I think a big chunk of this is prioritization of resources in a way Apollo doesn't have to worry about. I highly doubt reddit has like utterly mediocre/shit devs. I think it's more likely that works are being prioritized in a way that shafts mods (who don't pay money) towards the goals of the reddit company to ipo (more ads and engagement with their first-party platforms). We had stupid shit like reddit coin and reddit gold and random other small features that are primarily to make money on the first party platform. Apollo's spec is much smaller in comparison, in which the users of Apollo are effectively paying for a smoother integration with whatever Reddit already built.
I agree. The Apollo dev arguably owns the user last-mile. It wouldn't be a stretch to offer users an alternative. Reddit was open source until 2017 (https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit) so most of the heavy dev lifting is already done. The major cost would be in infrastructure.
Very odd for reddit to discount that it survives based on the free labour of power users, many of whom use Apollo and similar apps. This is one of those areas where a pure cost benefit analysis doesn't work.
I mod a top 1% sub and one of our moderators exclusively uses Apollo for moderation work. Official Reddit app doesn't work well, and their workflow for modding doesn't involve a computer.
This is an interesting point. I use free Apollo, and realized when I tried to post, that its a paid feature.
So you have to figure that all the revenue is largely from contributing users and the dynamics on social media go something like 5-10% of people post all the content. Also, i heard it has great tooling for mods as well.
We'll see how big of a blow this is but yeah, you're right, a lot of Apollo users are probably high value reddit users.
Different incentives. Apollo was made by someone who loved making software and wanting to build something nice for people. Reddit is made by a corporation interested only in extracting as much wealth from the platform as possible, with as little regard for users as they can get away with.
If a 1.5 person app (Apollo) is handily beating Reddit's app... what on earth is the holdup? Either the eng team is wildly incompetent, or this is by executive choice.
Reddit's inability to deliver on mod tools despite a decade's worth of promises makes me think it's 40/60 wildly incompetent and needing firing vs exec choice.
Monetization and growth go hand-in-hand. I'm an old.reddit.com user (even on MoWeb, I know I'm a psycho), but the way people talk about Apollo is like it's absolutely superior to the current Reddit app. If I were Reddit, and my users loved this third-party product _so much_, I would at least explore promoting Apollo to a first-class interface for browsing Reddit.
For the scale of Reddit as a company, it's likely a trivial deal; whereas the cross-pollination of ideas and UI/UX learnings could easily be worth more than the cost of collaborating.
I had the same thoughts, that Reddit's reasons must stem from opportunity cost.
The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such features.
Apollo did have a backend that made up for features that the Reddit API either kept as private APIs or refused to implement. He released the code as open source last week. He paid a part-time developer for the implementation and maintenance of code as well.
Featured that other APIs offer, like webhooks, pub/sub etc., were requested by various developers over the years but never implemented or took far longer to implement (years). This led to developers designing workarounds to get feature parity with Reddit's app, i.e., notifications. A few of these drastically cut down on total number of API calls by design, which would help them reduce the infrastructure spend they are so concerned with.
Ignoring the content consuming (Apollo, RiF, Sync, etc.) third-party app side of the discussion.
My biggest takeaway from the entire argument is Reddit now has 2000 employee's but 100 of the requests for improvements for the API, built-in moderator tools, etc., have been mishandled/ignored/years late. Because of that, many people took matters into their own hands and used the API to fill in the gaps in their moderation/admin/creator workflow, and initially, before they conceded on some of those tools, they were affected as well. It wasn't until a couple of days into the uproar (after the price was released, before the blackout) that they reversed course on some of those tools, including conceding the accessibility apps (being 39, and wearing hearing aids for severe loss, I sympathize with the users that are protesting because the web and first party app are lacking in this). I can understand the protest from the above, especially giving the short timeline between prices being released and go live.
I'm all for businesses being profitable; I'm all for companies having the right to adjust processes, prices and change terms, etc., but in my opinion, Reddit has severely mismanaged this situation and, in general, been a severely mismanaged business if they are as the CEO says not profitable by now.
He has a point, no? Sure, there's a middle ground where API access is priced so both Reddit and Apollo make money. But Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to sell ads, and if they get a large enough market share they can just start their own Reddit.. the codebase is not an effective moat.
Yes, that makes sense. But do you think Reddit would actually do that? Apollo has a better UX. Reddit has proven they don’t want to build a good UX. If they bought Apollo they would only ruin it.
Apollo is a for-profit app. They are using reddits technology, servers, and users for free to make money off their own advertisements.
Reddit isn't "losing" any money by losing apollo users, since it wasn't making any money in the first place.
This seems like a billing dispute between two companies, not a user issue. Reddit also announced that modtools will be allowed to use the API free of charge.
At the end of the day, most people log in to reddit once or twice a month. Those are the users that are being targetted by advertisers anyways. The power users and terminally online moderating staff are more of a headache for reddit than a benefit.
If people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to use third-party clients, doesn't that suggest that the first-party experience is awful?
Let's not forget that Reddit's content is generated by its users. Perhaps a significant number of these users wouldn't be on Reddit in the first place if not for apps like Apollo.
Reddit has to make money in order to exist, and Apollo is undercutting them by providing an ad-free experience for less money than Reddit would be making from ads. You don't see the problem?
Like many of us I’ve been using Reddit for a very long time (over 10 years) and am saddened by how much worse it’s got since the beginning. I also think they’ve greatly enshittified their default clients to push people to worse clients and hate that - they could have just given people a reason to want to use the new clients.
But I have an unpopular opinion: it’s totally ok, and I mean morally ok, for Reddit to charge for API access to this extent. 3rd party app usage incurs direct operational costs on Reddit, requires them to support an API with clients outside their control (and further, if a client uses the API inefficiently, Reddit has a lot more overhead in working to reduce that), and prevents supporting those efforts through advertising monetization. The actual API cost is not wholly unreasonable. Reddit shouldn’t be expected to work for free.
That is not to excuse all the other terrible dark patterns they’ve implemented. This wouldn’t even really be a problem at all if they had incentivized their own clients by making them better, what with all the funding and employees they have, and the ability to make backend changes to accommodate client changes. They’ve been using entirely “stick” tactics to encourage their crap clients instead of “carrot”. Even for people like me who don’t want to use the app at all, if they hadn’t made the default mobile web client (which I still use) so annoying and restrictive, probably Apollo would have much fewer users.
Basically, this is only a problem because they have given users no reason to use their official clients besides artificial annoyances
The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?
What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.
I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit.
It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
The change isn't about Apollo exclusively, Reddit is going to start charging for their API. Basically all remotely adequate (which Reddit's 1st party tools aren't) moderation tools make extensive use of said API, so Reddit has basically decided "Hey, people who do most of the work necessary to keep our platform afloat for free, mind if you start paying us for the privilege?"
This Is the corporate equivalent of "I can't give you money, but I'll pay you with in exposure on my socials". Reddit prefers to be paid in dollars, not with content. They likely have more than enough content from non-Apollo users.
Reddit's free APIs left a lot of uncaptured value on the table. This has become obvious by the sheer number of AI models trained on Reddit data. Free Reddit data goes into the machine, and piles of VC money comes out. Reddit wants in on it, but is unable to stop free API access without the consumer apps being collateral.
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