It turns out to be a good thing he did record the conversations. Reddit have behaved badly with what is essentially someone who loves Reddit so much they made a killer app to use it. you don’t care or don’t want to find the empathy, that’s fine. But this guy didn’t nothing wrong at all. Nor did Reddit technically. Yet here we are.
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Popular Reddit App Apollo Shutting Down After Today, Pixel Pals Migration Feature Added
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That's a little over-the-top, don't you think?
You guys all think you're the most important people, that your posts matter more than others, that you're special— more special than others, and that your not posting there will sink the company. You guys claim you're "power users"—an elite group of redditors who post 80% of the popular content. I've seen it time and time again in discussions about this protests. It's histrionics. It's narcissism. The truth is that you matter just as much as any other redditor; not more.
The truth is that the reddit protest was a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it definitely should alert reddit staff that there's a risk that certain users will attempt to bully the company in the future. A small group of people— power-hungry mods—absolutely can reduce traffic to the website. That's what staff needs to focus on. Staff should put measures into place to stem potential damage from these actions.
- Easier moderator removal and replacement
- Limitations on deleting subreddits and past posts (subject to whatever European data law there might be)
- Limitations on going private (maybe require approval for the largest, most popular subs)
- Limitations on significantly changing the most popular subs that drive the most traffic (r/pics → john oliver).
Beside the point. It should have never been done.
Subjective. They didn't IMO. They didn't even need to take calls from developers.
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Well we were all famously informed we were holding it wrong. So perhaps eventually he didn’t blame the users. But to start with he very much did! SJ is a bad example. I liked the guy. Actually most of what he did was incredible one way or the other. But he wasn’t really someone that listen to his users and he certainly passed the blame whenever he could.
Nobody said it can't. However, if you are a company that has in the past encouraged others to build apps for their platform, has provided the API for free and said until a couple of months ago that you have no intention of introducing a new pricing structure that will drive independent developers out of business, only to then implement a pricing structure that is clearly intended to choke off third-party apps, lie about your previous partners in public in an attempt to shift the blame and generally go out of your way to act in bad faith it becomes another issue.
Of course they can do it, it's their platform after all. Was it the decent thing to do? Was this generally how business should behave? My answer would be no, but a big part of the problem is that we seem to expect ethical, or just simply 'good,' behaviour from business.
Reddit has been a bad actor in all of this. It really is that plain and simple.
Not needing to isnt an argument. It’s the morality of it. Everyone is kicking off at the morality of the Apollo dev for offering people the option to not get a rebate. Yet the morality of Reddit doing what the f they want is not questioned.
If we're talking about morals, Apollo should retroactively pay for the API usage.
If you're arguing that Reddit is overcharging, you should also be arguing that Reddit was undercharging. That would be fair.
Based on what? There is nothing immoral in using an API exactly the way the provider of said API allowed it to be used.
I would somewhat agree if there was a bug or error on Reddit's side which made the API free of charge by mistake, it was obvious that it was not the intended situation and the developer abused it to its own advantage, but this is not the case, here Reddit clearly did allow the API to be used free of charge.
I do believe this is actually the case personally and from my understanding the argument was not against having paid access to the API altogether but the price point.
Ultimately Reddit can set the prices they want though, even if the prices are not "fair" it's their call to make.
Nonsense. The api was free to use. That was reddits choice. They now choose to charge. Also fine.
Context though - is everything.
Is it also a bad actor to take users money and then when asked for a refund for services not rendered you tell them it’s out of your pocket so you’d rather they didn’t ask?
If they choose to charge and it’s also fine. What are you complaining about?
There is no "should?" Whatever reddit decides is best for their business is the way that it is. There's no need for further conversation. They stated what would be the case, they wouldn't back down on it, and that's that. The people that use reddit seem to think that they have much more power than they actually do when it comes to what another business decides for itself.
Do I personally agree with what reddit did? No. Does it matter? Not in the slightest.
Software doesn’t write itself. People seem to ignore that in a lot of companies, the programmers/software engineers are the biggest expense.
If that were even remotely true, you would just take your refund and not make dozens of posts insulting others of users for making their personal decisions.
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This rather seems like a false equivalency to me.
Everyone will be refunded automatically. If you don't want it and and would prefer the developer keep your money in light of the circumstances you have to voluntarily opt out of getting your refund. At no point has the developer made any [edit: false] statements or exerted any pressure. Even the wallpapers, with which you also seem to have an issue, were completely optional and no one needed to pay anything.
You can disagree with all of this, take your refund and not pay for wallpapers.
How is the developer a bad actor? There's no harm here. No victims. Only volunteers who have to take action and initiative to not get their refund.
Actually you weren't informed that you were holding it wrong. Jobs has been repeatedly misquoted since that email was sent all those years ago. What actually happened was that arstechnica sent an email to Jobs stating that if you hold the phone with your left hand and use your palm to cover all of the antenna bands, that the signal drops. Jobs responded with "All phones have sensitive areas. Avoid holding it that way." And the manner in which we was speaking wasn't a natural way of holding the phone anyway. It was taking your palm and purposefully covering the left antenna band.
It always bugs me when I see "Jobs said you're holding it wrong." He never said it and neither did Apple.
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I didn't see anyone else respond to this; thought I'd share a few thoughts.
If he carried on as is, he has a customer base at a subscription level ($12.99/year) that provides $.92 per user per month; minus his infrastructure costs, that's what provides Christian's income from Apollo.
If he simply raised his price to $49.99 a year, that's fine - but he has an installed base who are already committed at the $12.99 year rate. It's not a technical issue or a coding issue (unless there were API changes to implement); he can change the price, he just can't retroactively change the price for subs in progress.
This is the not-enough-time issue - he'd be losing money, day 1, on all the subs in place. (I think he had a rough calculation of $2-3 for the API cost per average user; not sure if that was average subscribed user or average user).
How many of those subs are going to convert from $12.99 to $49.99 (or whatever the new price is)? How many new subs might he pick up from people using the app for free? How long would he be in the red? Would he ever get back to profitability?
If Reddit had allowed the fees to ramp up over year, or work on introductory pricing for a while: that's the timing issue referred to. Strictly business model/business process; nothing technical.
Christian - and others, it sounds like - had contacted Reddit asking to have a discussion, as Reddit had said they were open to - but no response. (I know Narwhal is sticking around, but I haven't heard if they were able work something out).
I suppose he could have shut down Apollo, refund the base, and launched New! Improved Apollo! With API at the new price point; but I'm guessing he didn't want to do that. I find it kind of annoying when apps do that, myself.
That (in my opinion!) is what led to his announcement on June 8th that he was shutting down.
Then on June 9th was the AMA on the API where Reddit Management where they said they felt Christian threatened/blackmailed them (don't recall the exact wording, but there are plenty of news stories on it).
At that point I think things were effectively dead, although Christian did say after that he was still hoping for some kind of resolution. I think that was a bit naive on his part.
This is the original public statement from Apple responding to the issue (emphasis mine):
So Apple was literally saying that if users were experiencing the issue the problem was not the phone's design, users should have avoided holding the phone in a certain way instead. Summarizing it as "you're holding it wrong" is pretty much accurate IMHO.
I lurk a lot these days (was on Reddit for most discussion), but I have to say, seeing an account that was started in 2015 without a comment since that year get unearthed 8 years later to rage against a critically acclaimed app is some trippy stuff.
Yea but why does he not want do do that? Have you thought about that? Especially when Narwhal was able to strike a deal.
I can give you a reason. It’s because Apollo is a grifter. He has no interest in actually running a legitimate business. Narwhal does. He wants free money. He doesn’t want to incur costs.
It's not clear to me what "why does he not want to do that" refers to?
If you mean what Narwhal did, he did reach out to his contacts at Rededit three times and got no response. So whatever may have been offered to Narwhal wasn't on the table for him. When I read the AMA from June 9th, there were a couple of other developers who mentioned the same thing - to be fair, I have no idea if Reddit ever did get back to them.
If that's not what you meant, please clarify.
As far as saying he doesn't want to incur costs - most businesses try to limit costs? Why is that an issue?
Really, you get "You're holding it wrong" from that? That's about as big of a stretch you can possibly make from that statement. They are LITERALLY saying that all phones suffer from this (which they did) and that if you hold the phone a certain way it will cause the signal to drop. In no way shape or form are the saying anyone was holding it wrong. It's comical that anyone could even extrapolate "You're holding it wrong" from that statement. It's a stretch into the deepest realms of fantasy land.