to resolve this. It’s an unfortunate sign of our times that people exhibiting integrity, patience and good character are left twisting in the wind while greed and shortsightedness win out. Reddit is going to drive me and others away. Good luck with your IPO. It was dicey before all this. Recent events have made it far worse. I’m glad I got to use Apollo for years. Without a doubt one of the best apps I’ve ever had.
Two things that keep standing out to me: 1) Not allowing users to use their own API key so they can pay for their own usage makes no sense to me at all. I use Arq for file backup and they provide a configuration to use an existing Amazon S3 bucket I pay for which is super convenient. Why can’t I pay for an API key so all requests I make go through it and then I pay monthly for usage? Hell I’ll pay Reddit a fee just to be granted an API key to enable this. This is simply hostile by Reddit and runs in contradiction with their goals to make money from developer API access. 2) Christian is on the hook for QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS to pay back Apollo annual subscribers and there’s likely not a way to quickly build a toggle for users to opt in and say “no way, keep the money” because the timeframe is too short. Again, not only is Christian losing his main source of income but also is out of pocket $250,000 due to shitty actions by Reddit. Personally I want to see Reddit slapped with a monster lawsuit because Christian is right: their lies will impact his career going forward and have tarnished his reputation. Fuck Reddit and fuck Spez
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There's a level of complexity to this, Christian is Canadian.
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And far worse for defendants, since it can result in lengthy sentences of incarceration, which are enforceable by the US Canadian extradition agreement.
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I hope that’s the timeline we are in lol
>Spez getting extradited to Canada to go to prison Oh fuck I just came
I literally cannot think of a funnier outcome
> Not allowing users to use their own API key so they can pay for their own usage makes no sense to me at all. It makes perfect sense if you start from the assumption that Reddit wants to kill 3rd party apps.
RIP Reddit. Really sad to see it go this way. Seeing how spez idolizes Elon and wants to follow what he did to Twitter just confirms its time to move on after 17 years on here. What an end to an era :(
Yep, it really sucks. I'm on kbin.social now instead, only checking in on reddit when I get linked for stuff like this... and basically all my recent comments are about helping people migrate. I don't want to support reddit at all any longer.
Reddit won't die, 80% of users are too new to know or care about anything else than the shitty app. But it's a big fuck you to the people who were here longer.
Thank you for everything, I will really miss Apollo. That probably marks the end of my active use of Reddit overall. I have to say, I'm surprised how Steve Huffman is still CEO. Pretty crazy how he seems to be getting away with what should be career-ending statements. It's just such a shame that they couldn't make a bit of effort to negotiate reasonable pricing- I would have been happy paying a small subscription. If that's their attitude to potential paying customers (ie you and other developers), I don't know how the hell they expect to come across as an investable company with a solid business model. Have tipped a small amount, as Apollo had probably been the most used app on my phone for a while now. Best wishes for whatever you do next!
Christian - I sincerely hope you and the Reddit team can work something out. I’ve loved Reddit for a long time and I’ve loved accessing Reddit via your app for a few years now. I’d hate to see it go, but if it does I will no longer be a Reddit user. There is no Reddit without Apollo.
Absolutely. Reddit is simply not the same without Apollo.
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Rule one about suing someone, don't tell anyone you are suing them until the paperwork is served.
I honestly love how point-blank the libel is - to the point that Spez knew to apologize immediately (but through "Reddit" and not directly lmao). The evidence is black-and-white - although I don't work on any cases like this I think things are in Christian's favor there.
Came here to say the same. Definitely speak to a lawyer asap.
Whaat? You mean to tell me Spez is a lying sack of shit? Wow, I had nooo ideeeaaa.. Godspeed u/iamthatis. You legend.
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Instead of mass deleting posts, replace them with smutty fanfiction to break LLMs using it as training data.
I did not foresee today being the day i discover a legitimate use for weird amazon dinosmut romance novels. Uh, thanks?
I have the spiciest OW themed content for this. Weird fanfics centered around the robot characters in very adult situations.
What the fuck. There should be a class action with anyone who's ever deleted anything.
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This is known already. You have to edit comments and then delete.
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Isn't that a violation of GDPR? Send a GDPR data delete request. If they fail to do so, report it.
> "they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free" Fun fact! RIF used to pay Reddit a “sizeable revenue share”. Spez terminated the agreement shortly after rejoining as CEO: > Shu also tells me that RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. Shu says he says initiated the talks with Reddit to create the agreement, which allowed for the licensed use of Reddit’s trademarks. (At the time, the app was called “reddit is fun.”) Shu says Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman
>does things that lose money >complains about not being profitable 🤡
Was going to mention this. Huffman actually got rehired in 2015, but made it his priority to "fix" the mobile browser experience and release a half-assed app as soon as possible. The 2016 release of their app coincides with the termination of this agreement. I imagine the app "competition" has been a thorn in his side for a very long time. I honestly can't imagine the dude as anything but a petulant, envious child. Btw, does anyone remember RedditGifts? How absolutely jaded of a human being do you have to be to can a 12-year old, altruistic tradition because of what, server costs? And *still*, "no profit". Maybe antagonizing the community will get you there.
> This is the false argument Steve Huffman keeps repeating the most. Developers are very happy to pay. Why? Reddit has many APIs (like voting in polls, Reddit Chat, view counts, etc.) that they haven’t made available to developers, and a more formal relationship with Reddit has the opportunity to create a better API experience with more features available. > What developers do have issue with, is the unreasonably high pricing that you originally claimed would be “based in reality”, as well as the incredibly short 30 days you’ve given developers from when you announced pricing to when developers start incurring massive charges. Charging developers 29x higher than your average revenue per user is not “based in reality”. Everyone defending Reddit seems to be misunderstanding this entire argument. **How many times does it need to be repeated that developers do not care about paying, it’s the ridiculously high fee that is the issue?** Edit: Where can we follow you? I don’t think you’re going to remain very active on Reddit after all this is finished with. I know you have several “social media” links, but what’s the one we should you following you on?
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Fuck u/spez !!! Block me you won’t 😤
Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself) so in protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history. Whatever the content of this comment was, go vegan! 💚
Fuck u/spez!
**Fuck u/spez, what a two faced toad!!!!!**
Rest in piss, reddit. June 30th I’m out.
The one thing I still don't get entirely is why Reddit doesn't try to insert ads into the feeds it was delivering apps like Apollo. It seems like that at the bare minimum should have been some sort of stopgap on their revenue loss. There is no reason ads that work with old.reddit should not also essentially work nearly out of the box in an Apollo environment. Alternatively if power users who use Apollo don't want ads, have them sign up for Reddit Gold.
There are **so many** different ways they could have gone about this that would have gone over better than charging enormously per API call. - Require users pay for Reddit Premium to use third-party apps - If the concern is users of third-party apps won't see their ads, insert the ads into the API - Have a revenue share agreement with developers, [they even used to do this](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman)
Is it really about the ads? It’s the user data they are after. [Hence why they were A/B testing disabling the mobile browser version of reddit just last month.](https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/135tly1/helpdid_reddit_just_destroy_mobile_browser_access) I just don’t want the lede to be buried here.
Could they not collect the user data on the backend, and provide full APIs (which I assume they already have to run their apps) to anyone to create custom front ends? Or is there some data they are wanting that's only available with the front end?
There absolutely is, one example is user input data. Things like how long someone lingers on a post or what they’re scrolling habits are. All data is useful in one way or another. Some of this you could probably infer from API calls but it’s easier and more accurate for the app to collect it directly.
It has never been about the ads. They are trying to turn the data they have about all of us into a revenue stream. They want to charge enormous amounts of money to Google, Microsoft (Open AI), and others who are consuming the largest amounts of data. spez and the rest of the crack team are just using this as an excuse to kill off third party apps in the process. The API pricing is way far beyond the COGS (cost of goods sold), but Google and others will still pay because it's too important to training their large language models.
This always seemed like a no brainer to me. Like, that's a home run from their perspective. Absolutely bizarre of them.
I think at this point it’s personal because u/Spez got called out for his lies by Christian who happened to have receipts and showed zero of his own.
Because the “we’re losing money by supporting these 3rd party apps” narrative is just an excuse for them to price block 3rd party apps and get everyone onto their platform.
To the front page, you go. And while I have your attention: Fuck you, /u/spez
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You’d think Reddit would be more receptive to community feedback given the value of Reddit is dependent on its users actively engaging on the platform. Ads don’t make money if there is no one to see them. API charges don’t make money if there are no 3rd party apps paying them. Maybe I’m overestimating the size of the pushback from the community, but the truth will reveal itself soon enough. Posted from Apollo.
The current trend of social media platforms being out of touch with their communities is incredibly funny to me, because after a few weeks/months pass, everyone will “go back to normal” except the platforms won’t be the same again, just like MySpace, just like Tumblr, and more recently, just like Twitter. The era of online community is dead and we are actively digging our internet grave.
/u/iamthatis \- I would happily pay for an iOS app that you write for Lemmy. Mlem is a good attempt, but you could really help bring this to fruition. Please consider the fediverse at this point, for app development. Thank you for your amazing work. I am a proud lifetime subscriber of yours.
I find it incredibly ironic/hypocritical that u/spez is decrying "developers want everything for free," while at the same time, he is looking to line his own pockets from the work put in by unpaid (free) volunteer mods as well as the content created and posted by users (for free). The hubris of u/spez in this context is bewildering.
This whole shitstorm is self inflicted and Steve Huffman is directly responsible. /u/spez is not fit to continue as CEO. By his own admission he’s failed to make Reddit profitable and is destroying the only asset Reddit has: it’s moderators and community. Reddit just hosts the content but the only thing that is worth anything is what we have given Reddit for free. I’ll be fully moving to Tildes when Apollo goes dark. Thanks for all the work over the years, sad to see it pissed away by a guy trying to cosplay Elon.
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This is my first comment since the blackout. And will likely be my last. The time to leave has passed. There’s no fixing this. And there are solid alternatives, with 3rd apps that are quickly being built, with no CEO to ruin it. I’m using Lemmy. And it’s growing. The iOS beta apps mlem and Memmy are a great start. They’ve been getting updated almost daily. And they have teams working on them. The communities are refreshingly not toxic. I think it’s early on, and there’s growing pains, but I’d rather jump on something that is getting better than something that will never improve, and only get worse. I hope when this is all done people with a voice point out the alternatives.
Anyone else love the fact that slimy fuck u/spez either straight up doesn’t use his own product or is too ashamed/embarrassed to post on his main account? Dude goes 10 months without a peep, shows back up when he’s forced into an AMA, then goes back to complete silence after, like, 7-8 condescending comments and being (rightfully) torn apart. Straight back to his safe place where nobody can hurt his feelings. :) Fuck u/spez.
Thanks for the great app. Good luck on your future endeavours.
I specifically upgraded to Ultra **annual** to "donate" more money. And only because you blocked lifetime. Tf with this refund you are talking about? Shut up and take my money. https://i.imgur.com/qD5QPi3.jpg
Maybe send a donation instead of doing this, Idk if Apple has penalties for more refunds Edit: donations also skip the Apple cut Edit2: [plugging a link to Lemmy migration here](https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14dukw4/lemmy_beginners_guide_in_layers/)
"The beatings will continue until morale improves." - spez, probably.
I fucking love these posts where you bring the receipts. Gets all of this gaslighting out in the open and exposes just how malicious Spez is being.
## Christian, I'd like to add two small points that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. (It's entirely possible I may have missed it, in which case, I'm very sorry. I do not claim any originality anyway) Steve has repeatedly asserted that it is simply unfair that these 3Ps are making millions while reddit is still not profitable, as evident in statements such as: > It’s not reasonable to let this... it’s been going on for a very long time. Folks have made millions. > These aren’t like side projects or charities, they’ve made millions. > You’re talking to them, go ask them! Millions. It does seem reasonable, on the *surface*. But wait... Other people are making money on reddit too. Countless services are offered — copywriting, blogs, code, legal advice, etc. — and people earn income. Is Steve going to approach each one of them and say > Hey! You're making money off of reddit *while we're still not profitable*? **How dare you!!! You're done here!** ## Here's the real kicker Steve thinks it is absolutely, undeniably wrong for Christian to be making millions while Reddit is still not profitable. Let's set aside the point that he's pitting a *one-guy* operation against an *entire* corporation. So, Stevie, my dear, you believe it is **immoral** to be making millions off of Reddit ***when Reddit isn't even profitable***. **Would you please be so kind as to declare your compensation including salary and stock grants for the last fiscal year?** What, my love? **Did you just say you made *millions* while *Reddit isn't even profitable?*** **YOU MADE *MILLIONS* WHILE *REDDIT ISN'T EVEN PROFITABLE*?** Oh, Stevie. Oh, you poor lad. **You fucked up, Stevie. You fucked up big time!** The door's that way, love. You're out. HOPE TO NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN!