From everything you can easily google his networth ranges from 3 to 5.5 million dollars... but he is known for giving pretty much everything he earns away to various non-profits. That says a lot... he didn't care to make money. Thats a poor business practice. He set himself up for this.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Popular Reddit App Apollo Shutting Down After Today, Pixel Pals Migration Feature Added
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
What's "this"? Not sure what you mean by that.
I'm know you can google various people's net worth, but I'm not sure how those sites figure that out. Pretty sure they don't ask whomever they are writing about . . . tell me, how much do you have in cash? What other assets do you have? Do you have any loans or other liabilities?
You also say "...but he is know for giving pretty much everything away...". I'm sort of confused by how his net worth can be $3-5 million if he pretty much gave everything away.
Are you saying he earned like $5-10 million and gave half of it away?
If I take you statement at face value - i.e., he gave pretty much everything away - then by definition he can't have a net worth of $3-5 million.
This is where Apollo and the moderators lost me.
Great, if you can't make money, just announce you were unable to come to an agreement with Reddit and move on.
But instead his first post was very accusatory towards Reddit and then said nothing when the mods started jumping onto the train and using it for their own purposes.
If it was just business, the Apollo dev should have told the mods to quit hijacking his issue and if they want to protest, protest for their own cause and leave him out of it.
But he didn't. He seemingly welcomed them.
The mods and the API pricing are, in my mind, two entirely different issues linked by a pubic hair thin mutual interest.
Apollo was a straight up pricing dispute. Reddit wants $X per API call and Apollo wants to pay less than $X.
The mods, IMHO, are protesting for much more selfish reasons.
There are only two reasons the mods went ballistic that make sense.
1. Many of the mod tools do some evil stuff that the mods don't want people to know about and since Reddit's solution was to host the apps/tools for the mods, the mods were concerned that Reddit would figure out what they've been using the tools for.
For instance, it's happened commonly enough I think we can say with great certainty that at least one of those tools bans users across multiple subreddits controlled by the mod. So, if you post a comment in r/Conservative, even a comment that is attacking conservatives, a mod that is in control of 100 other subs can ban you in all of those subs because he doesn't like your political leanings.
2. The mods are taking kickbacks to promote content. I run a very small sub with under 10k members and I get approached at least monthly by people who want to offer me money or gifts to promote a post in my sub. There's no way that a sub with millions of members isn't being offered serious cash to do the same. But they can't do that if Reddit is hosting their tools since accepting kickbacks as a mod is against Reddit's terms of service.
No other reasons make sense. I use Apollo for my personal browsing of Reddit but I quit using it for moderating my sub because it sucked. I wouldn' t get modmail messages, I wouldn't get alerted to people reporting posts and comments, etc. Their claims that Apollo made it easier to moderate their subs doesn't hold water for me. If it provided any productivity gain for them, it had to be minimal.
And what would they care about API costs since Reddit has already said that some mod tools would be exempted from API fees?
compare Reddit (content) now and like a week ago, Reddit is becoming a dead horse. Give it a week or 2 and Reddit is a total irrelevant website.
Reddit makes a platform. Saying that they make nothing is not accurate. It's like saying Facebook, Twitter, etc make nothing. If they make nothing why do they need to have any developers at all?
You say that Reddit could have charged a reasonable rate for the API access, but who determines what is reasonable? I've seen three reddit apps that have said they'll pay the API fees and pass the cost on to their users. They obviously felt the price was reasonable.
Also, if I own a piece of land and I offer it for sale for $10,000 but before I sell it a geologist tells me there's a gold deposit sitting underneath it, am I being unreasonable if I want more than $10,000 for my land now?
How is Reddit doing anything differently now that they have a potential gold mine? People keep saying that AI companies can just scrape the data anyway but what is the cost differential between API access and scraping (bandwidth, tools keep breaking when the design changes, etc)? It may be much cheaper for them to use the API and I'm guessing that's how Reddit priced API access. They priced it such that it would be cheaper to use the API while getting as much value as they can for it.
This stance that because they offered it for free previously that they should be forced to forego any increase in value is just silly.
Companies change their pricing all the time. Some go from free to paid. Some go to subscription models.
Sorry, it's just a fact of life.
Sure, I think Elon Musk is a tool for many reasons. But none of those reasons are for charging (or charging more) for the Twitter API. I used TweetBot and paid for several upgrades but, end of an era, ya know? It happens.
I do think that what has made this worse is that the average age of a Redditor is around 22 years old. They're still in that idealistic phase. It's not a coincidence that some of the more popular subs are anti-capitalist, anti-work, etc.
Reddit basically dropped a huge reality bomb on them.
You saw a much more muted reaction about TweetBot because I'm guessing their audience was older and less idealistic.
BTW, I always find it hilarious when people argue against someone harming themselves. Oh, they lost 66% in paper valuation so they should stop? They have every right to run the company straight into the ground.
The part that makes it comical is that someone will be like, "Reddit is evil and their CEO is a moron but I'm really concerned about them and their profitability". LOL.
And, if they haven't fired the CEO by now it means he cleared his actions with the board of directors who represent the investors. In fact, it may have been the board that told him to do it.
It's almost like they might have a longer-term vision and have more information than some rando on a message board.
I don't agree with that assessment at all but I do think that once they start booting some mods things will improve very quickly.
Aren't all of those still offline or in private mode or whatever?
If so, replace the mods and the subs will slowly go back to normal.
all 3 online, but all 3 nearly dead spaces. /r/Android used to have 3 million readers, now down to 2.5 million in less than a week.
Again, after all this fuss Reddit will simply become a totally irrelevant website
I disagree with your conclusion.
One reason why those subs may be suffering is because many of the user's don't agree with the protests. I just took a quick look at the pinned thread about the protests in r/Apple and many of the most popular comments are saying that the mods should quit and that the mods are easy to replace.
Without commenting on the accuracy of those statements, it seems like a lot of sub members (across many subs) were NOT happy with how the mods handled the protests.
Mods are not well liked in many subs because they abuse their power so many people have been reporting that the "votes" to support the protests accounted for less than 1% of the total members and that mods had organized brigading these votes in order to get the vote results to be to support the protest.
I mean, in that pinned thread, this is how they "summarized" the situation:
Reddit’s a**hole CEO u/spez made it clear that Reddit was not backing down on their changes
The editing of a certain word was done by me. They posted the full word.
It's clear the mods are biased and everyone that disagrees with them runs the risk of being banned. So, maybe that's a reason some of the subs have lost traction. People are just tired of the mod drama and theatrics.
Yes, I do because that's exactly what they were saying. They were literally telling users to avoid holding the phone a certain way. If the user is not supposed to hold the phone in a certain way, that way of holding the phone is "wrong". They were clearly attempting to shift the blame from the antenna design to the way the user held the phone.
Other phones also suffered from this but not to the degree of the iPhone 4, which was due to how the antenna was designed. Before launch Apple's own senior antenna designer advised in an internal memo that the design of the antenna would cause these issues.
I do to a certain degree agree that the issue blew out of proportion, but the issue was certainly not how the user held the phone and lied squarely in the antenna design flaw and Apple should have taken responsibility for that instead of trying to argue that the issue was how the user held the device.
Apollo has been one of my favorite apps ever since I switched to apple in 2018. I am genuinely a little sad to see it go, but I'm not gonna delete my account or boycott the whole site just cause I have to get used to a new app now. Reddit is a lot of fluff but there's a lot of useful info there too, some of which I needed last weekend but couldn't access b/c the mods thought they'd stick it to spez by inconveniencing users. Lots of them treat subs like their own personal echo chambers and I honestly think the reason so many are big mad is because they're losing the tools they used to autoban anyone they disagree with. I have seen thriving, valuable subs wither out thanks to a single abusive mod so I'm fine with the admins dethroning some of these little power-trippers.
I have no personal feelings about reddit itself, it's just a company like any other but it entertains me on the toilet and hosts a ton of niche info that's often very hard find elsewhere so I don't want it to die. They aren't wrong for wanting to charge for API access either, servers cost money to run and I'd much rather pay a small fee every month than have 1/3 of my feed be ads. I'd have happily paid 5 or 6 bucks a month for Apollo to stay alive. That said, the API price is insane and not enough time was allowed for apps to adapt, especially since reddit gave it away for free and actively encouraged 3PAs for for so many years. That's a 🍆 move and it's really weird that they all of a sudden need to start charging so much right NOW. Hopefully more info comes out about that.
I dunno. ESH. This could have been handled way better by both sides.
I have no personal feelings about reddit itself, it's just a company like any other but it entertains me on the toilet and hosts a ton of niche info that's often very hard find elsewhere so I don't want it to die. They aren't wrong for wanting to charge for API access either, servers cost money to run and I'd much rather pay a small fee every month than have 1/3 of my feed be ads. I'd have happily paid 5 or 6 bucks a month for Apollo to stay alive. That said, the API price is insane and not enough time was allowed for apps to adapt, especially since reddit gave it away for free and actively encouraged 3PAs for for so many years. That's a 🍆 move and it's really weird that they all of a sudden need to start charging so much right NOW. Hopefully more info comes out about that.
I dunno. ESH. This could have been handled way better by both sides.
I do believe, however, that if Reddit plans to transform into a company that seeks to make money primarily through the sale of their users' content, they need to have this conversation explicitly and thoroughly with their users and not hide it somewhere in generic language in their privacy policy.
I think most users, to the extent that they considered the question, probably assumed that the API was primarily to enable apps and services they could use to access Reddit. I don't think anyone actually understood and therefore meaningfully consented to have their content shared at large with outside companies for completely unrelated purposes. By the sounds of it, Reddit itself was caught off-guard.
So if Reddit really wants to go down that path I think they need to explain very clearly what content they will share, with whom, how that data will be protected and what safeguards are in place.
Again, telling users to avoid holidng their phone in a certain way is completely different than saying “You’re holding it wrong.” Apple never said that if you hold it with your palm covering the antenna on the left side that it was “wrong.” And that wasn’t the point anyway. Jobs gets quoted as saying “You’re holding it wrong” all the time and it’s not something he or Apple ever said. You can argue that them telling people to avoid holding the phone in a certain way is the same as “You’re holding it wrong“ but its not a quote that was ever spoken by Apple or Jobs.
If someone wants to quote what Apple and Jobs said it should be that Apple told its users “To avoid holding the phone in a certain way.” And that certain way Apple was describing was never mentioned as being “wrong”, but that if it is held that way then the signal is going to fluctuate.
I'm genuinely at a loss at how you arrived at this conclusion.
Google scrapes Reddit all the time. Many services are based on indexing Reddit content. This is all data that is available to the public. Please don't tell me you were unaware of this prior to today.
If a conversation needs to be had about AI tools being trained on data, the whole internet needs to have that conversation because AI companies have been training on internet data for years.
Reddit's data just happens to be more valuable because it isn't spammy affiliate content masquerading as actual reviews.
And, again, I see just as much anger at the mods for participating in these protests as I do against Reddit for increasing the API fees. Unfortunately, there are a few news sources, like Verge, that keep fanning the flames and publishing some of the weakest journalism even by today's low standards for journalism.
The Verge story I read the other day was just quotes from pissed off mods and a line about nobody at Reddit would speak with them. How about some quotes from pissed off users that don't agree with the protests? And why do they need to write a daily story about the situation? They're all authored by the same author, Jay Peters, and they all paint Reddit in the worst possible light while making Apollo and the mods sound like heroes. They make zero attempt to tell both sides of this story. And why are all of the featured comments on those stories comments like, "I deleted Reddit and will never use them again"?
You're literally watching propaganda in action.
Almost every post on Reddit talking about the protests in subs that went dark has a fairly large contingent of users who strongly disagreed with the protests and think the mods are the problem.
The mods are so bad I'm almost cheering for Reddit and I'm a mod myself.
If this was just about Apollo, I think it sucks for the developer, but I can live with it. And I think most people that use Reddit agree since people that access Reddit via third party apps only accounts for, maybe, 5% of total users.
So you really need to be asking why the mods are so up in arms over it. It can't be that they can't use Apollo. It wasn't that great and it didn't make moderating that much easier (I've used Apollo to mod my sub and switched back to the Reddit app).
Is it because they're power hungry? Are they getting kickbacks to promote content in their subs and they'll lose revenue if they can't mod 100 subs? Is it because they might lose control of the narrative in many of these subs if there's actually a diverse set of opinions rather than just whatever the mod allows?
Someone explain this aspect to me because the only conclusions I can come up with don't look good for the mods.
If it's not wrong to hold it that way, why Apple told users not to? Let's not play word games, Apple's message was very clear and IMHO quite intellectually dishonest:
- Apple suggested that other phones had the same issue, but it's not entirely true: other phones had the issue that the hand could obstruct the antenna and could cause similar issues, but not that the hand could cause two separate antenna components to interfere with each other.
- The latter issue was a significantly bigger problem and it's false that it also affected other phones: it was a specific issue of the way the iPhone 4 antenna was designed with the actual antenna being exposed as part of the phone exterior and two separate components of the antenna being able to be "bridged" by the user hand. I'm not aware of any other phone on the market that had that antenna design and of no other phone on the market that suffered for this interference issue.
- If that was not the case, a bumper case would not fix anything as the hand would basically cover the same places, but the bumper case did actually help since it would prevent the two exposed antenna components to be bridged.
- The issue was known by Apple internally, so Apple omitting to publicly mention it when they addressed the issue in their statement cannot be dismissed as lack of awareness and can only be interpreted as wilful attempt to hide the information.
- Suggesting to hold the phone a different way is a clear attempt to shift the issue to the user instead of the faulty design. "You're holding it wrong" is a fairly accurate representation of that.
I will not further discuss the issue since it's not strictly on-topic, for those interested in a timeline of the "antennagate" events, here you are, people can form their own opinion on the matter. It's quite old news after all.
Last edited:
Sigh, did Apple say ‘you’re holding it wrong?” No they didn’t. You are just marking word salad at this point.
Again, let's not play word games, I'm definitely not arguing that they said that exact sentence word-for-word of course... that would be ridiculous and hopefully not the point you're trying to make.
The point is whether "you're holding it wrong" is an accurate representation of what they were trying to convey in their initial statement. IMHO it actually is and I explained in detail why, but feel free to disagree.
Reddit's success and survival is purely dependant on it's users making (free) posts on a daily basis and moderators keeping good management and control of subreddits (done freely). Smartphone app's allow people to no longer be tied down to their laptops or desktops computers. Reddit users turned to 3rd party apps because reddit's own app is shockingly appalling and does not give for a good user experience (according to those that have used it) so they used apps such as Apollo that provided them with a much better user experience. I wonder how many new users reddit got from people using 3rd party apps that they would have never got using reddit's own app. A side effect of using the Apollo app is that reddit moderators found they could do there job so much easier because asking reddit admins to improve their own app kept falling on deaf ears (history subreddit mod wrote an article about it when the protests started).
Yes reddit provides the platform to allow people to post but with those 'free' posts and moderators working for 'free' to make the reddit experience that bit more pleasurable (removing trolls, troublemakers, spam posts etc etc) reddit is nothing, something the CEO has taken for granted.
Yes reddit provides the platform to allow people to post but with those 'free' posts and moderators working for 'free' to make the reddit experience that bit more pleasurable (removing trolls, troublemakers, spam posts etc etc) reddit is nothing, something the CEO has taken for granted.
And STILL, my original quoted post is correct. I don’t understand where we are in disagreement and feel like you’re just screaming at me because you need someone to scream at.
The Empire changed its terms. Pray they don’t change them further.
Last edited:
Reading his Verge interview, the math jut doesn't work out.
He said he has ~50,000 paid subscribers, whose average monthly costs would be ~3.60. At $5/month, after Apple's cut he's around ~3.50, already 10 cents in the read just from Reddit's fees, before any of his costs.
To make it work, he'd have to end free app use and the one time payment offer, and raise prices enough to cover his costs, Apple's cut, and the existing lifetime user base. I suspect the price point to do that would drive away enough subscribers that he'd still wind up in the red.
I'm not sure they are sitting on a goldmine; unless 3rd party apps took away so many users that their ad revenue would jump dramatically. The question is what is more likely to occur - high demand for access to the api, in which case they could see a large revenue bump, or users simply going to Reddit directly and Reddit getting some additional marginal revenue for adds
Reading an article in the news today about 'data scraping' and it's prolific use amongst AI developers/companies, it would not surprise me why information sources such as Twitter and Reddit suddenly increased the costs of using their API's as a way to ward off these AI companies from abusing the free use of the API's and that 3rd party app developers such as Apollo have been caught out in the crossfire. I think there are some articles in the news that reported on Google data scraping reddit for it's AI. I doubt Google out of the goodness of their heart said 'Hey reddit, here is x amount of money so we can use your free API to data scrape your platform for our AI system'.
Google could be a advertiser partner with reddit and there is no way the reddit CEO is going to publicly say he put such a huge price on their API to deter Google from data scraping for it's AI system because that would put the CEO in direct conflict with Google, something the media would love and thus something he would not be about to do. There is an easier way though, blame someone else such as 3rd party developers such as Apollo.
Google could be a advertiser partner with reddit and there is no way the reddit CEO is going to publicly say he put such a huge price on their API to deter Google from data scraping for it's AI system because that would put the CEO in direct conflict with Google, something the media would love and thus something he would not be about to do. There is an easier way though, blame someone else such as 3rd party developers such as Apollo.