Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

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This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels.

1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less)

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.

3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion.

Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.

> 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.

The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.

That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way.

Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.

> 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.

Would those users continue using Apollo after Reddit bought it and filled it with ads or would they start to slowly drift away to other clients over time?

i don’t care either way, other than HN and some Mastodon i don’t really social media much anymore. Reddit could disappear tonight and it wouldn’t bother me much, but…

> A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly.

…at some point people need to understand that jokes are about timing, about audience, about place, and the subjects of the joke.

again, i have no dog in the fight, but the number of times i’ve heard “it was clearly a joke” is wild. we’ve all seen people from every political corner from every walk of life proclaim “clearly that was a joke” when repeatedly it wasn’t received this way by those involved.

jokes are about timing.

all of that said, i do wish the founder of apollo well, if old.reddit wasn’t your thing apollo truly was one of the better alternatives.

slight tangent, but this is another lesson on how we inevitably screw ourselves when relying on non-open source.

if it isn’t ours, the thing is someone else’s. we have to face this. we repeatedly see the repercussions of ignoring this fact.

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