[This portion of call begins at 25:47]
Me: I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We're good. That's mostly a joke.
Reddit: Six months of use? What do you mean? I know you said that was mostly a joke, but I want to take everything you're saying seriously just to make sure I'm not - what are you referring to?
Me: Okay, if Apollo's opportunity cost currently is $20 million dollars. At the 7 billion requests and API volume. If that's your yearly opportunity cost for Apollo, cut that in half, say for 6 months. Bob's your uncle.
Reddit: You cut out right at the end. I'm not asking you to repeat yourself for a third time, but you legit cut out right at the end. "If your opportunity cost is $10 million" and then I lost you.
Me: No, no, I'm sorry. Yeah one more time. I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that's a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too. As is, it's quite difficult.
Reddit: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think it's… I don't know what you mean by quiet down. I find that to be-
Me: No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-
Reddit: I'm going to very straightforward to you too, it sounds like a threat. And I'm just like "Oh interesting". Because one of the things we're trying to do is say "You have been using our API free of cost for many, many years and we have absolutely sanctioned - you have not broken any rules." And now we're changing our perspective for what we're telling you - and I know you disagree with it. That hey, we want to operate on a thing that is financially, you know, footing. And so hopefully you mean something completely different from what I said when you say like "go quietly", I just want to make sure.
Me: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
Reddit: Oh, like, because you were like, "Hey, if you want this to go away".
Me: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
Reddit: Oh, go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry.
Me: Like it's a very-
Reddit: Yeah, that's a complete misinterpretation on my end.
Me: Yeah. No, no, it's all good.
Reddit: I apologize. I apologize immediately.
Me: No, no, no, it's all good.
Reddit: Because what we're hearing in some conversations is folks are, you know, like in other- making threats, and we're like "Hey, that's not a conversation that we want to have". So I immediately apologize.
Me: Oh, no, no, it's all good. I'm sorry if it sounded like that.
Reddit: That's why I was asking you to repeat it because I thought I misheard it.
Me: No, no, that's fine. I'm a noisy API user.
Reddit: Right. Great.
Me: Like I said, I want this to be constructive as much as possible. And that would be the opposite.
Reddit: Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, I've taken up enough of your time. Thank you very much. I'm here, please email at any time and looking forward to continuing to chat.
Me: Yeah, likewise! Yep, just shoot me an email as well if you folks want to talk, I'm here.
Reddit: Great, thank you.
Me: Okay, good luck with any additional calls. Take care, bye.
Reddit: Thanks. Bye.
end of call
@danielfaust
You're right and I was just correcting myself on that. The correct word I should have used was coercion; or coercive.
I do but I don't think Apollo really even put in the effort to try. They had so many users and so much support. Something was salvageable. If you read the back and forth with me and @SpencerKaiser I talk about that a bit.
Don't even worry about it man. It's my bad for being hard of you over the confusion that's brought.
I wouldn't be surprised if the terminology he used is the reason Reddit still considered it a threat after the fact. The phrasing just doesn't add up. 'Quiet down' as opposed to just saying eliminate traffic is an odd choice of words.
'A noisy API user' is too. It the equivalent of saying "I make unneeded/spam calls when using the API".
There is a chance with him being Canadian that this is an unfortunate ESL mistake. Or just a mixup if he's mainly front-end and picked that up from the term noisy neighbor and ran with it. A noisy neighbor can be caused by their API usage so I suppose that's possible too.
Cheers bro