by Jason Snell
Apollo to shut down; developer has receipts
Apollo Developer Christian Selig, who has been trying to find a way to keep his app alive despite an enormous new charge for connecting to Reddit, has given up:
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.
Apparently in a conversation with moderators, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman alleged that Selig was attempting to threaten the company into paying him millions of dollars. Unfortunately for Huffman, Selig has receipts—namely recordings of all his dealings with Reddit.
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.)
Following the trail blazed by Tweetbot and Twitterrific, Apollo users will be offered the opportunity to request a pro-rated refund or decline the refund, reducing Selig’s losses.
It’s a sad situation made worse by Reddit’s dissembling. Turns out they’re doing exactly what Twitter did to third-party clients—they just saw how badly it went for Twitter and decided to try to shield themselves from the worst of it. Whoops.