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0 pointsWestCoastJustin3y ago0 comments

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.

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10 comments · 5 top-level

jhugo3y ago· 2 in thread

It's clear that they don't want any of the third-party apps to pay them a cent. They want the third-party apps gone, and the users to move to the official app where they can be directly monetised by Reddit. There was never going to be a deal; if Reddit was interested in one they would have approached this differently.

pixiemagic3y ago

Then why not just shut down their public API?

Ryoung273y ago

Optics, both are functionally shutting it down, but one claims to add value while the other removes options.

chimeracoder3y ago· 1 in thread

> 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.

If they wanted him to pay $20 million, they'd certainly have given him much better than a brief phone call.

But that's the point. They're revealing with their actions that they don't actually want him to pay the money. What they want is to shut it down. Charging a sum of money that they know he won't pay is just an easy way to do that.

imajes3y ago

'course it's not just him, but it's him and _everyone else_. i'm not sure what their overall intent here was, but it's been a shit show from start to finish, and they gotta at the very least start thinking hard about pausing the rollout till they can get their ducks in a row.

girvo3y ago· 1 in thread

You only approach this deal this way if you don't want the deal to go through at all.

sweetjuly3y ago

A shocking amount of people here are assuming Reddit is launching this API program in good faith. This was not a transition third party apps were meant to survive; 30 days is nowhere near enough time for any business, let alone ones by single random software developers, to see their costs increase into the hundreds of thousands or even millions per month.

satvikpendem3y ago· 1 in thread

You're assuming he can pay 20 million dollars. The point is that he can't, or even a fraction of that, so there's no point to wining and dining him at all.

gigglesupstairs3y ago

That’s where negotiations come in. He has been very upfront about talking and negotiations but Reddit hasn’t budged on pricing at all.

newZWhoDis3y ago

> 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.

I pay Apple more than a million a month and I don’t even have a contact email.

Just saying, a Christmas card would be nice.

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