Apollo was already a nice app so why didn’t reddit just buy apollo and integrate ads into it and just keep the features that made everyone happy.
Reddit tried that before, they bought Alien Blue, and instead of improving it, they turned it into the monstrosity that we now know as the Official Reddit App.
Sometimes, when companies get too big, the C-level executives lose visibility about what the needs of the actual users are and instead, they focus their planning on increasing revenue, no matter what, Quarter after Quarter.
Buying another 3rd party app when they can keep using their shitty app to collect and sell user data to advertisers and marketers without spending more, makes sense to them in their twisted world, sadly.
when companies get too big, the C-level executives lose visibility about what the needs of the actual users are and instead
I think that cycle is universal. As any organization or group becomes increasingly stratified the decision makers at the top lose any connection to the foundations of prosperity that allowed to to grow and stratify in the first place.
I imagine it like a city on a mountain. As the city grows wealth and status concentrate at the top. That’s normal and beneficial at small scales. But at a certain point the top moves above the cloud layer and can no longer see the base of the mountain. After that point those at the top start to forget how the mountain works and believe the cloud layer is part of the structure and their decisions become increasingly disconnected from any reality below that cloud layer.
And our globally connected society keeps those above the cloud layer in closer contact to the tops of other mountains than to the base of their own.
Didn’t you hear? Christian is a lying, scheming, impossible to work with, dev who they just couldn’t possibly work out a deal with.
It would’ve made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version…
Of course, Reddit could sell it as a “$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience” app that keeps what it is. And I’m sure there’s a ton of folks that’ll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.
Apollo’s paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it’s $1.2M/year revenue. The question is… is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?
My gut would say ‘yes’. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit’s longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they’d look the other way when shady happenings go down.
But Reddit doesn’t want to spend money on turkeys. So we’ll see how well that works out for them. I’m not optimistic.
Apollo is an app that exists to give a great user experience for reddit.
The official app exists to ensure you get advertising and allow reddit to extract as much personal data from you as possible
because it’s not the user experience that matters to Spez.
It is not super clear whether Christian would have sold Apollo to Reddit. I know he mentioned them buying it from him for $10 million, but he has also said that he wouldn’t sell Apollo to someone who was just going to mess it up because he cares about it. Reddit would have definitely made it a shell of what it currently is.
He was pretty much asked this question in a recent interview.
NP: If they’d offered to buy the app from you, would you have sold it to them?
I guess it depends on the stage. I mean, I’m just some guy, so if the number was high enough, sure. Absolutely. At the stage where it was clear that they weren’t interested in having third-party apps around anymore, just because of the pricing and some of the API changes around explicit content or whatnot, if that was the point where they said like, “That being said, we would like to maybe work with your user base or take your user base and figure out a way to make them happy in the context of the official app and work with you and your app through an acquisition,” I honestly would have listened to that.
Prior to that, it would have had to have been a pretty good number, just because I love building Apollo and being so in touch with so many people through the community. It would have to be a big number, losing such a big part of your life and what you do every day. There’s an emotional penalty to losing that is hard to quantify with money, as superficial as that sounds.
I can’t speak for Apollo users, but as a user of Infinity and Slide, one of the best features was no ads
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Something that really blew me away is apparently Reddit has 2000 employees.
What the heck are they doing??
they already bought alien blue and ruined it.
They bought alien blue awhile ago and butchered it. New Reddit is horrible. Even on old reddit the sidebar is in the way (an extension can hide it). They’re just not good at this. (And maintaining two apps is more cost than one.)
They don’t see a problem with their own app, so why would they? They’re killing the 3rd party apps so they can have more control over what the user sees (ads, gold, avatars and anything else they can make money with). They can do that with the official app (which was already a 3rd party app they purchased), no need for Apollo or any other 3rd party app anymore. They feel like their user base is big enough that it will sustain itself without the 3rd party apps bringing in free users.
They would have screwed it up anyway.
I mean, I think the best move was to require users to buy a private API access key subscription. But requiring Apollo or Sync users to buy an API key from reddit probably violates Play Store and Apple Store terms of service and would just get the Apps banned.
So po-Tay-to, po-TAh-to…
I think it’s a move to monetize but without any mindful strategy whatever to utilize the strength of the platform or to maintain the integrity thereof. In other words “Elon did it so we do it too” .
