Can anyone explain the joke to me? Why would reddit cut Apollo a $10M check? Is this just a cheeky "so you think my use of the API provides me with $20M of value" comeback at the ridiculous API pricing? It did, in part, sound like a "half serious" (as in completely serious but with plausible deniability) attempt at "give me money and I'll announce my completely unrelated retirement and stop making a stink about this", which I'd agree is a bad look.
> Apollo: Well that's a silly number that doesn't add up and you're basically comparing me to a DDOS, if I'm just a botnet I guess you can just pay me half that to shut the botnet down.
Also Apollo doesn't cost them shit. Unless they're arguing that they lost $20m/yr in ad revenue you can't do the math like that. Reddit users cost Reddit $20m/yr.
I think they use the language “opportunity cost” which would imply to me its a lost ad revenue figure instead of an infra figure. Its fuzzy math at best.
The joke is that the opportunity cost is NOT 20 millions. Asking them to buy the app for 10 millions is supposed to illustrate the point. Imagine we both have a phone an you try to sell me yours for 20 million dollars, I would reply saying well you can buy mine for 10 millions, hopefully that makes it clear that your asking price is ridiculous.
That doesn't make sense. Reddit is (charitably) arguing that Apollo is costing them $20m/year. "Splitting the difference" and just losing $10m on a one-time basis doesn't make sense when Reddit can of course just cut off API access.
If Apollo were delivering $20m/year of incremental value to Reddit, then this would've been a sensical bargaining strategy. But the Apollo dev wasn't prepared to make this argument.
Even if it was a threat, I don’t see why that’s a problem. Reddit is a multibillion dollar business. At that scale businesses routinely threaten each other - I.e., “If you sue us over patent A we will sue you over patents B, C, and D”. Apollo saying “If you move to kill my business I will deploy my consumer goodwill against you” is a completely reasonable thing to do.
But that's not exactly what happened here. I'm totally with you on mobilizing your users to affect change, but this was asking for hush money instead of enabling Apollo to continue operating?
Which is basically just boring normal business leverage.
"My customers are more loyal to my portal to your platform than your platform. You're literally putting me out of business so you can buy my app and keep running to keep those users for a price.
I doubt it was about making a stink, it was likely along the lines of "It's your site and your rules, I get that. You're clearly trying to kill off 3rd party apps like mine even if you won't admit it, so I'll make it easy for you and kill it off myself for some compensation."
