> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
It’s 140% clear from both the audio and the transcript that this whole buyout thing is a failed to land joke. And it is not even a problematic thing! Why would offering to sell their own app be a negative? The negative, threat part is from a misunderstood expression of “quiet down”, which was meant about the API calls.
But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!
I am not a native speaker but I first read the transcript and then listened to the audio. It sounds like a Good Fellas dialogue. To my non-businesses ears you don't propose a $10m deal for things to go quietly, even in terms of API usage. It makes no sense. I don't see where's the leverage in that unless quiet refer to "no fuss from me" because Reddit could legally just close the API without paying the dev. If Reddit were to give even a dollar to the dev for Apolo to slowly go away and with the promise the dev wouldn't make a fuss about it that would be extortion right ?
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
To me, as a native speaker, it sounds like it was a serious offer but he didn't know how else to bring it up. Which I don't blame him. And I think he knew what the Reddit community response was going to be like and he sure as hell worded his original post that started this off really well to make sure the reddit community went nuts.
For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.
I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.
I listened to the audio as well. Can you please explain how you think Spez interpreted the threat?
He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media? Slander him? Break his legs? Murder him?
>He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media?
Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
Except thats not at all what he said. The noise referred to the amount of API "noise" he generates. Which reddit likes to pretend is costing them millions.
I haven't listened to the audio recording per se but that was my understanding, too, by reading this guy's written description of what happened.
Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
> That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
Days afterward, spez got on a conference call and falsely claimed that Christian was blackmailing him. An employee of Reddit itself affirmed that he said it in a summary of the call they posted to a (private) sub of high-level moderators, replicated here:
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?