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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

In this situation, do you hire someone to negotiate with or for you? I'm thinking the intention here was to sell the company for $10 million and that came across as a threat because of the language that was used. You would not record the call [1] and then publish it if you actually were blackmailing them for $10 million. I'm not faulting the guy here at all, I just think it comes down to lack of experience in dealing with negotiations of this level. He clearly has an awesome product if you look at any of the HN/Reddit comments.

He probably could have walked away will at least a few million vs shutting it down if there was a small level of negotiation that took place here. I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call but strategic accounts normally get pretty seasoned sales folks assigned to them. They are used to having hard conversations around pricing and pissed off customers. That's all part of negotiation.

That call was brutal to listen too.

Or, is saying you're shutting down part of negotiation too? This likely took it too far if it was, in that you're making reddit look like the bad guy very publicly now. So, it's probably worth it for reddit to cut ties and force people into the reddit app.

No winners here:

  * Apollo the company is gone.
  * Apollo users are gone.
  * Reddit has no customer paying money.
  * Reddit cannot reference them.
  * Reddit users are ticked off.

This is a case study in bad negotiation tactics on both sides. Reddit tried to squeeze them pretty hard right off the bat. Should have tried a 3 year contract or something with heavy discounts. This is wild.

[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...

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It's certainly a strange call. Hey, you want to charge me $20 million per year, so why don't we make it easy and you just pay me $10 million to go quiet?

It's really confusing. He wants Reddit to pay $10 million so he isn't "loud" with API usage? He wants them to buy and takeover the app? He's wants a payment to shutdown? Is he even serious about any of this? I get the impression he lacks the confidence to ask for a $10 million acquisition, so instead he approaches the subject casually as a joke, and the entire conversation spirals into confusion due to the lack of clarity.

Either way, that's not a great deal for Reddit. They might as well charge the $20 million, and if he can't find a way to pay it then Apollo shuts down and the majority of users return to the official Reddit site/app for free. There's no benefit to paying $10 million.

The call was a failure between the two parties and likely destroyed any future negotiations. I think the best suggestion was from another user here. Only allow Reddit official subscribers to use third party apps. Reddit can charge users whatever they want, and app developers can monetize their apps however they choose.

If Reddit thinks Apollo can pay them 20 million a year, 10 million is certainly a nice deal for the app? I guess that is what he meant.

It's not a deal though. Reddit says the users are worth $20 million in lost advertising. So either Apollo pays the money, the users move to another app that pays, or the users return to the official site and app. Either way, Reddit gets their $20 million.

Apollo has no leverage here unless there is strong evidence most of the Apollo users will leave Reddit if the app shuts down. I don't believe they will. The other potential leverage is the upcoming subreddit blackouts, or hinting at taking the Apollo users to start a competitor. The developer said they are not going to build a competitor (that was a mistake, they shouldn't have revealed that card), so I think the blackouts are the only chance of lowering API costs.

There's no way the bit about $20million in lost advertising is true. Going by user counts and reddit's total ad revenue you get about $1 million.

Also, people use Apollo so they don’t have to deal with the ads and terrible ux. They’re not suddenly going to go to the terrible official website or app.

Or if they are, they'll use an adblocker and be of 0 revenue.

There are a lot of users who have decided to delete their account once 3rd party apps are gone. Some may come back but they won't be getting that 20 mil

The point here is, if Reddit thinks the user base is worth $20M per year, paying $10M to take over the app and implement ads on it, would be a steal. They’d return the money in 6 months. Usual payback periods are like 4-8 years. Clearly the $20M is BS because otherwise they’d done the deal on the spot.

They would only do the deal on the spot if that was their only option. But they have the option of spending $0 and having the majority of the users moving to the official app.

This is an example of the same thing being worth different amounts to different parties, and the equivocation leads to comments like this thread.

If Apollo's userbase was actually generating $20mm/yr, acquiring Apollo for $10mm is a no-brainer. But if that were the case, keeping Apollo running as it is would also work.

Obviously this is not the case. Apollo is confusing costing $20mm with generating $20mm.

If it were worth $20M in lost advertising, buying the app and adding adverts to it would be a no brainer. The author was trying to call their bluff on user value, but communicated it very poorly.

Reddit should have ended the call politely and told the Apollo guy to reach out with some sort of negotiator/liaison/agent/manager on the line.

> if he can't find a way to pay it then Apollo shuts down and the majority of users return to the official Reddit site/app for free

I think you underestimate the fallout here.

Rather, the vocal minority overestimates it. The vast majority of social media users don't give a shit, they'll continue using the platform.

I quit Reddit today in part because of this event and I had never used Apollo. I started reading it more regularly 5 years ago because a friend had ranked in their top twenty and got me curious about what he spent his time on. I loved observing a couple of communities passively, but it’s just not worth the risk anymore. They might eventually also remove old.reddit.com so I don’t see why I should bother with content that might one day disappear completely.

I’m also looking to migrate off reddit because of this. I have a couple sites for my hobbies I’ve already started to visit, but the big loss for me is the ability to find reliable information on niche topics — ie, what rain pants to buy for fishing, where in a city to get the best perogies, looking at how user opinions change over time on political topics etc. Also great are any of the discussions on movies or TV shows. I really see no alternative but reddit for these things. Does anyone have recommendations? Or do I still need to go to reddit for this.

I deleted my 8 year old account yesterday. I modded a few subs.

I don’t know if I’ll quit Reddit entirely, but I’m certainly done engaging at the level that I use to. I no longer trust how Reddit will decide to use my data or how they’ll pull the rug from me. They’re pre-IPO and already getting desperate. Shits going to hit the fan when they IPO and investors expect constant growth.

Nah. It’s time to decentralize and federate ALL social networks. Mastodon is in good shape now let’s do lemmy? I think that’s the front runner.

Mastodon petered out and Lemmy never gained traction in the first place

Sorry, no. Mastodon is quite lively.

Lemmy is developed by and its main instance run by tankers. We need a healthier alternative.

What are tankers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

> Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history.

> ...

> The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of authoritarian communist states, such as the People's Republic of China, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Additionally, tankies have a tendency to support non-socialist states if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general.

---

Or a quick way - if you think of countries that have military parades with tanks rolling down city streets, those are supported by "tankies".

Got it. I should have looked this up.

Does it matter though if Lemmie is run by such a group when you could potentially spin up your own instance where you enforce totally opposing values?

If you have a site that is espousing contradictory values to the main site, would the main site accept your content? or would they kind of shun you?

(alas, its shut down... but it used to be that if you looked at the 'moderated servers on a mastodon site you'd find parler in that list which was a modified mastodon instance that no one else wanted to talk to)

If your content is sufficiently shunned from the main instances/interchanges how discoverable would your posts be? Or would you go "ok" and accept the political or philosophical lean of the main site so that your content got syndicated/federated to others?

I mean that'll happen with literally any website, forum, BBS, subreddit framework out there. The idea here would be to create a forum stack where users can confidently contribute to knowing that no single entity has full control over all of its contents.

Obviously there's nothing stopping from some instances from creating closed or gated content, but the public facing ones with like 10-20 years of gardening input freely given by end users can never be taken away from the community, which is what's happening with Reddit and has happened with IMDB and countless others.

Mastodon far from petered out. The communities I’m apart of are highly active on there.

I might have agreed with you if not for the fact that Reddit was effectively born when we all left Digg en masse because of a major, unpopular change just like this. Piss off enough people all at the same time and things actually happen. Reddit has been boiling this frog for so long I thought they had learned their lesson but apparently not.

Reddit existed as an equivalent just slightly smaller alternative to Digg at the time. There is nothing like that for current Reddit.

Any thread about Google Search on here is filled with people saying they have to do "site:reddit.com" to get accurate results. I've never seen another site used in that example. I'd love to be proven wrong on this because it means there's some great internet resource I've been missing out on.

Either Apollo represents a “$20M opportunity” or it’s just a “vocal minority.” So, which is it? It can’t possibly be both.

Sure it can, if you assume that Reddit doesn't actually care about keeping third party apps alive and just made up the 20 million dollar figure.

> the vocal minority overestimates it

Those were the people using Apollo in the first place.

My understanding is that Reddit is saying that by not charging for the API they are losing $20M per year. So he said, well you can buy me out, and instead of doing a multiple of that $20M to be like $100M, he’s only asking for half of only one year’s worth of what they would lose. Clearly they don’t want to do that deal because the $20M figure is complete bogus.

but there’s no incentive for Reddit to pay any money, they either start charging for the API and recoup the costs or the app shuts down and it starts costing Reddit absolutely nothing

The cost for reddit as stated in another part of the call is an opportunity cost. By acquiring Apollo instead of shutting it down they would seamlessly acquire a lot of users who would have a hard time adjusting to the native app and potentially leave the platform, so this call is still a cost to them.

The app shutting down does not automatically cost nothing. If all users move to the official app the server resources still are used but the users would at least see ads.

So what he said rather poorly was:

1) ok so, according to you I’m costing you $20M/year in API load

2) How about you pay me $10M which is 6 months of your cost, and I turn off the $20M/year burden immediately.

3) you make your money back in 6 months and within a year are up $10M

The problem is Apollo does not cost Reddit $20M/year lol

It's not strange at all. At least the Reddit CEO heard and understood perfectly well what the Apollo dev said in that call and there's a recording to prove that.

Your first sentence misrepresents what the Apollo dev said. Actually, it's the exact same misrepresentation that the Reddit CEO knowingly made in public.

First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.

The CEO, in contradiction with publicly available data, claimed that Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year in lost opportunity. So the dev jokingly offered to sell Apollo for half that price. Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.

Yeah totally agree.

Further I wouldn’t be trusting a hot take from ~100 points GuestXXXXXX at this point of the PR dumpster fire cycle.

Given the mishaps of the past such as stealth editing comments of other users, I would not at all be surprised if these comments were made by alt accounts of u/spez.

> First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.

I disagree, I think the Apollo dev would have happily taken the $10 million.

> Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.

The $20 million price is irrelevant here. Reddit doesn't need to pay to acquire these users. They are Reddit users (they're registered there, and Reddit knows everything about them). They can close down Apollo and they'll get almost all the users back for free.

If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition. But, that's not the case here.

Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not siding with Reddit and I think both sides are losing here due to their poor management.

> I disagree, I think the Apollo dev would have happily taken the $10 million.

That doesn't mean he was demanding money.

> If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition

I do agree it's difficult to calculate the value of a user in this case.

Yes, Apollo users are Reddit users, but they are specifically Reddit users who don't use Reddit's official clients. The question is how many of those users will move to Reddit's official app after June 30, and how many will look for alternative platforms that aren't so manipulative and abusive. I for one have deleted my Reddit account and won't be going back.

> The question is how many of those users will move to Reddit's official app after June 30, and how many will look for alternative platforms that aren't so manipulative and abusive. I for one have deleted my Reddit account and won't be going back.

I think you're in the minority. If there was a well known Reddit alternative at the moment, I could see Reddit having their Digg moment and losing a large part of the community. Subreddits could blackout and threaten to leave to the other website. That is something that would be taken seriously. Dozens of subreddits with 1-50 million users potentially jumping ship at once. If you had the right platform, with the right attributes and reputation, the stars would be perfectly aligned to take in a mass number of Reddit users. But, no one is in the right position to catch the ball at the moment (I don't claim it's an easy position to be in). It's actually unfortunate, because these moments don't come too often and I believe it allows Reddit to make these changes with little repercussions. Fans of old.reddit.com better watch out, I bet it's on the chopping block within the next year.

I'm also only one datapoint but I won't use Reddit from 30th on. I guess all these big cooperation and some users are overestimating the power of their platform. I (and I know some other people from my inner circle that are not "in tech") left these platforms before and never looked back.

It was the same with Facebook: You want me to use my real name? I'm gone. Never used Facebook again. Specifically in Germany (where I would argue the population values privacy more than in other nations) that was a deal breaker for a lot of them when they started enforcing that policy.

(This example is not about a platform but more of an example of quitting a product because of "bad" behavior) Mobile games getting more and more P2W and have a half-life of ~1 year? Yeah, count me out. Especially with that example I know a lot more people that said "fuck that" and won't touch mobile games with a ten foot pole anymore.

And honestly it will be the same with Reddit. It's not like it's essential. I'll be good without it and I would guess many more people too. The two examples I gave made my life better (less screen time) and the Reddit move will do the same.

As for how it'll play out for the majority of people: I guess we'll see. But looking at Reddits latest track record of bad decisions I would argue it won't be the last one and there is a lot of potential to create a new Digg moment.

> when they started enforcing that policy.

I don't have a real name on Facebook not have any of my friends. There are also a lot of fake/troll accounts on Facebook. I don't think they ever enforced that policy.

If true I don't know how that happened but two of my friends + me got their account suspended and were asked to provide identifying information to get it reinstated - at the same time.

Source on the CEO making a claim of a threat in public?

Don't know if you're being pedantic (was it the CEO himself or someone speaking for Reddit officially?), but this is the reference:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...

> Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.

“ Is he even serious about any of this?”

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.

> 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.

Right now there seems to be two options on the table.

1. The Apollo dev pays $20 million per year for API access.

2. Apollo shuts down and the users return to the official Reddit website/app for advertising.

If Reddit is refusing to lower their API pricing, doesn't this mean the users are worth $20 million? If the users were worth $1 million, then why wouldn't Reddit charge $2 million for the API and double their income on those users?

That being said, something else must be at play here. The users are not worth $20 million and Reddit refuses to take anything less than $20 million. If I had to guess, they want to boost metrics before going public and are willing to take a hit to their reputation to do so.

I’m just one Apollo user, but I don’t plan to install the official app. It’s terrible and riddled with ads.

It’s the same reason I don’t use instagram—seeing an ad every two images bugs the crap out of me. The difference with Reddit is there was a nice third party option.

>There's no benefit to paying $10 million.

Him not rabble rousing their user base against them would have been the benefit.

Yeah this guy didn't handle this situation very well. I don't know if it would've been possible to save Apollo for reddit, but that call didn't help at all.

Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor? That's like his only bargaining chip in this situation, and he's just throwing it away because he feels overwhelmed and wants to make iOS widgets. I totally sympathize with him and how this situation is probably incredibly stressful, but when you have 50k+ subscribers per year + millions of happy loyal users, you gotta start bringing in outside people to help with these things. He's just letting a lot of people down.

I don't mean to trash the guy, but I hope that the other third-party apps see this example and change their response to find a better outcome for their users.

Yeah, 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.

This should have gone like, "Hey, in a few months we're rolling this out and wanted to give you a heads up so you know before anyone else, since you're a major API user. We wanted to offer you a grace period and special pricing. When's a good time to chat we'll fly out.". Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.

This is all just my opinion based on what I've read so far.

> 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.

'course it's not just him, but it's him and _everyone else_. i'm not sure what their overall intent here was, but it's been a shit show from start to finish, and they gotta at the very least start thinking hard about pausing the rollout till they can get their ducks in a row.

It's clear that they don't want any of the third-party apps to pay them a cent. They want the third-party apps gone, and the users to move to the official app where they can be directly monetised by Reddit. There was never going to be a deal; if Reddit was interested in one they would have approached this differently.

Then why not just shut down their public API?

Optics, both are functionally shutting it down, but one claims to add value while the other removes options.

You're assuming he can pay 20 million dollars. The point is that he can't, or even a fraction of that, so there's no point to wining and dining him at all.

That’s where negotiations come in. He has been very upfront about talking and negotiations but Reddit hasn’t budged on pricing at all.

You only approach this deal this way if you don't want the deal to go through at all.

A shocking amount of people here are assuming Reddit is launching this API program in good faith. This was not a transition third party apps were meant to survive; 30 days is nowhere near enough time for any business, let alone ones by single random software developers, to see their costs increase into the hundreds of thousands or even millions per month.

> Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.

I pay Apple more than a million a month and I don’t even have a contact email.

Just saying, a Christmas card would be nice.

Why should he be forced to do something he doesn't want to do?

He's made it abundantly clear why he doesn't want to do that, who are you (or anyone else but him) to say "No you're not allowed to have opinions, you MUST create your own alternative"?

> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.

> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.

He’s allowed to do whatever he wants (including not starting a competitor). But it’s bad from a negotiation perspective to let that out

Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.

Reddit from 2017 or so is open source!

> But it’s bad from a negotiation perspective to let that out

It’s pretty clear that there’s no negotiating left, so I’m not sure what relevance this has anymore. A few days ago? Yeah maybe.

If the CEO is maliciously accusing you of threatening them, then there’s nothing left to negotiate. The relationship is beyond broken.

> Also bad from a business perspective. It likely would cost way less than 10m to build a competitor, functionality wise.

He has already made it clear he’s not interested in building a competitor (the quote is literally right there in the comment you replied to), so, once again, what’s your point?

It’s plainly evident that Christian is done, and I don’t blame him.

The RIF and Sync devs are too, and I’m sure all the other apps will soon announce shutdowns at the end of the month too.

Why don’t we all monetize our hobbies? Why don’t we market our personal lives? Why don’t we each have our own line of branded merchandise? Why haven’t we written a memoir?

Because some people don’t want to! And that’s okay.

And frankly it's a failing of society that we would ever need to.

I don't think Apollo is just a hobby for Christian, given that he said that working on it is now his full-time job.

Trying to start a new social network (or whatever you'd call Reddit) from the ground-up is not only very likely to fail, but it's also a totally different skillset than building iOS apps. Of course he'd rather just find another job.

His point was that there is a big difference between building a product and operating a service. I can understanding not wanting to do the latter, because it's a COO job and unless you like doing that it is not fun.

Because sometimes, you don't want to reclimb the mountain you just hiked up and down.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Would you want to moderate Reddit? I get that Apollo is in a good position to take their users with them, but it's not like it's going to be easy to build a Reddit when what you've made so far has been a frontend for Reddit and some mobile widget spin-offs.

Many of us can make a frontpage for hacker news in a few hours, some might even be able to grow a userbase on it but that doesn't mean we can do what dang does.

Many of us would prefer dang only removed spam, or moved off topic post to bantz

Absolutely not, dang's work is nothing short of miraculous and I don't know of any other forumlike place that's this civil at this scale. Hope he keeps at it in this way for a long time.

The outcome of moderation here is very good, and changing policy has a high chance of damaging the value of HN. I would not risk secondary effects, myself.

But I would enjoy HN more with a soupcon of joking (currently considered zero-value). I benefit from my bread being leavened, I like programming tutorials with humour. So it's understandable why people might want to change the policy.

I thought he was pretty clear that he was done bargaining:

> ... I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.

If a bargaining chip is only useful in making a deal you've decided cannot be made, why bother holding onto it? Better to tell your fans outright that you're worn out and not interested.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

I suspect that both reddit and apollo know that most of the content generation happens on Reddit controlled properties.

Apollo users probably do not generate enough content to sustain a reddit-like website.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

In addition to what everyone else has said, he really has 1 month if he has any chance of siphoning off reddit users.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Yeah, what's the deal with this iOS developer not wanting to start a competitor to checks notes one of the largest websites in the world? Surely you just up and did that last week, it's no big deal.

I guess I should start getting used to saying "Jesus christ, HN" now that I won't be saying "Jesus christ, Reddit" anymore.

He can't start a competitor because he has no market power. Not enough will use the competitor product for it to be worth it. A past example of someone attempting to disintermediate Reddit was /r/changemyview which attempted to switch to changeaview.com and met immediate and total backlash. Reddit's SSO multi-forum user-generated experience is why people use it.

Can’t really blame the guy. If I had banked $X00k-XM in my early thirties I wouldn’t be doing jobs I didn’t want to do either.

Starting a competitor involves doing all the things that Reddit is doing (having a legal team, servers across the world and staff to operate them, making policy decisions, ...).

That is not at all the same as building an iOS client using an API as a one man show (or 1-3) and directly selling that.

I don't know how serious he was about pursuing a sale in the calls, but he made it pretty clear in the post that he's done dealing with Reddit. This isn't an attempt at blackmail or otherwise an attempt to get Reddit to buy him out, this is him getting everything out in the open to head off lies that were being spread.

From the post:

> I bring this [audio recording] up for two reasons: ... It shows why I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.

> I'm not sure who was on the other end of the call

He mentions that it was spez AKA Steve Huffman the CEO of reddit. The call really does sound amateurish and the joke/negotiation tactic/money request/??? was really unprofessional but Steve seems to have completely misconstrued the whole interaction and blown up at him. I would say this is worse of the CEO to use this to spread slander especially when he already apologised for misunderstanding Selig and then privately walked it back

It seems a number of people believe that the recorded call has Steve Huffman talking, but I don’t see this claim anywhere in the original post.

If you read the section titled "Bizarre allegations by Reddit of Apollo "blackmailing" and "threatening" Reddit", he is directly addressing Steve. He starts with the transcript of the private mod call with Steve and then begins addressing Steve directly. The "you" in that section is the Steve Huffman he had calls with who heard the "threatening" bit

Yeah that part says it’s Steve but where does it say it’s Steve in the phone recording? It just says “Reddit” in the transcript.

Ah I see that he is claiming it’s Steve Huffman via all the use of “you” there.

He later says that he has not personally talked to Steve Huffman.

I think you're right. The Apollo dev didn't directly mention them by name but re-reading the post, I agree that that was not spez. My mistake

Steve appears to have assumed there is no recording, so he can represent the conversation dishonestly. Unfortunately, there is a recording, so we can all hear that it wasn't a threat and that the reddit representative admitted that on the call. The optics of ineptly smearing Christian look terrible for Reddit management.

That joke about the $10M wasn't unprofessional at all. If Steve was honest about the $20M per year opportunity cost, he would've instantly agreed to a one time $10M. Then Reddit would gain an additional $20M per year. But it was only a joke because Steve was lying about the $20M opportunity.

Christian is acting in a surprisingly civil manner despite the repeated lies and smears made by Steve and others at Reddit. I see that as being professional.

That makes no logical sense at all. Why go for $10m if there is no need to because you have already adjusted your own pricing upwards.

Also, what things are priced at is not what they cost …

Reddit specifically said that killing third apps wasn’t their intention, and wanted apps to pay a reasonable amount to cover the costs.

> Also, what things are priced at is not what they cost …

So if that’s the best argument in favor of Reddit, then it’s Reddit that’s being illogical. Or to be more straight, lying.

> Why go for $10m if there is no need to because you have already adjusted your own pricing upwards.

Because $20M is neither the amount Christian was earning, nor the cost that Reddit was paying to provide API access. Steve explicitly said it was a lost opportunity. There was simply no way that Christian could’ve paid that insane price. However, Reddit could’ve earned $20M themselves per year by acquiring Apollo. If the $20M opportunity was even remotely true, that is.

>it comes down to lack of experience in dealing with negotiations of this level

Yeah, the conversation is so cringe. Why is he beating around the bush so much ? He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout. It sounds easy to make that proposition. Instead, he uses terrible verbiage like, "go quiet, I'm joking, opportunity cost, Bob's your uncle, yada yada". Why is he so terrible at talking ? Nothing in the call resembles a sales pitch if he is actually trying to sell a product for $10M.

> Why is he so terrible at talking ?

He's a 20-something year old developer. This isn't his comfort zone and did not expect himself to be in this position.

I know I would be terrible if I was in his shoes.

Fair enough. It just isn't the slam dunk that the post makes it out to be. He made some extremely vague proposition that can easily be misinterpreted and it was ultimately unproductive.

The claim still stands, given that in the same call Reddit immediately and openly admitted that they misinterpreted him, only to later turn around and lie about it.

It’s not like the person on the other end of the line had no idea exactly what he was proposing. Even if the dev isn’t experienced at negotiating something like this you can bet the person on the other end of the line was.

Actually, I'm not sure if it's entirely clear to anyone on the other side (or even the world at large) how to value something. To a large extent, Reddit has drunk the cool aid and internalized that APIs are worth X. So going to a meeting with the implicit assumption that everyone knows that pricing is BS is not a safe assumption. They've already had the pricing discussion, so throwing more oblique references to BS pricing is not productive. It's like in a normal human argument. Once you are at an impasse, throwing more facts or presenting a logical paradox doesn't change the other person's mind.

The actual amounts were irrelevant to the offer. The author was clearly trying to feel out whether Reddit would be open to a buyout.

The response seems to be a resounding no.

If he was even entertaining the idea of maybe selling his company, the least he could have done was get a negotiator with mergers and acquisitions experience. If he's making reasonably good money off of Apollo, he could have afforded a few hours of a good attorney.

This call was awful to hear as an entrepreneur. He is not at all clear about what he wants, and I think he's honest when he says it's "mostly a joke" - I'm getting the sense he threw out a strangely-worded scenario hoping that he could perhaps get some money. If he was serious about getting money, and he's primarily a software developer and not a negotiator, it would've been lovely if he had gotten proper counsel for this negotiation.

He wasn't expecting to float the idea! This literally came up during the call. He did not decide days before that he was going to offer to sell his company. He cannot hire outside counsel for something he is not thinking about.

Was the full call released somewhere? As i've only heard the 3 minute snippet.

> Why is he beating around the bush so much ?

He is asking for clarification, something you do when you have a good business relationship with someone.

> He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout.

He doesn't. He is saying that 20$M is clearly overpriced and that if it was true then reddit would come up with a ludricous number like 10M to make that API be turned off. He just uses quiet because reddit described the API use as Loud.

It's not an offer, it's calling someone's bluff out.

Think in poker someone says "my hand is worth 20 million" and you got pretty good cards you would tell them "go all in because I am gonna keep covering whatever you raise" and then they do not go All In, you got a pretty good case to think their initial comment was not true.

Bad negotiation because the other end owns the platform, has all the leverage. Apollo simply cannot stand up and leave the table, which is what reddit predictably did.

Let that be the lesson: don't sink your time (and money) into building OSS (or a business) on top of a platform. It's like building on sand.

If you have a quick and high return, it can be very much worth it.

The business plan and your personal savings should reflect that it can (and will) disappear in an instant.

This guy had a job he loved running his own business for 8 years. Yes, it can get taken away in an instant, but that doesn’t seem like a terrible deal to me in hindsight.

Not sure I agree. Apollo is apparently monetizing these users above and beyond what Reddit is/was able to accomplish. I’m confident that this represents value to Reddit > 0. So Reddit may have leverage, but not all the leverage.

I genuinely don't understand the "pay me 10 million to save half on 20 million of costs" negotiation tactic... if they wanted to save money, why wouldn't they just shut down the API access?

They say somewhere that the 20m is from opportunity cost, so 10m for an app that's "costing" them 20m a year would be a deal.

Exactly. They’re not doing the deal because the $20M is complete BS.

The whole thing was just to illustrate the point that he thinks the Apollo API access is worth nowhere near $20 million a year in opportunity cost.

20 million/year is how much the Apollo users would bring in when served ads (the opportunity costs).

Reddit pays Apollo 10M, starts serving their ads in the app, and now rakes in 20M/year without any extra effort.

Conversely, now they need to convince all the angry users of Apollo to come back to use their shitty website/app, something that will never happen. A lot of people that aren’t even using Apollo are going to be angry at the mistreatment and leave the site altogether. On the whole it’s quite likely that Reddit’s losses will amount to more than the 10M they’d have to pay once to get a ton of money in the future.

That sounds like a reasonable benefit to bargain over, but only if you have a great negotiator to make it happen.

Wouldn’t happen. $20M number is completely BS.

That’s on Reddit. The exact number doesn’t really matter for purposes of this explanation, and I suspect it doesn’t really matter to the Apollo creator either. It could be 2M or 500K, the equations remain the same.

It's not a negotiation tactic. It is a joke because the numbers they are talking about are a joke. He's saying that if they think Apollo is can make Reddit 20 million a year then just pay him 10 million and they can keep the change. The truth is both sides know these numbers are b*llsh*t.

if they wanted to save money, why wouldn't they just shut down the API access

They are. They're just pretending they aren't. No one is going to pay the amount they're charging.

I’m a lawyer and listening to this call was absolutely painful. I like to think I’m a pretty decent negotiator, and agree that there was likely a few million here were this handled competently.

Don’t be afraid to bring people in when something is outside your area of expertise.

His app icon was showcased front and center at the WWDC keynote, something I always thought was bought with money, for (I assume) free. It has tons of users including paying users. I have a very hard time imagining being able to sell the app right now for less than 10 figures. All this fight has shown me is that people will gladly pay for this app monthly

If he's leaving all that on the table out of spite, well thats his money to lose. But he shouldn't call the world unfair

As he mentions in the post, the main issue is the 30-day timeframe to completely rethink the business model of the app and move enough users over to paying subscriptions to not go bankrupt when the first API access bill comes in. The suggested API fees also seem quite unrealistic and it's unclear whether enough users would be willing to pay the necessary monthly fees to cover them.

Reddit's actions here make it pretty clear that they just want the app (all third-party apps) to shut down — if they actually wanted a solution they could easily lower the pricing to something more realistic and/or give a slightly longer transition period.

When our app has been featured in WWDC moments, it's at the discretion of Apple. I don't believe that it's paid, but more Apple choosing what they think are quality examples of apps to motivate developers.

>something I always thought was bought with money,

No. Apple chooses this on their own. Their internal teams find new and interesting apps, songs, etc.

When they announced the iPhone X, they used a band without telling them before. They asked the band to send them some music samples and just a generic "this might end up on an Apple marketing material one day". The band was shocked when it turned out to be THE song on THE intro video for the iPhone X.

Apollo still have some value. If there is another online mass migration, like with Digg, he can connect Apollo to whatever comes next. Maybe he even can affect the decision with his user base. Lemmy could over night have a much larger user base if Apollo switched to them.

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