> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.
Not only do the receipts contradict the Reddit CEO, but even if they didn't, the Apollo dev is well within his rights to offer an ultimatum that either Reddit acquires his app, or he shuts it down. If he has enough leverage in that situation for Reddit to feel as if that's "blackmail," then it actually means that Reddit is the one blackmailing him with the pricing changes.
On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it "blackmail" - meaning they're losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can't they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo's costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?
It was certainly telling when Apollo guy offered what seemed like a pretty lighthearted open in a potential negotiation, and reddit claimed this as "blackmail".
When I negotiate the price on a piece of real estate, I often will include things that I want the owner to fix before closing (this is very common). The implication is "fix this or I won't buy the property".
Is that "blackmail"? Apparently according to Spez it is.
It was the "go quiet" part, as in if they don't just buy him out he'll scream and cry to the public so they get really negative publicity on the API updates. To be clear, I don't think that's what he meant, but I think that's what the Reddit person thought was being said.
He’s also got a pretty sweet panic bunker, guns, food, and fuel supplies stashed away so when the division and panic he directly benefits from comes to a flash point he can ride it out safely.
> We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrow
Even funnier to me, there's a not even thinly veiled threat right below it.
>Blackout
> We respect your right to protest – that’s part of democracy.
>This situation is a bit different, with some mods leading the charge, some users pressuring mods. We’re trying to work through all of the unique situations.
>Big picture: We are tolerant, but also a duty to keep Reddit online.
>If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue. That’s a loss for everyone.
AKA: If you protest we will remove you from the mod team for that sub, and force the sub back to public.
Yeah, IIRC r/pics (a "default sub" back when that was still a concept) tried to do a blackout but came back on with similar accusations that the admins intervened.
That’s a private sub, but boy I’d love to see that bloodbath of a comment section after Christian released the call recordings.
It is always remarkable to see what an absolute bankruptcy of ethics some corporate leaders are burdened with, and a relief to see the consequences hit them in the face.
>It’s an extraordinary amount of data, and these are for-profit businesses built on our data for free.
No spez you utter cunt. The data is not yours. It's my posts on your website. Your own fucking terms say I grant you a right to copy it, not that it's fucking yours.
I rarely appreciate profanity on HN but in this case I appreciate the candid language. The politeness of the corporate speak BS on the other hand is devastating.
Unless there is another job offering with similar compensation/benefits/etc. I'm not sure most employees will be able to do anything. "Leaders" and bold-faced lies are a duo as old as time. Macroeconomic conditions have many chained to their shitty bosses.
Hmm, I think I trust that my CEO isn’t lying to me. It’s just that he isn’t ultimately in control. If he says something and the board changes their minds the day after, he’s stuck.
To be honest it sounded like that to me too. It's very hard to differentiate between some honest clumsy phrasing and fishing for a payout, and the "clarification" doesn't help with that since it could also be an excuse to save face.
Maybe with text snippets, but I don't see how somebody can listen to the conversation and come away with the idea that the dev was blackmailing anyone.
Having just listened, I can understand that misinterpretation!
I can buy that Selig's words may have been intended, at some level, as a jokey hypothetical to draw a point into contrast. That is, he meant it as (fleshed-out sympathetic rewording): "If this really is just about a $20M drain to you, it'd be a dead-simple & efficient solution to pay $10M to make me go away quietly forever. But of course I wouldn't ask for that & you wouldn't do it, thus this isn't really just about solving your $20M/year cost center, but other mutually-agreeable futures."
But Selig's actual wording in the clip is exactly how people coyly/semi-deniably imply that they be handed various kinds of "go-away" or "hush" money. (That includes arrangements that might not technically be "blackmail" as a legal definition, but feel like vernacular 'blackmail' to laypeople or business-negotiators.)
Selig's opening words, of this audio clip, absolutely sound like an actionable offer "pay me this specific cash amount & your troubles – both technical/competitive & in terms of any ruckus I can raise in public – go away." I mean, here's Selig's exact words:
"Uh, hey, I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20M a year, you cut me a check for $10M, and we can both skip off into the sunset. 6 months of use, we're good. That's mostly a joke."
Until "that's mostly a joke", & depending on earlier context/levels-of-mutual-trust, that sounds like a specific offer to do whatever eases things for Reddit in return for $10M cash.
And even after "that's mostly a joke", the 'mostly' leaves open that maybe something of this shape is legitimately in Selig's mind as a resolution.
> Uh, hey, I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20M a year, you cut me a check for $10M, and we can both skip off into the sunset. 6 months of use, we're good.
This is an offer to sell Apollo. The opening stage of a negotiation. There’s nothing wrong with saying this, at all.
That's a possible interpretation. We don't hear the discussion before it. And it's a weird wording to merely offer a sale of assets for Reddit to then manage.
The word choice, to my ears, more implies a "just gimme cash to make me shut up & disappear" attitude, or at least openness to torpedoing every other goal as long as the cash prize is big enough.
I further think Selig's rush to qualify it as "mostly a joke" is evidence that he noticed, in the moment, that what he just said sounded a bit brutally grubby. Maybe by this point he was getting angry his other hints that he mainly wanted an attractive buyout weren't being met by serious offers.
As I mentioned, such a tactic could be far from what the law declares as actionable 'blackmail' but still feel like a tough, "play ball or else" shakedown on the other side of the negotiation – the sort of thing people commonly describe, though somewhat figuratively/hyperbolically, as 'blackmail'.
Is there anything "wrong" with that style of making joking payoff offers to "skip off into the sunset"? Well, in negotiations, as long as you're not breaking the law or sabotaging your longer-run reputation, what's 'right' is largely what gets you what you want, both for now and in enduring relationships.
Did Selig get what he wanted? Does he come off as a desirable & trustworthy counterparty in other future collaborations & negotiations?
I think he's got a legitimate beef with Reddit in many dimensions, but at the same time this audio clip doesn't make him seem super clear & fair in his communications.
The "mostly a joke" bit is him suggesting that while his previous bit was just making a point about the $20m insistence, he'd be open to selling and walking away. He doesn't shut the door on selling it in the linked post either.
It's still very unclear what exactly right it would be buying with that $10 million. Instead of Apollo shutting itself down right it would pay for the privilege of being the one to shut it down? The payment doesn't make any sense and doesn't help Reddit offset the losses in any way.
The Proposal was to have reddit by Apollo and monetize it, all the talk about going quiet doesn't make sense.
Of course it would be on his mind as a resolution. He makes a living building that app. If his expenses are covered for the forseeable future, that’s a mutually beneficial offer. He says it’s mostly a joke because he knows Reddit won’t go for it, even though it would make a lot of sense.
Or because as long as you say 'just joking' after a threat no one can say you threatened them right?
Really a thinly veiled attempt to ask for a buy out. The guy only needs to charge his users 2.50 more to make up for lost ad revenue, but instead he chose to burn down Reddit.
TBH that doesn't sound menacing to me...however you misinterpret it, it feels more like making a deal than blackmailing. Granted, even taking money to let a publicly discussed issue go away is more akin to a settlement.
Selig's posted audio doesn't vindicate him like he thinks it does. He struggles to speak about what he actually wants and should have hired an attorney (or someone who doesn't clam up and make unfunny "jokes" when nervous) to do the talking for him. I respect what the kid has done, but he's clearly out of his element here and I can totally see how reddit execs took it that way.
I'm shocked that people are interpreting this as not fishing for a payoff, honestly. "We can both skip off into the sunset" does not mean "rewrite the app to do fewer API calls", as he tries to claim later in the call. It means it's done, over, everyone is happy. And why would he say "mostly joking" if he actually meant doing fewer API requests? Nothing about this recording or transcript makes me think Selig is an honest person.
I'm sure the price is negotiable. Off the top of my head, the reasons you'd pay any nonzero amount of money for it are:
1. You avoid all of this drama. Christian makes a post that says, "Reddit offered me a lot of money and I said yes because I want to have a lot of money. It's been a pleasure working with them and it's been a pleasure developing Apollo for you. Peace out." Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
2. Reddit could rather enshittify Apollo gradually, and/or fold Apollo's subscription model into Reddit's own model to maintain a premium power-user experience. It is an absurdly well-polished app, even if you added advertisements to it. It is a better user experience if the app gets worse slowly than if it disappears all at once and forces everyone to migrate to a new app. Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
The goal of reddit here is to obviously shut down the app, he was saying "just pay me then" - he's obviously annoyed. Stupid thing for him to say for sure, it shut the "negotiation" down.
Okay but what does this even mean in terms of API usage? Why would Reddit buying Apollo "quiet down" its API usage? I accept I may just be missing something here but I don't understand this.
in both the text snippet and the audio it sounds to me like 2 people politely pretending that the offer wasn't made. Notice how the CEO basically immediately cuts off the call after the "clarification"
I don't understand, what is the threat on Christian's part? His project is being killed, that's not a threat but something that is actually happening. He suggests that they pay him a small fraction of what he has cost them to shut down without compromising the reddit API as a whole. What's the threat, that he keeps operating? That's not an option, they are FORCING him to shut down.
Steve, come on. Maybe Apollo shuts down, maybe you figure something out, but this whole thing becomes a lot easier to judge as an outsider if one group starts throwing mud like this. You should know better.
I know I'm stretching really far with this, but is it at all possible that the mods made that up, or somehow misheard Steve?
Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...
Basically, the whole post hinges on the claim that spez was telling internal employees that Christian was making threats. But neither the calls nor the transcript seems to give any details about what exactly spez said. I'm inclined to take Christian's word, but we should all be aware that we are in fact taking him at his word, rather than the claim being proven.
It seems really hard to believe that spez would apologize for misunderstanding him and then immediately tell employees that he was threatening Reddit. This feels like a misunderstanding rather than malicious intent.
> Then yesterday, moderators told me they were on a call with CEO Steve Huffman (spez), and he said the following per their transcript:
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
This doesn't sound like a transcript. I don't know what it is, but that's not how anyone in a work call would behave. Supposing Apollo did threaten Reddit, why would spez even mention that to the mods? Something's weird.
> Maybe I'm missing it, but that claim seems unverified. Did Christian post a transcript somewhere of exactly what Steve said to the mods? It seems like this could all be a big misunderstanding...
He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators. He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place. Both are in the OP reddit thread here. Just search for "transcript" in the page.
It's the sort of thing you'd say to mods if you think it will get them off your back.
> He posted a transcript of what Steve told moderators.
The part I pasted, right?
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
That's not a transcript. That's a sentence devoid of context. We're now two steps removed -- not only do we need to believe Christian, but Christian needs to believe whatever mod sent that to him. Who's the mod? Why is the mod telling Christian anything? Why was Steve talking to mods about Apollo's threat? None of this makes any sense. I don't think anyone has malicious intent here –– bet you $50 that it turns out to be some weird miscommunication. After all, there's zero benefit for Steve to be doing any of those things, and a whole lot of downside. Ins't a miscomm the more plausible theory?
Ironically, if Christian's claims are unsubstantiated, then he's slandering Steve. But Steve slandering Christian to internal employees is precisely what Christian's so angry about. But why would internal employees break ranks and go tell Christian?
There's something more going on here. I'm not sure what.
> He posted a transcript - and recording - of the exact conversation with Steve in which this part of the conversation takes place.
That's the point -- all that he's posted is a transcript where Steve says mea culpa. Then he posted some other person's two-sentence "transcript" of Steve badmouthing him. But it's not a transcript; it's weird.
There's an actual mp4 recording of the conversation on the phone call which lasts about 3 minutes. Maybe "He posted a transcript" should have stated "He posted a call recording" instead, but it's all out there now.
I'm not talking about the call. The call proves nothing. In fact, it proves that Steve is behaving reasonably -- he realized his mistake, then apologized.
I'm talking about after the call, which is what the central claim of the post hinges on. The claim is that Steve went to internal employees and said that Christian was threatening Reddit. Where's that transcript? There's only two sentences, and those two sentences came from some third party moderator that wasn't even introduced in the story.
Everyone is being hypnotized by the audio recording. But the audio recording doesn't say anything about Steve. The only one who said anything about Steve was the unnamed moderator, which we get no info about beyond two very weird sentences.
That was posted 20 hours ago. And yeah, if I were Christian and saw that, I'd probably go nuclear too.
I thought Steve was badmouthing Apollo behind closed doors, and then someone behind those doors went to Christian. But that's not what happened. Steve publicly accused Christian of threatening Reddit – a council meeting counts as public.
> 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.
I am more confused after reading that than I was before. Why is Reddit apologizing? What does “go quiet” mean here and why aren’t they speaking more plainly?
To be fair, buying 3rd party apps out makes absolutely zero sense when they can just ban them and improve their own client if that aligns with their business priorities.
I stopped reading at that point. I probably would have laughed at the suggestion instead of taking it as blackmail though.
They probably thought it'll be a "he said/she said" situation and people will err on the side of the big co vs. the little guy. It's extremely funny that the conversation was recorded, so satisfying to catch them in a lie so open-faced...
The author doesn't want to look at it this way, but this is a really weird thing to say. My interpretation was that they'd make an offer to sell the app to reddit, but the specific phrasing there really is not that.
edit: I still think it was the wrong way to approach the situation. Consider this from reddit's perspective,
it would only make sense for Reddit to pay for the traffic if they think they would lose it if it Apollo went away, but then it's not opportunity cost.
It doesn't make the change any better of a look for reddit, and you can certainly question whether it's true that Apollo users would just use reddit, but if you accept that then I don't think you can claim the moral high ground if you offer to accept payment to "make it go away". The developer should have approached this from the perspective of the value that Apollo offers users and reddit instead of the cost to make the problem go away. I imagine the dev doesn't accept that Apollo users would just switch over, but they shouldn't have made their statement in those terms then, and I think that was a mistake.
It sounds to me like the conversation went in a way that it could be interpreted as a threat.
This is from the Apollo developer's own telling of the story:
> As said, a common suggestion across the many threads on this topic was "If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?" That was the point I brought up. If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal!
If someone said that to me, i.e. "hey, just give me $10 million and I'll stop making things difficult for you," I would interpret that as a threat, even if they denied that it was.
I can only surmise from all the posts and interviews that Christian has done post that call but it simply seems like he tried calling their bluff on the $20 million number and/or was fishing for a buyout. He found the number ridiculous, the reddit admin told him that this number wasn't server costs but opportunity costs for lost revenue, Christian decided to poke the bear and ask if instead of him paying them 20 million dollars a year, they could buy him for 6 months of that "lost revenue" and then make that revenue for themselves. He was offering to be acquihired and was simultaneously calling their bluff about the API pricing
The reddit person seems to have thought that Christian was threatening them in some way??? I genuinely don't know what Christian could even have threatened them with. It seems to me they didn't understand the power dynamic at all of a small solo app developer talking to a massive corporation. Maybe they thought he was threatening simply shut his app down for that amount without telling anyone which might have avoided this ruckus? I'm sorry but I genuinely cannot fathom what they thought was going on
1 and 2 are different in that clearly the admin thought Christian was making a threat to their business whereas he was merely calling their bluff and possibly opening himself to business negotiations if reddit actually thought his app was worth that much. Through all this it feels like Christian did not communicate what he wanted effectively (though this seems to have been a throwaway line in a much longer call that got misconstrued gravely) and the admin was simply not equipped at all to handle negotiations
That seems like a fair read. Maybe I would restate as:
Reddit: If we had all Apollo's users, and showed them ads, we could make $20M/year more than we are making now.
What Christian meant to say: Ok, if that's really true, how about you buy my app and all my users for $10M? Then you can show them all the ads you want. If what you say is true, that's quite a deal for you. But my real point is that I don't believe your $20M number.
What Reddit heard: If you pay me $10M, you can have my app and all my users and I will stop making a fuss. Otherwise, I will badmouth you to my users and the press, encourage boycotts, and otherwise try to force your hand.
This read mostly makes sense to me. The only part I don't get is the part of the call where Christian says:
> 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.
If Christian's intention was to sell the app and all its users to Reddit, then the load on the API wouldn't change, the only thing that would change is that Reddit would own it and the users would also see ads. So Apollo wouldn't "go quiet" under this scenario, and I don't understand the comment.
For some reason, in all their communication, the reddit admins have been VERY insistent that his app is one of the largest users of the API and that he needs to "optimise". My read is basically that if he sold the app, the external API calls all become internal API calls, they are free to either let the app work but with their own internal APIs or kill the app completely. It would be out of his hands and the issue of the volume of APIs being invoked would quiet down. Not sure if I'm being too charitable but from all the communication from both sides, this is what I'm surmising
You might be prone to perceiving threats where there aren't any then. The only threat here was reddit's potential loss in revenue - offering to let himself be bought out for half of what they would supposedly "lose" in a year is extremely generous.
Of course, this is all a deliberate reframing by reddit. Reddit wasn't going to "lose" anything so much as "not get".
Apollo is fully allowed to make things difficult by complaining on social media that he thinks the pricing is unfair. What is illegal or even unethical about that?
Framing it as "give me money and I'll stop making things difficult for you" is disingenuous. The proper framing was "buy the app out and the API usage, and thus the $20mm/year in costs, will stop, or whatever you want to do with the product at that point".
Reddit said the majority of the lost revenue was in opportunity cost (money they could have made from those users if they were using the official app), not the literal cost of maintaining the API. So the idea is that they would buy the app, then could serve ads to those users (or however else they monetize users on the official app) and recoup the opportunity cost.
I've listened to the voice call [1] linked in [2] and I interpret it the same way that Reddit staff apparently did -- as a veiled threat.
Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.
I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian's offer is for Apollo to "go away quietly", as in he personally won't make noise about it. I'm not honestly sure that there's another sound way to interpret this.
Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It's not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.
This 'clarification' that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will "go quiet", doesn't make sense, because Reddit doesn't need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.
What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that "Christian will shut down the app and go quietly" is the only answer that makes sense in context.
We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren't necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: "Vote for our initiative or else we'll stop funding you and fund your opposition"? No, almost certainly not. They'd say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.
Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he's offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It's not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. "Buy me out or else I'm going to cause even more public fuss about this". The way that it's communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.
They don't need to buy Apollo for it to shut down, that's the point. Apollo gets shut down with or without the buyout, so what exactly is the $10 million payment securing
So the whole raise-api-cost was in fact intended to just shut these apps down, and isn't to recoup costs, like Reddit is saying?
That means Reddit entered in bad faith - at that point you can't fault Apollo for reacting to that bad faith in any way really, as long as it was legal. You can't be expected to act in good faith if the other party isn't.
So, I still see no blame for Apollo folk (I don't use the app or know who they are before today)
Apps cost them money they could be making in advertising, So they want big money or will cut the apps off. If apps could offer more money than reddit thinks they could make without them, then everyone would be happy, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
What do you think is fair? They dont owe Apollo anything and they dont want anything Apollo has to offer.
If we are being real, Reddit wants Apollo gone. The only definition of fair would be terms both reddit and Apollo mutually agree to, but that isnt going to happen.
Apollo had a good run while it lasted, and I hope the devs walk away with some money to show for it.
Honestly, reddit shouldn't want Apollo gone. They should want Apollo. If a large number of your potential users are going to a different platform it's because yours lacks something. Shutting down some of your competition doesn't change that fact, and those users are still going to be open to bailing for better options.
Why piss off your userbase by trying to force them back to your inferior option when you could just buy the thing they've clearly shown they prefer and give it to them yourself?
>Why piss off your userbase by trying to force them back to your inferior option when you could just buy the thing they've clearly shown they prefer and give it to them yourself?
Because Apollow doesnt bring in the revenue but Reddit's user hostile platform does.
The goal isnt to make the users happy or their preference, it is to make money.
If you run a restruant, and the restruant next door gives food away for free, of course diners will prefer it. The problem comes if the place next door is using your kitchen and supplies. Buying the restruant next door doesn't help your problem.
I don't see it that way. That was just a proposed business transaction: reddit pays a fee, and in exchange, the Apollo dev doesn't comment publicly on the API changes. What's the threat, real or implied? The alternative is he goes public, which is only a problem for reddit if they know what they're doing is wrong.
Him going public with... what? The API pricing? This was discussed in similar calls with all third party app devs. The pricing was going to be public anyways
I can't believe that CEO of Reddit was telling internal people that Apollo tried to blackmail Reddit for a $10 million payout when that didn't happen.