[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
@photonometric again I need to stress I supported Apollo before this call - and I support the other apps as well. I think everyone does to some degree that has a similar opinion to mine.
They never said blackmail. The wording Reddit used was threat. The developer also says opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the cost of not choosing the next best alternative. Operational cost is what it would cost Reddit to run the API for free in general. It is a financial concept used in the books they keep. They can negate the operational cost by just rate limiting non-paid users, which they are doing. They don't need to buyout any heavy users. That doesn't make sense.
In this thread we also talk a good bit about clarifying coercion vs extortion/blackmail. I'd suggest giving it another read through in the event you do return.
All in all this is what it all comes down to for the vast majority unfortunately. You don't even care if you're being accurate or objective and at the end of the day just want to outrage at corporations. This has been exactly my entire point. That being said there have been others (such as @SpencerKaiser) who seem to just truly mean well and are not explicitly anti-corporate in general. I would say it seems they are few and far between unfortunately.
The API was free for around 7 years. Apps that block ads and bring heavy traffic to the API hurt revenue. For all we know Reddit's books are so bad that they even risk bankruptcy if they don't fix this now. If you really feel Reddit is so bad just stop using it and move on with your life. Why say this and then go right back to Reddit? If you truly see it that way - quit.
A huge group is protesting using pretty much every form of social media in support of your viewpoint. Saying people posting on GitHub is 'petty social media invective' just because their opinion opposes yours is quite hypocritical. I don't even have accounts on actual social media. The reason I came back to this thread is how unreasonable it all has been. I will say there has been some constructive dialog in doing so - so I'm glad I took the time.
This reads like they should have paid the price just to avoid the outrage from the opposing viewpoint. Which is the entire reason both Reddit and a minority of others see this portion of the call as a threat.
Reddit isn't a profitable company right now. Shareholders/investors don't even get anything! Reddit has hundreds and hundreds of employees whose livelihoods depend on them.
The fact that the majority of people with your opinion see things like this has been pretty much my entire argument. It's a dangerous outlook to come from. It does more harm than good to listen to a large group of people that are this extreme and blindly anti-corporate.
If Apollo's developer ever clears up the whole quiet/loud/noisy API user verbiage I'd most likely support him again regardless. Half a decade isn't the longest time to be programming - but I've never once heard this used the way it was here. I understand noisy neighbor and noisy data concepts. Even noisy API calls can have some context to spam/unneeded calls (this in itself is incredibly uncommon) but there isn't such a thing as a noisy API user in context to a users heavy traffic. Until this is clarified some will see this as a threat.