Christian Selig: I want to debunk Reddit's claims, and talk about their unwillingness to work with developers, moderators, and the larger community, as well as say thank you for all the support
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 tipjar@apolloapp.io 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
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