Technology

That AMA is immediately going to turn into ‘The Roast of Spez’ and I’m honestly quite looking forward to it. It won’t change anything since Reddit’s already too far round the ‘enshittification’ U-bend but it might be the last funny thing that’s ever posted there.

He knew things could go ugly. Good thing he made the recordings.

Yeah, I found that interesting. I generally don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, and I imagine either (or both) of these is likely:

1. The 'evasive' language made everything feel implied, that when pressed to outright admit his intentions he falls back. He was evasive, evasive, evasive, pressed, fell back. Still he did not clarify he was selling Apollo, only that 'go quiet' meant 'pay me off and Apollo stops making calls'. It's possible Spez did not believe him and was trying to deescalate.
2. Internally discussing the outcome of the call with other members on staff, they may have felt (1) was true, or Spez accepted the explanation but other staff didn't; they discussed the implications of each possible intention; and they collectively decided they should probably treat it as a threat since it remained ambiguous. It's possible Spez did want to believe him but other staff didn't.

The conclusion doesn't have to be that Spez believed him, then personally as an individual decided "oh, actually, fuck it" and decided to lie about it anyway. In fact I'd say that of the three possibilities, that's the least likely.

I imagine his intend was to imply - or at least put pressure on - the idea of Apollo actually costing them $20mil was an inflated number. The idea that it was a real and on-going cost, and had been for a decade, and he's basically daring them to buy Apollo. Because if that number was real, they should leap at the chance:

If you want to rip that band-aid off once. [...] Beautiful deal.

I believe that's why it was 'mostly a joke' - he never expected them to take it, he doesn't believe it actually costs them that much. It's not what he's taking from them - it's what they feel entitled to take from the users, and they blame him for being in the way.

Personally I agree it doesn't cost that much - I believe they believe it does, but only because they look at Apollo's userbase and activity, and decided "oh boy, if we could sell ads to those users and sell their data at those rates, this is how much we would make" and decided that means Apollo is somehow costing them that. I don't think 'opportunity cost' is an appropriate concept to price on, because it relies on obviously false assumptions.

Apollo is definitely costing them server bandwidth, as are the other apps. And it seems all the devs were ready and willing to cover the costs, even negotiate how their users could still be a revenue stream. But Reddit believes they were owed the same profit of Apollo's users that they would make off of their own, and I think that's nonsense.

After all, if somebody pirates Photoshop, it's stupidly naïve to think that every single one of those users would be willing to pay Adobe $80 a month (in some countries that's more than they make in 3+ months). And if somebody goes to a friend's house and watches a Blu-Ray with them, it's absurd to expect they mail a check for $20 to their local theatre.

The expectation that somebody using something convenient/free would use it just as much if it was demanding/unaffordable is... like, they're not stupid, right? They can't possibly be that stupid to think that was even attainable profit for them. I just don't understand why they think that 'opportunity cost' is real.