Why should he be forced to do something he doesn't want to do?

He's made it abundantly clear why he doesn't want to do that, who are you (or anyone else but him) to say "No you're not allowed to have opinions, you MUST create your own alternative"?

> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.

> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.

Yeah, Reddit needs to majorly up their game too. You strong arm your major customers right out of the gate. What a loss for both sides. You want the guy to pay $20 million and you just give him a call on the phone. Total amateur hour.

This should have gone like, "Hey, in a few months we're rolling this out and wanted to give you a heads up so you know before anyone else, since you're a major API user. We wanted to offer you a grace period and special pricing. When's a good time to chat we'll fly out.". Fly the sales team over to where he lives, wine and dine him, etc. This is what sales people do all day long for deals that are like $250k+. For deals that are $20 million a year you'll have all parts of the company bending over backwards trying to win that.

This is all just my opinion based on what I've read so far.

Why don’t we all monetize our hobbies? Why don’t we market our personal lives? Why don’t we each have our own line of branded merchandise? Why haven’t we written a memoir?

Because some people don’t want to! And that’s okay.

I thought he was pretty clear that he was done bargaining:

> ... I've finally come to the conclusion that I don't think this situation is recoverable. If Reddit is willing to stoop to such deep lows as to slander individuals with blatant lies to try to get community favor back, I no longer have any faith they want this to work, or ever did.

If a bargaining chip is only useful in making a deal you've decided cannot be made, why bother holding onto it? Better to tell your fans outright that you're worn out and not interested.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Would you want to moderate Reddit? I get that Apollo is in a good position to take their users with them, but it's not like it's going to be easy to build a Reddit when what you've made so far has been a frontend for Reddit and some mobile widget spin-offs.

Many of us can make a frontpage for hacker news in a few hours, some might even be able to grow a userbase on it but that doesn't mean we can do what dang does.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

Yeah, what's the deal with this iOS developer not wanting to start a competitor to checks notes one of the largest websites in the world? Surely you just up and did that last week, it's no big deal.

I guess I should start getting used to saying "Jesus christ, HN" now that I won't be saying "Jesus christ, Reddit" anymore.

He can't start a competitor because he has no market power. Not enough will use the competitor product for it to be worth it. A past example of someone attempting to disintermediate Reddit was /r/changemyview which attempted to switch to changeaview.com and met immediate and total backlash. Reddit's SSO multi-forum user-generated experience is why people use it.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

In addition to what everyone else has said, he really has 1 month if he has any chance of siphoning off reddit users.

Because sometimes, you don't want to reclimb the mountain you just hiked up and down.

> Also, what's the deal with him not wanting to start a competitor?

I suspect that both reddit and apollo know that most of the content generation happens on Reddit controlled properties.

Apollo users probably do not generate enough content to sustain a reddit-like website.

Starting a competitor involves doing all the things that Reddit is doing (having a legal team, servers across the world and staff to operate them, making policy decisions, ...).

That is not at all the same as building an iOS client using an API as a one man show (or 1-3) and directly selling that.

Can’t really blame the guy. If I had banked $X00k-XM in my early thirties I wouldn’t be doing jobs I didn’t want to do either.