Edit: archived link, (alternative)
Copy pasted his post below for people who don’t want to give Reddit traffic:
I wanted to address Reddit’s continued, provably false statements, as well as answer some questions from the community, and also just say thanks.
(Before beginning, to the uninitiated, “the Reddit API” is just how apps and tools talk with Reddit to get posts in a subreddit, comments on a post, upvote, reply, etc.)
Reddit: “Developers don’t want to pay”
Steve Huffman on June 15th: “These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.”
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. I expressed this willingness to pay many times throughout phone calls and emails, for instance here’s one on literally the very first phone call:
“I’m honestly looking forward to the pricing and the stuff you’re rolling out provided it’s enough to keep me with a job. You guys seem nothing but reasonable, so I’m looking to finding out more.”
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”.
Reddit: “We’re happy to work with those who want to work with us.”
No, you are not.
I outlined numerous suggestions that would lead to Apollo being able to survive, even settling on the most basic: just give me a bit more time. At that point, a week passed without Reddit even answering my email, not even so much as a “We hear you on the timeline, we’re looking into it.” Instead the communication they did engage in was telling internal employees, and then moderators publicly, that I was trying to blackmail them.
But was it just me who they weren’t working with?
- Many developers during Steve Huffman’s AMA expressed how for several months they’d sent emails upon emails to Reddit about the API changes and received absolutely no response from Reddit (one example, another example). In what world is that “working with developers”?
- Steve Huffman said “We have had many conversations — well, not with Reddit is Fun, he never wanted to talk to us”. The Reddit is Fun developer shared emails with The Verge showing how he outlined many suggestions to Reddit, none of which were listened to. I know this as well, because I was talking with Andrew throughout all of this.
Reddit themselves promised they would listen on our call:
“I just want to say this again, I know that we’ve said it already, but like, we want to work with you to find a mutually beneficial financial arrangement here. Like, I want to really underscore this point, like, we want to find something that works for both parties. This is meant to be a conversation.”
I know the other developers, we have a group chat. We’ve proposed so many solutions to Reddit on how this could be handled better, and they have not listened to an ounce of what we’ve said.
Ask yourself genuinely, has this whole process felt like a conversation where Reddit wants to work with both parties?
Reddit: “We’re not trying to be like Twitter/Elon”
Twitter famously destroyed third-party apps a few months before Reddit did when Elon took over. When I asked about this, Reddit responded:
Reddit: “I think one thing that we have tried to be very, very, very intentional about is we are not Elon, we’re not trying to be that. We’re not trying to go down that same path, we’re not trying to, you know, kind of blow anyone out of the water.”
Steve Huffman showed how untrue this statement was in an interview with NBC last week:
In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.
Reddit: “The Apollo developer is threatening us”
Steve Huffman on June 7th on a call with moderators:
Steve Huffman: “Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million. This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He’s threatening us.”
As mentioned in the last post, thankfully I recorded the phone call and can show this to be false, to the extent that Reddit even apologized four times for misinterpreting it:
Reddit: “That’s a complete misinterpretation on my end. I apologize. I apologize immediately.”
Despite this, Reddit and Steve Huffman still went on to repeat this potentially career-ending lie about me internally, and publicly to moderators, and have yet to apologize in any capacity, instead Steve’s AMA has shown anger about the call being posted.
Steve, I genuinely ask you: if I had made potentially career-ending accusations of blackmail against you, and you had evidence to show that was completely false, would you not have defended yourself?
Reddit: “Christian has been saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally”
In Steve Huffman’s AMA, a user asked why he attempted to discredit me through tales of blackmail. Rather than apologizing, Steve said:
“His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally.”
I responded:
“Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.”
I genuinely have no clue what he’s talking about, and as more than a week has passed once more, and Reddit continues to insist on making up stories, I think the onus is on me to show all the communication Steve Huffman and I have had, in order to show that I have been consistent throughout my communication, detailing that I simply want my app to not die, and offering simple suggestions that would help, to which they stopped responding:
https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-steve-email-conversation.txt
Reddit: “They threw in the towel and don’t want to work with us”
Again, this is demonstrably false as shown above. I did not throw in the towel, you stopped communicating with me, to this day still not answering anything, and elected to spread lies about me. This forced my hand to shut down, as I only had weeks before I would start incurring massive charges, you showed zero desire to work with me, and I needed to begin to work with Apple on the process of refunding users with yearly subscriptions.
Reddit: “We don’t want to kill third-party apps”
Regardless of your “intention”, that is what you achieved. So you are either very inept at making plans that accomplish a goal, you’re lying, or both.
Reddit: “Third-party apps don’t provide value.”
(Per an interview with The Verge.)
I could refute the “not providing value” part myself, but I will let Reddit argue with itself through statements they’ve made to me over the course of our calls:
“We think that developers have added to the Reddit user experience over the years, and I don’t think that there’s really any debating that they’ve been additive to the ecosystem on Reddit and we want to continue to acknowledge that.”
Another:
“Our developer community has in many ways saved Reddit through some difficult times. I know in no small part, your work, when we did not have a functioning app. And not just you obviously, but it’s been our developers that have helped us weather a lot of storms and adapt and all that.”
Another:
“Just coming back to the sentiment inside of Reddit is that I think our development community has really been a huge part why we’ve survived as long as we have.”
Reddit’s hostility toward moderators
There’s an overall tone from Reddit along the lines of “Moderators, get in line or we’ll replace you” that I think is incredibly, incredibly disrespectful.
Other websites like Facebook pay literally hundreds of millions of dollars for moderators on their platform. Reddit is incredibly fortunate, if not exploitative, to get this labor completely free from unpaid, volunteer users.
The core thing to keep in mind is that these are not easy jobs that hundreds of people are lining up to undertake. Moderators of large subreddits have indicated the difficulty in finding quality moderators. It’s a really tough job, you’re moderating potentially millions upon millions of users, wherein even an incredibly small percentage could make your life hell, and wading through an absolutely gargantuan amount of content. Further, every community is different and presents unique challenges to moderate, an approach or system that works in one subreddit may not work at all in another.
Do a better job of recognizing the entirety of Reddit’s value, through its content and moderators, are built on free labor. That’s not to say you don’t have bills to keep the lights on, or engineers to pay, but treat them with respect and recognize the fortunate situation you’re in.
What a real leader would have done
At every juncture of this self-inflicted crisis, Reddit has shown poor management and decision making, and I’ve heard some users ask how it could have been better handled. Here are some steps I believe a competent leader would have undertaken:
- Perform basic research. For instance: Is the official app missing incredibly basic features for moderators, like even being able to see the Moderator Log? Or, do blind people exist?
- Work on a realistic timeline for developers. If it took you 43 days from announcing the desire to charge to even deciding what the pricing would be, perhaps 30 days is too short a period from when the pricing is announced to when developers could be start incurring literally millions of dollars in charges. Other companies like Dark Sky when deprecating their weather API literally gave 30 months. Such a length of time is not necessary in this case, but goes to show how extraordinarily and harmfully short Reddit’s deadline was.
- Talk to developers. Not responding to emails for weeks or months is not acceptable, nor is not listening to an ounce of what developers are able to communicate to you.
In the event that these are too difficult, you blunder the launch, and frustrate users, developers, and moderators alike:
- Apologize, recognize that the process was not handled well, and pledge to do better, talking and listening to developers, moderators, and the community this time
Why can’t you just charge $5 a month or something?
This is a really easy one: Reddit’s prices are too high to permit this.
It may not surprise you to know, but users who are willing to pay for a service typically use it more. Apollo’s existing subscription users use on average 473 requests per day. This is more than an average free user (240) because, unsurprisingly, they use the app more. Under Reddit’s API pricing, those users would cost $3.52 monthly. You take out Apple’s cut of the $5, and some fees of my own to keep Apollo running, and you’re literally losing money every month.
And that’s your average user, a large subset of those, around 20%, use between 1,000 and 2,000 requests per day, which would cost $7.50 and $15.00 per month each in fees, which no one is going to want to pay.
I’m far the only one seeing this, the Relay for Reddit developer, initially somewhat hopeful of being able to make a subscription work, ran the same calculations and found similar results to me.
By my count that is literally every single one of the most popular third-party apps having concluded this pricing is untenable.
And remember, from some basic calculations of Reddit’s own disclosed numbers, Reddit appears to make on average approximately $0.12 per user per month, so you can see how charging developers $3.52 (or 29x higher) per user is not “based in reality” as they previously promised. That’s why this pricing is unreasonable.
Can I use Apollo with my own API key after June 30th?
No, Reddit has said this is not allowed.
Refund process/Pixel Pals
Yearly users with time left on their subscription as of July 1st will automatically receive a pro-rated refund for the time remaining. I’m working with Apple to offer a process similar to Tweetbot/Twitterrific wherein users can decline the refund if they so choose, but that process requires some internal working but I’ll have more details on that as soon as I know anything. Apple’s estimates are in line with mine that the amount I’ll be on the hook to refund will be about $250,000.
Not to turn this into an infomercial, but that is a lot of money, and if you appreciate my work I also have a fun separate virtual pets app called Pixel Pals that it would mean a lot to me if you checked out and supported (I’ve got a cool update coming out this week!). If you’re looking for a more direct route, Apollo also has a tip jar at the top of Settings, and if that doesn’t work for you, I also have a [email protected] PayPal. Genuinely zero pressure.
Thanks
Thanks again for the support. It’s been really hard to so quickly lose something that you built for nine years and allowed you to connect with hundreds of thousands of other people, but I can genuinely say it’s made it a lot easier for us developers to see folks being so supportive of us, it’s like a million little hugs.
- Christian
.
Similarly, had no 3rd party add but was so disgusted by how the company has acted that I’ll never be able to use them again in good conscious. It feels like these sort of corporate moves of “eat a bag of shit or don’t eat at all” have been really ramping up as of late. You do things that you know your users or customers won’t like and then see how they’ll react. Did a lot leave? Some did but now I know that the ones that are left will take whatever financial or TOS curveball that I can think up. I can make more money by providing less options, and shittier service, but I’ll say the exact opposite. And when the thing we do brakes or charges you 5x the amount you signed up for then our customers will need to take half a day to get around every dead end automated messenger and customer call line that takes 2+ hours because of “covid.”
I agree with your last point so much. I also used the official app and had a 12 year account, but fuck if I am going to just stand by and watch another corporate board make our world a bit more miserable for the sake of their profit. Let them have dust.
This is similar to me. I used Reddit’s official app, so initially I wasn’t bothered by 3rd party apps going away. But seeing Reddit’s response, which is basically “users will bow down and do what we want, they will generate revenue for us and not complain, and we will never listen to them”, is what made me not want to use Reddit again. So now I’m not using it.
As an Apollo devotee, I find it so heartwarming to hear the solidarity from folks like you.
Same here. I feel so bad that Christian is having to deal with all this. He’s doing a spectacular job at defending himself from the corporate attacks but he shouldn’t have to. I really hope he gets more visibility in the media, because all the articles I’ve been seeing in the mainstream are from spez perspective and that’s a shame.
Between misrepresenting their conversations with app devs and mods, and trying to spin a different story in media outlets, and lumping me into a “database of human conversation”… I really don’t want to contribute to or engage with a company like that in any way. None of it directly affects me but I see no reason to help assholes out with free content, ad views, or votes.
Pretty much the same. I didn’t mind the Reddit app and even paid the monthly fee because I wanted to support a site that I used daily. I also had Apollo and used it and was pretty indifferent between the two. Each had their positives and negatives and don’t mind paying a fee as long as it is reasonable but I can’t turn a blind eye to the bullshit u/spez is pulling.
I’m a Relay user. I found the amount of ads and pushed content/gimmicks on the official reddit app and ‘new’ mobile website (which is already straight up hostile to browser users, very intrusively pushing the app) aggravating and found old.reddit not super usable on mobile, where I spend most of my life (RIP).
I was hopeful the Relay dev could find a pricing mechanism which would enable him to continue, but to be honest, as long as I know where my main communities will migrate to I’m no longer broken-hearted that I wont be on reddit - although I feel for the devs who have had so much work ripped out from under them in this way. The direction of Reddit as a company is clearly laid out before us with spez’s and admins’ responses and what is looking to happen with piracy, NSFW etc content, and they do not want to support all the things that make it great. They seem to almost hate its whole raison d’etre - its widely open and extensive community forums, development/tech led userbase, its potential for a very easy-to-read but user-specific or incredibly niche experience if wanted.
I understand how this means they are not profitable like more algorithm-intensive and centralised social media companies with stronger ad platforms, and I would, like the devs, very much understand some sort of pricing for API access. But their aggression and lack of communication, the kind of PR- or IPO-led choices they’re making and general 'snoo’tiness (sorry) makes it clear that they’re a company I no longer really support. Especially if they’re taking anything Elon says seriously, blimey.
I support the reddit userbase and community, I’m not loyal to a random brand - I’ve been on there for >10 years as well but only because it felt like the website was just the vehicle for the underlying communities, rather than the headline company plastering itself on everything (apart from the occasional r/place sort of event). Now they’re pushing their branding over the content so much I’m glad to be rid of it, just like meta and twitter.
Man, I’m really annoyed that I won’t be able to use Apollo but at the same time, this is just what I needed to cut the cord on Reddit.
I hope Christian finds a bigger and better project going forward even after pixel pals.
I won’t lie, I’ve been enjoying this past week with (minimal) Reddit use!
I imagined that I would be doing cooler, more productive things, like exercising or creative writing. Instead I am spending too much time reading fandom wikis about shows I have never watched and no interest in watching, and visiting tvtropes. But I’ll get there. Reddit scratched an itch for me that nothing else does, yet.
I replaced my reddit doomscrolling with fediverse doomscrolling. Progress?
I feel ya there!
Same. I deleted my account about a year ago because I felt I was addicted… still browsed, but not commenting seemed to break a link. But, of course, I ended up making a new account and endiedup just as addicted.
I’m trying not to make the same mistake here, glad it exists but making an effort to do other things rather than reach for post aggregation.
It’s kinda the self-imposed equivalent of sitting a toddler in front of an iPad, now I think about it.
I hope Christian sues them for libel.
What a class act. He’s really showing ol Stevey boi what an adult looks like. I wasn’t an Apollo user (RiF, instead) but he makes me want to donate to support.
@feidry
I went back and checked and apparently hadn’t bought the premium RiF app over the 11 years I was on reddit so I went back and bought it this week as a final thank you.I just did the same. Says a lot that I never even noticed I was on the non-premium version since the base client was so excellent.
I did the same at the start of this month. I had been using RiF since High School in 2013 and had never even considered the premium version due to how good the standard version was.
Never used Apollo and never had an Iphone, but i just gave a couple bucks just for the work it takes him to be this transparent about all what is happening.
The digs about what a real leader would do are hilarious.
What a real leader would have done
This whole paragraph is the best Fuck You to spez.
It really blows my mind how good of a deal reddit has (had?) with regards to content and how determined they seem to be to blow it up.
By that I mean: they make the site, all the content is created for them for free, all the moderation, sifting through horrible porn, nazi shit etc. is done for them, also for free, people create apps to more effectively drive traffic to their site, also for free, literally all they really have to do is run ads to rake in the cash, keep the servers up and try to provide better tools for the free moderators to sort through the free content more effectively.
They only do one of those things reliably, and people still contribute endlessly for free. So really all they have to do is not directly torpedo all the free labour they rely on, and they even fucked that up.
I’m a RIF person myself but I have so much respect for Apollo and Christian’s work, even as I’ve never had the opportunity to use it, just from how he’s handled and documented this situation. I’m sad both Apollo and RIF are being taken from us and I hope Christian and Andrew find amazing success in whatever they decide to work on next.
I’m a Sync user and I feel the same. All of these third party all developers seem like great people and they all have my full support despite whatever all I chose to use.
No uncertain terms, pure transparency, with receipts to boot. Christian Selig is a legend for this.
It’s really difficult listening to those audio clips. Arguably defamatory territory.
It really does make me wonder at what point the apollo dev does take Huffman to court for defamation.
"Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.
Really all you need to know.
Really good business to Elon and spez means Nazis screaming all over your timeline.
Twitter’s a cesspit now, Musk’s reputation took a hit, and Twitter’s valuation is something like a third of what Elon paid for a controlling share eight months ago. What is it that Spez thinks is “good business” about all this?
I don’t like calling people stupid, because it’s usually reductive and lazy, but… how else can you explain it?
I honestly don’t know why Christian hasn’t sued Reddit and Spez for a bunch of money, the evidence has been in the open for days
For all we know Christian is talking to a lawyer behind the scenes, it’s typically not recommended by attorneys to announce that you plan on suing someone
I don’t think he’s been harmed in any way that’s illegal. Defamation, perhaps, but those are hard and expensive cases to prosecute.
This situation sucks and Reddit has blown all kinds of good will, but I’m doubtful that they’ve broken any laws.
Only time will tell. If a couple of years on he can prove he’s been blackballed by Reddit’s action, he has a case.
He seems to be happy being an indie developer though, it may be quite awhile before this comes back to impact him.
I am curious what you think the angle he has to sue for?
Not a lawyer, but that’s defamation, isn’t it? Mr. CEO’s saying Christian is this and that bad thing, when Christian has proof otherwise. Mr. CEO repeats this lie about Christian, damaging his reputation. In Christian’s own words, it’s a “potentially career-ending lie”.
Slander maybe?
Slander is spoken, libel is written. They’re also very hard cases to win. You have to be able to prove that measurable damage was done to your reputation. Not sir Christian could prove that.
He claimed that Christian threatened the company on a phone call with moderators, so it would be slander.
Yeah I don’t know either, I hope he is consulting a lawyer to get a professional opinion on this mess.
Christian would have trouble winning this case because no one believes Spez or Reddit anyway.
Reddit’s probably got a bunch of protection on the financial side of this, but libel over the blackmail accusations seems like it could be a possibility.
As Christian said in his post, Reddit has made some potentially career ending claims, such as attempting to blackmail Reddit. IANAL, but depending on how well Christian can prove Reddit knew they were lying about these claims and what their damages were, he could have a nice libel case.
Though it’s hard to show he’s been harmed by that, if anything i imagine this whole situation has helped his career.
What company would hire Christian at this point? I bet he’s insta-black-balled now from any high profile tech company.
Fair. He’s definitely gotten a huge podium to advertise his new app he’s been developing. I’d be surprised if he wasn’t talking to a lawyer at least. But to your point, it probably wouldn’t actually be worth any legal action.
If he hadn’t been able to refute the claims, the reputational damage to him could have made it so nobody would ever work with him again. He is lucky and smart to have covered his ass how he did, but if someone breaks into your house and you stop them from stealing anything, you still call the cops on them.
Thanks for putting the text under the link!
It’s disgusting seeing how Reddit has treated Christian and other third-party app devs.
I’m glad that he can refute every claim Reddit has made against him with proof to back it all up.
I think Huffman is set in following Elon’s way though and I don’t see him reverting their decisions. I hope all this negative attention turns investors away though as they keep trying to go public.
I can just hear Elon on the phone to Huffman: “Stay strong, like I’m doing with the vaccine disinformation.”
Banned permanently from the site for this extremely
mild comment. Anyone know how to see what I wrote? I would like to forward my story to journalists while Reddit is a hot topic.https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/146ovat/comment/jnsj3w0
It’s removed but it simply complained about r/politics moderators and told the story of them banning me permanently for saying, “only a fool links opinion pieces as evidence.”. They banned me for “harassment.”.
Fucking ridiculous.
/r/politics and /r/worldnews are beyond terrible. Just constant propaganda and astro turfing, bots, and just generally brainwashed idiots who take an editorialized headline as fact, and then race to the comments to make a shitty non-constructive joke. And God forbid you try to bring up evidence to counter their arguments, you’ll get downvoted to hell if not banned. It really started to become noticable around 2016 after Bernie lost the primaries, and it’s only gotten exponentially worse since then.
Fuck spez for this
I’m really curious what rank-and-file reddit employees think about Steve Huffman and this whole affair. The guy has singlehandedly taken a match to their equity and I can’t imagine that would prompt a positive response.
