> Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder?
Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
>Why is it impossible to give a finite list of customers a refund in 30 days? Again, isn’t he doing it anyway?
if that's all you got out of the comment, you clearly aren't trying to see the POV of the app developer. He's under no obligation to keep working for a company that has at this point slandered him behind his back and he can shut down his app whenever he wants.
You are free to judge him but I don't think he's losing sleep over internet comments trying to claim he is disingenuous. Personally, I see no fault on his end, especially when Reddit is dealing the cards to begin with.
> Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0
Because according to Reddit, the problem with Apollo is the opportunity cost of Reddit not being able to monetize its users.
Acquiring Apollo is user acquisition. Destroying the app does not necessarily mean that all those users will now start using Reddit's official app and become monetizable, they might just quit Reddit entirely. By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.
>And it would have been a deal: 6 months of opportunity cost upfront to then turn into real profit. Instead they are permanently lose the [possibly] majority of that opportunity when those users lose access to Reddit.
I dont think that is accurate. Reddit doesnt make 20M a year if they buy Apollo in this situation.
If something costs 20 million/yr to operate, buying it doesnt reduce that cost. You are just out 10M upfront and then 20M/yr.
The solution is not to buy it, but to make it stop.
He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million. What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with much less friction.
The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipulative (unrealistically short period for apps to adapt, API prices far above what other services charge) indicates that the $20 million number is a lie made to make themselves seem less scummy.
As it stands, Reddit hasn't even tried even simpler solutions like returning ads in the API requests and requiring that the 3rd parties include those for free usage.
> don't care about the API issue, despite being a professional dev. I find sharecropping on someone else's product a perilous path that eventually comes up snake-eyes. Like, the moment someone makes a third party app for Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, or anything else, they are on an expiry meter. Have people not learned this yet?
You are missing the forest for the trees here. The issue is not that they are charging for API access. The issue is that assurances were given that the transition would be reasonable but pricing withheld until the last minute.
Negotiations then proceeded in bad faith, with reddit never intending to allow them to pay the price asked (no methods existed to even make this transaction possible with a 30 day deadline, and other app creators were ignored completely when approaching reddit sales).
When the dev made the situation public (with a 'go ahead' from reddit) then Huffman appears to have taken it personally, and instead of engaging with the community concerns about lack of options for mobile moderators, went on a tantrum. He then discounts any concerns over his handling of the situation and doubles down on libelous claims that were proven false.
This is on top of using reasoning that is not only dubious, but contradictory. If they really care about making a profit, why not offer something of value and charge for it, like the 3rd party apps do? You don't win customers by making something shitty and then removing all of their options and then not even have a plan in place to make money with the shitty alternative.
Huffman has been unable to monetize reddit and he isn't presenting any way to. All he is doing is acting unhinged and destructive -- with both community trust/relations and the corporation itself being used in ways that can not be turned around.
Usually corporations burn their trust as a short-sighted scheme to make a bunch of money quickly (reputable brand cuts so many costs the reputation is lost, etc) and this is tragic, but at least they got something out of it.
This guy seems like he is just burning things down because he is frustrated that they exist successfully on their own using the same resources he has, while he cannot.
> 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie.
If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing.
And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
> If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking.
Weren’t the $20M reddit claimed they are losing, missed opportunity costs? I.e. if Apollo users wouldn‘t use Apollo but the official app, they would make that amount of money off of them. So buying that amount of revenue for $10M sounds definitely reasonable to me. If what reddit claims would be truthful that would be a guaranteed 100% ROI.
> So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well
In other words the expected price for reddit per user is 12 cents but their pricing model for APIs is retaliatory at 20x that price.
> Also, is it expensive?
Charging 20x what you make yourself, and again 4 times more than a similar offering?
> Reddit is much more complicated product with img and video hosting.
No it fucking isn't. 90% of reddit is text by volume and most of it is super short tokens too. Reddit is so uncomplicated you can make it a 1st year uni proyect to make a backend and front end with nested comments and a text post saved in a db.
it is so uncomplicated most of its work behind the scenes for the apst 6 years has been on monetisation, such as the new ads, the nfts, the reddit premium, the reddit awards etc. thats where all dev time has gone, because the actual website itself is uncomplicated
> Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour.
If they wanted him to pay $20 million, they'd certainly have given him much better than a brief phone call.
But that's the point. They're revealing with their actions that they don't actually want him to pay the money. What they want is to shut it down. Charging a sum of money that they know he won't pay is just an easy way to do that.
> He also presents his math, related to cost per user in terms of revenue and reddits proposed API cost is 20x average reveneue per user in any similar business model plan.
he gets traffic and potential Ads views from reddit, and can't monetize it well enough. Sounds also not like reddit's problem.
> The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented, indefensible.
this is pure handwaving without any supporting evidence. Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar price on standard plans.
> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
You believe that? Dude banked on both the sale and takeover, plus the ad revenue when he was running the site.
He had no alternative but to push the poverty myth (Kevin Rose@Digg also did this). Can you imagine what the users would do if he disclosed how much he was raking in?
My guess? $10 million n/w post sale, most likely much more.
Not sure how people are misunderstanding him, he literally said he was joking… He knows it’s not a great deal for Reddit. His whole point is that the app isn’t actually worth $20 million a year, which is what they want him to pay. It’s not even worth $10 million. Not to him or Reddit or anyone else.
> I'm specifically concerned about one-time digital purchases, where once the customer has the file/valuable info there's nothing to stop them from keeping it and requesting a refund.
It's highly dependent on the product and who you're selling to. What are the specifics?
I have a subscription based Chrome extension [1] that will stop working if you refund. I offer 7 day refunds in place of my ability to offer free trials right now. I get minimal refund requests so it's not something I worry about and I'm not going to invest time in winning over people that don't see enough value in the product after seven days.
> I am just wondering how someone can build something that people actively hate? And then for people to create a thread where people are tearing the app and the person apart?
Maybe you didn't get to the part where he said this:
> at this time I would learn and do anything to get more users to my site, to the point where I was getting banned from multiple forums for posting after people told me to get lost for promoting content.
My takeaway is that he came across as a scammer and as a result a few users warned about his product on the forums he was spamming.
> That number was corroborated by Reddit themselves
Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.
> There is no reason to assume malice on the side of Apollo.
There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.
> Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a social media site
Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c per click will give you $10 of monthly Ads revenue if you put one Ad on each page.
Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
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