"His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him."
Why should they stop? Asshole immature CEOs still bring in millions a year. If the consuming public refuses to punish you, and the government is busy playing sportsball with women's reproductive health, why would you ever change?
CEOs will only stop being giant twats when being a giant twat inevitably leads you to personal ruin.
In general I would agree, but the only reason the recordings were made public was because Reddit was straight up lying about the Apollo dev. So the recordings were released to prove that the Apollo dev was right.
this part is up to debate. I would also consider "joke" with $10m sticker to go away quiet as a threat, which looks like didn't go through and apollo dev backed up.
The recording contains the Apollo dev explaining that it wasn't a threat, and spez acknowledging it as such. To other people spez still says he was threatened. How is that anything but a lie?
Okay. So spez acknowledged in the call that it wasn't a threat, but he felt threatened, so it's okay for him to tell everyone the Apollo dev threatened him?
> So spez acknowledged in the call that it wasn't a threat
its regular bs sugar coating, like you know someone is cheating, and he knows he is cheating but doesn't admit, but you don't have proof and you say "oh it was miscommunication" for the sake of continuing cooperation.
Why do you think this is the case? The audio by the Apollo dev doesn't support this, and spez has not published anything that would prove there was a threat. The audio doesn't sound like what you're describing, it sounds like what the Apollo dev is describing.
> Apollo dev: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> spez: Oh, like, cause you were like "hey, if you want this, if you want this to go away, like [unintelligeble]..."
> Apollo dev: Oh, I said if you want Apollo to go quiet, like I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API use..."
> spez: Oh, okay, got it. Got it, sorry. That's a complete misinterpretation on my part. I apologize immediately [...]
Would you expect spez to still consider it a threat given both the literal content of what he says, and the tone it was said in? I see no way your interpretation makes sense.
So the part that spez was talking about misunderstanding, which he apologized for? The context you think I didn't include is the thing that spez is explicitly saying he didn't understand correctly?
I quoted spez apologizing for misunderstanding something. You're saying I left that something out as context. Considering spez acknowledged his misunderstanding and apologized, it seems a bit ridiculous to expect the something he apologized for to "override" his apology, doesn't it?
If he was joking then why would he still be asking for reddit to buy Apollo?
Yesterday he wrote,
> Why doesn't Reddit just buy Apollo and other third-party apps?
> This was a very common comment across the topics: "If Apollo has an apparent opportunity cost of $20 million per year, why not just buy them and other third-party apps, as they did with Alien Blue?"
> I believe it's a fair question. If these apps apparently cost so much, an easy solution that would likely make everyone happy would be to simply buy these apps out. So I brought that up to them during a call on May 31st where I was suggesting a variety of potential solutions
I don't care whether he is joking, I care whether he is making a threat or not. He did not make a threat. spez understood him as saying "if you want this discussion and situation to go away quietly, pay me this". The Apollo dev was asking "if you're having these costs, why not just pay me half that and have the app quiet down?". One is a threat (pay me or XYZ will happen), the other is a legitimate question.
No, he clearly was. I don't know how someone could think otherwise. He said "I could make it really easy on you", "we can both skip off into the sunset", "Bob's your uncle", "And have Apollo quiet down". He just backed up at the end I think because they're somewhat scared nerds and they don't like that level of confrontation. But nobody would go into a business meeting and just say that accidentally. You wouldn't even do that at a weekly meeting with your own team members, much less talking to the CEO of a decent sized company and asking to be acquired. And he actually carried out the threat, he helped make one of reddit's biggest messes (although mostly they did to themselves.)
All of the things you quoted are obviously referring to Reddits claim that Apollo is incurring very high costs through its API usage. I don't know how you can get anything else from it. What do you think "And have Apollo quiet down" could mean EXCEPT for this?
spez is free to release counter-evidence, the Apollo dev has given his approval for anything to be released. Him not doing it means we just have the Apollo devs recording to go off - and that is very, very clearly referring to what he is claiming it's referring to.
He had previously made 2 other posts about it before on Apr 18-19, so that's what he meant by "quiet down". Reddit refused to pay him $10 million and so he went the opposite of "quiet", he made a post telling his story and it blew up.
For the next week when mods were taking their subs private, the Apollo dev didn't disclose to any of them that he'd asked for 10 million to "have Apollo quiet down." If some reddit employee hadn't asked him about it Mastodon, he would never have told anyone about that.
I'm not sure what timeline you're exactly trying to prove or disprove. It makes sense to me that he'd make a post describing a call with Reddit, after he had a call with Reddit. He doesn't have to describe exactly everything he describes, but fact is: Reddit is claiming he is costing them 20 million dollars per year, he suggested a buy-out for half that. You have to actually prove he tried to threaten them, because the non-threat explanation makes perfect sense - because of course the developer of an app would make posts about the status of communications regarding these changes!
If I'm missing something you're alluding to in the beginning I'd appreciate an explicit explanation :)
The way the US business environment is, if the little guy in every business deal ISN'T recording everything they can legally get away with, they WILL be taken advantage of.
People are quickly replying with screenshots and archive.org snapshots. He certainly can, but it would be plainly obvious and all eyes are on those comments.
Does anyone know what the "joke" thats being referenced is? I'm not super in the weeds here, but none of the posted material looks like a joke or "joke" one way or another.
The Apollo dev “joked” that Reddit should buy Apollo for $10 million dollars because, according to Reddit’s pricing of their API, the opportunity cost of Apollo existing to Reddit was $20 million.
spez accused the author of Apollo (Christian) of trying to blackmail reddit. Christian responds[0] and has a recording [1]. There was a misunderstanding, Christian clarified, spez apologized.
Additional context that Christian was referencing the _app_ being "noisy", as in the _noisy neighbor_ effect, when a client is misconfigured to cause more activity and bring more a burden than it should [0]. Reddit interpreted this as "noisy" = "we will complain and raise hell", but this was literally immediately worked out as a miscommunication in the transcript [1].
Weeks later, after Christian announced to his community the most likely impact on the app of the upcoming API changes and a summary of his conversations with Reddit.
Reading this comment makes me wonder if Steve genuinely believes the ongoing outrage from Reddit's community is somehow to any extent Christian's fault. "Look, it was a threat after all. He's doing what we thought he would and what he said he wouldn't do."
