I am confused why he is upset. He has built a big business for himself on the back of Reddit. Reddit realizes that he is extracting value from their platform, since they aren’t able to harvest ad review, discourages registers, etc.
Now Reddit wants rent to compensate for the lost ads. My guess Reddit also noticed most people using Apollo doesn’t create content, so Apollo users are just extracting value from Reddit.
I’d like to see the hard numbers before having an opinion about who yo be upset with.
If you watch the video you find that he has valid complaints, and he's not opposed to paying Reddit but thinks these terms are designed to sink 3rd party apps. Some highlighted points.
* The API access charges about 10x the price compared to the revenue per user they would expect if the users accessed reddit via web or official app.
* There was 30 days notice of the new pricing. He has many customers that pay per-year that he is going to lose money on until renewal.
* The price is too high. Compared to similar platforms that charge for API they are charging way more.
* An individual from the company called him out for having 'inefficient' code, which he took personally and mounted a good defense of his usage.
* The API is losing feature parity with the first party website/app.
* Reddit is itself building a bigger business on the backs of reddit users generating content. Many of those users use a 3rd party app. In fact, 3rd party apps were largely responsible for transitioning reddit into mobile usage. They seem to be overstepping their position in the ecosystem.
His “defense” for using the API inefficiently is that the official app makes a similar amount requests as Apollo, ignoring whether those are actually API requests or just telemetry (as mentioned in the linked video). Apollo makes 3.5x more requests than other third party apps. That’s a lot.
Not really "a lot". When you think about providing absolutely best user experience, you gotta leave the engineering efficiencies out at the doors and live with the redundant API calls. The over optimization often comes with sacrificing the UX.
It’s possible to make fewer requests without negatively impacting the user experience. For example, batching requests would result in a more responsive app.
He specifically cited situations where the opposite is true - for example when first opening a subreddit, he requests only 25 posts so the UI can render something quickly, then requests a further 100 posts to prepare for the user scrolling.
He could just request 100 posts first, halving the API requests, but the app would be less responsive.
Your comments seem to have a confidence level that their content doesn't justify.
That’s a great example of something that could be optimized without impacting the user experience. For example, just request the next page of posts when the user starts to reach the bottom. The reason for my confidence is that I’ve worked with Reddit’s API before and I know exactly where the pitfalls are.
That’s too late to be sending the request if you want the premium feeling of no loading times while scrolling, especially if you also want to do rich thumbnails of media.
He is upset because they told him API pricing would be “fair and reasonable”. But when they announced pricing, it comes to ~$20 million per year for Apollo. He doesn’t make anything near that from Apollo.
He isn’t opposed to paying for API access, but he feels the rates they are charging are exorbitant to the point of being designed to forcel 3rd party apps out of business, not extract value from them.
...or, has facilitated a large number of contributions to the site in terms of posts, comments, votes, views, community building and fluidity, and user stickiness.
I can't see the relationship between Apollo and Reddit as singularly one sided.
Reddit encouraged third party clients for a long time, and made no effort to monetize them. The piracy analogy is completely inappropriate.
Reddit could still encourage third party clients and also monetize them in a reasonable way, but they have chosen to be unreasonable and will almost certainly kill the market for those apps.
A simple reasonable way is that you have to pay a subscription to Reddit to use a third party app. The app maker would then just have to charge enough to make a profit for their time spent creating and supporting the app.
Milking? He made a great app that I use daily ( guess it will soon be _used_) and he used the money I paid him to improve his work setup. How is that _milking_?
You improved his work setup but app hasn’t been improved lately with thousands of bugs reported and ignored. Just go to his Apollo GitHub, I am an ultra user and it’s been frustrating to use that app as a Reddit Mod.
Please don’t give me that “he’s the only one working”.
Why did you put the word "need" in quotes? I don't see it in the comment you're replying to.
That said: least for me, I've found that some equipment actually does make me more efficient as a dev, even if I don't "need" it as the bare minimum to do my job. I could do my job on a 15 year old ThinkPad. But having a modern computer with a nice mouse, keyboard and a big external display makes a measurable different in my productivity
You could get a large monitor, what does the dynamic range do for you? Nobody is saying to use old equipment just why would you buy something so clearly suited for one purpose for a domain that doesn't even involve HDR content?
This is also talking about an iOS dev saying this would help test for iPads. How exactly does any of that make sense?
Now Reddit wants rent to compensate for the lost ads. My guess Reddit also noticed most people using Apollo doesn’t create content, so Apollo users are just extracting value from Reddit.
I’d like to see the hard numbers before having an opinion about who yo be upset with.