> if they are no longer interested in moderating that community
The mods, as GP stated, are interested in moderating that community, they just disagree with Reddit's changes. They wouldn't be taking the path of shuttering their subs in protest if they didn't give a damn.
That is absolutely dishonesty on the part of Reddit.
Note that the Relay dev says that there's no way for him to offer a free version of Relay and make it financially viable. That means that user acquisition is going to tank, hard, because no one is going to be able to try the app before paying for it.
> Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 10% conversion rate and charging $2.00 a month
In other words, if he's willing to tell 1.35 million people to get fucked, he could turn his app that's widely beloved by many into an app that barely anyone knows about and new users are barely willing to consider trying.
These apps live and die by the same model: the paid users subsidize the free users. Who knows, maybe Christian could just tell those 1.35m people to get lost and it would be instantly profitable, but maybe that's not the app he wants to make. That seems entirely fair.
> To me it sounds like Christian just doesn't want to do the work.
Or, alternately, Christian feels betrayed by Reddit, because even though he's worked very closely with them for years, Reddit suddenly decided that yanking the carpet out from under third-party devs with thirty days' notice is the best way forward for them, and then the CEO turned around and slandered him all over the place, criticized Christian for having receipts, and then just continued to trash talk him everywhere.
Reddit has shown repeatedly through this ordeal that they don't actually want to work with people. Tons of other devs have reported that their e-mails are going unanswered. Christian asked about extensions or some other way to make things work and got no response. Reddit's goal here isn't to be profitable by charging 3p clients for API calls, it's to kill 3p clients and force them into their own terrible app.
Why would Christian want to jump through hoops to work with a company that's gone out of their way repeatedly to treat him like shit?
It's painful to post a comment that otherwise reads as low-quality flamebait. But I tried to defend his actions, and was dragged to the conclusion that he tried to damage Christian's reputation by making up a lie. He even acknowledged it was false during a phone conversation with Christian, then continued to tell the lie publicly.
It shattered my faith in him, and to a lesser degree in YC's "don't be evil" philosophy.
Christian isn't the only person with a dog in this fight, and none of what you just said at all negates Reddit's dishonesty throughout this entire situation.
From what I understood, the problem is less the change itself but more the short notice. 30 days isn't much to redesign your app and monetization, especially if you had many users on year-long subscription plans.
Do try to remember, that they gave him 30 days to adopt this new pricing structure, which also includes trying to figure out how to reneg on the subscriptions he has already sold.
Why should I trust the CEO who was just recently caught in a lie about blackmail despite evidence to the contrary and in the past has straight up edited people’s comments without any notification that Reddit is responsible for the edits?
I haven't been paying close attention to all of the spez/Apollo stuff, was there actually any evidence from either side? Last I saw it was mostly just each party posting contradictory text in replies.
Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
If by "majority of users" you mean users that do not contribute any content and only view the site, sure, you may be right. But a content aggregator that is devoid of content doesn't exactly make a great website.
> Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
The vast minority polled the users, from what I can see. None of the subs I visited that went dark had a poll. I just decided to check some others - /r/funny and /r/gaming because they're listed as some of the biggest subs that went private, /r/askhistorians because people often use it as "the best of Reddit," /r/outoftheloop because I used to visit it. None of them had polls, either.
People keep trying to push the narrative that this was a democratic decision, but every piece of evidence I can find is that most mods did this without consulting the people that use the subs.
I think the argument is that the impulsive API change will harm many, many subreddits. Does Reddit care about quality content? Or do they care about becoming profitable? I think the mods make a lot more sense than Spez here. And I don't think you can say Reddit cares about keeping subs open if they're willing to watch them all shrivel away in a sea of spam and clickbait bots.
Right. If the users of the sub want to continue the boycott, they certainly can. If the removed mods are beloved by the community, it's easy for them to open a new subreddit.
But I think most people realize that most of the users, who actually create the content, don't want the boycott to continue, and don't have any particular love for the current mods.
Reddit cares more about having an open subreddit then the mods do.
This was the obvious conclusion