Linked List: June 9, 2023

Friday, 9 June 2023

It’s worth perusing the replies to Apollo developer Christian Selig’s sunsetting announcement on Mastodon and Twitter (as well as the long thread on Reddit itself). So much love and affection and appreciation for Selig’s nearly decade of hard work, all for what outsiders must surely see as a mere “app”. These threads show how much the relationship between developer and users can be like that between any artist and their deepest fans.

Reddit’s Hoped-For IPO and Pipe Dream of Cashing in on OpenAI’s Hype ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

I gotta be honest, this Huffman guy sure looks like a lying creep, and all of Reddit’s public statements about honoring third-party apps seem like an attempt to lie to Redditors so they don’t look like the bad guys. But the bottom line is that Reddit repriced its API in order to bankrupt third-party apps. (Selig says he’ll lose $250,000 in the shutdown.)

It seems pretty clear that all of Huffman’s recent decisions are driven by Reddit’s hoped-for IPO. On one front is the ugly fact that Reddit’s valuation is sinking. TechCrunch reported last week:

Fidelity, the lead investor in Reddit’s most recent funding round in 2021, has slashed the estimated worth of its equity stake in the popular social media platform by 41% since the investment. [...]

This devaluation, part of a broader trend that has hit a variety of growth stage startups across the globe in the past year, raises uncertainties about whether Reddit will maintain its initial intent to reportedly go public at a valuation around $15 billion.

On the other front is OpenAI, currently buoyed by a sky-high valuation, and which used Reddit content as part of its massive training data. The whole point of going from free-of-charge to very-expensive with these APIs is to get OpenAI and similar companies to pay for them. It’s a pipe dream. Julie Bort at Insider:

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free,” said Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit.

I asked ChatGPT if it is going to pay for Reddit data. It told me its training data cut-off was September 2021 so it didn’t know what was happening after that date.

Reddit already gave all its data to large companies for free. Huffman is trying to charge now for horses that were let out of the barn years ago. And he obviously doesn’t care about Apollo or other third-party Reddit clients, or what these moves do to Reddit’s reputation as a platform vendor. He’s just trapped in a fantasy where investors are going to somehow see Reddit as a player in the current moment of AI hype.

Facing Reddit’s Exorbitant API Pricing, Christian Selig Is Shutting Down Apollo ★

Christian Selig, writing in r/apolloapp:

Eight years ago, I posted in the Apple subreddit about a Reddit app I was looking for beta testers for, and my life completely changed that day. I just finished university and an internship at Apple, and wanted to build a Reddit client of my own: a premier, customizable, well-designed Reddit app for iPhone. This fortunately resonated with people immediately, and it’s been my full time job ever since.

Today’s a much sadder post than that initial one eight years ago. June 30th will be Apollo’s last day.

I’ve talked to a lot of people, and come to terms with this over the last weeks as talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point, and in the interest of transparency with the community, I wanted to talk about how I arrived at this decision, and if you have any questions at the end, I’m more than happy to answer. This post will be long as I have a lot of topics to cover.

Please note that I recorded all my calls with Reddit, so my statements are not based on memory, but the recorded statements by Reddit over the course of the year. One-party consent recording is legal in my country of Canada. Also I won’t be naming names, that’s not important and I don’t want to doxx people.

Given what we knew about Reddit’s stance on this API pricing a week ago, this isn’t surprising, but it still feels tragic. Apollo — like Tweetbot and Twitterrific before it — isn’t merely a nice client for a particular service. It’s one of the best apps ever made, full stop.

Let’s stop attributing this shutdown to “Reddit” the company, though, and pin responsibility where it truly lies: on Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman, personally. When Twitter killed third-party clients everyone naturally and correctly pinned responsibility on Elon Musk, because Musk is very famous and very much public in his stewardship of Twitter now that he owns it.

I’ll bet many of you reading this, even Reddit users, couldn’t recall Reddit’s CEO’s name before I named Huffman above. But it’s clear from Selig’s description — and his receipts, as it were — that Huffman is intimately involved in this decision, and is not only responsible, but is actively besmirching Selig with provably false accusations of both extortion and shoddy engineering.

Reddit didn’t kill Apollo. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman did.

Let’s see if Huffman has the courage to go through with this planned AMA today to discuss Reddit’s API policy changes. I have one simple question for him: What do you think Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz would say about this if he were still alive?

Lionel Messi Is Coming to MLS, With a Revenue Sharing Deal From Apple ★

MG Siegler:

Earlier today, it was announced that Lionel Messi, the world’s greatest soccer player, would be leaving Europe behind and joining Inter Miami. This matters because the biggest name in fútbol (soccer), and arguably in all sports, is coming to America. But it also matters because he’s coming to play in the MLS. A league that has an exclusive television deal with Apple. And as such, Apple apparently helped lure Messi over with an extraordinary offer: a cut of revenue from new subscribers to their Season Pass service.

I’d be very curious to learn just how big a revenue share Messi is getting from Apple, but regardless of the details, this is simply an extraordinary coup for both MLS and Apple TV+. There are only a handful of athletes who are so good, and so beloved, that they can singlehandedly elevate an entire league in a team sport. Lionel Messi is one of them.

Of the people who got early looks at Vision Pro, there’s seemingly universal praise for the NBA court-side and MLB dugout demos. These were apparently shot with special cameras which Apple manufactured to be able to capture footage that could take full advantage of the viewing experience on the new device. It will likely take a bit for this type of content to become more widespread and accepted amongst the leagues. You know where it won’t be? MLS. I fully expect Apple to be filming games with their new Spatial Cameras (I made up the name, but it seems like something they might use… ) soon, if they haven’t started already! Apple isn’t undercutting any other TV rights here (as they might be with say, the NBA), they have exclusive rights. To display any game, any time, anywhere on any device.

It occurred to me after my demo with Vision Pro that it was slightly surprising that Apple included spatial presentations of NBA basketball and MLB baseball, but not MLS soccer — the sport TV+ is most all-in on. (Apple does of course have weekly national broadcasts of MLB with Friday Night Baseball.) But I’ll eat my hat if Apple isn’t planning to broadcast entire MLS games with this technology.

And finally, fifth, much like Apple used AT&T as their exclusive carrier for the iPhone when it launched, I could see them using their MLS deal in a similar manner. That is, work with a league/carrier that is willing to break norms and allow Apple to be in control of the product and offering. And when it’s a success, watch the other leagues/carriers trip over themselves to get in line. It worked with the iPhone. Will it work here? Feels like a pretty good bet to make.

This is exactly what I was thinking when I mentioned in a footnote in my first impressions piece this week that the NFL in particular might have made a colossal mistake signing a long-term deal with Google for Sunday Ticket broadcast rights. Siegler’s comparison to how Apple leveraged its initial exclusivity deal with AT&T with the iPhone seems apt.

Update: Apple also announced a four-part docuseries on Messi’s career coming to TV+.