Reddit

The interpretation Spez is trying to get people to buy is based on Christian saying something along the lines of, "if you want Apollo to keep quiet."

It's important to note that, for developers, and especially people who work with APIs, it is extremely common to refer to "apps that make a lot of network calls or otherwise clog the server logs up" as "noisy." If some program or application is calling too many APIs, or makes a lot of log spam, it's "noisy."

The comment Christian made was during a part of the call where Reddit was trying to accuse Apollo of being "unoptimized" and making too many API calls. Reddit was calling Apollo noisy. They didn't use that term, of course, but being the long term developer he is, and speaking and thinking like a developer, Christian made an off the cuff statement about "if you want Apollo to go quiet. As in not noisy. As in making no API calls. As in shutting down.

This was originally misinterpreted, but Christian clarified his statement and Spez immediately understood the misunderstanding. We can hear this much in the recording.

Naturally, being the asshole he is, Spez is trying to "spin" this as trying to make the public believe, "Christian threatened us! He demanded money in exchange for being quiet, otherwise he would try to speak out publicly against us, ruin our reputation, and ruin our IPO! What fiend!"

Spez, I don't know why you're so worried about Christian dragging Reddit's name through the mud. You're doing a fine job of that yourself. Keep it up!

The statement that was supposed to be a "threat" was something along the lines of "if you want Apollo to go quiet, you can buy out the app." In context, they were talking about how often Apollo sends API requests to Reddit's servers. If Reddit bought Apollo and made it into an official app, then it wouldn't have to use the public API, so it'd "go quiet" in that sense. The Apollo dev explained all this during the call, so Reddit didn't just misunderstand the context, they had to intentionally ignore it.

Here's the transcript. It was a genuine misunderstanding -- "have Apollo quiet down," Steve took to mean "I'll make noise in the press if you don't agree" when Christian was talking about quiet vs. loud in API usage. He meant "quiet" in terms of, we'll consume less resources of the API. It was honestly confusing; I think Christian was genuinely unclear, but the confusion was cleared up, and whoever was talking on Reddit's end acknowledged the misunderstanding and apologized for getting heated at the perceived threat in the first place.

Then Steve later summarized that conversation as if that clarification-of-the-misunderstanding had never happened, and got angry about it when Christian "leaked" the transcript and recording of the call to clarify what had actually happened.

Yea it's just mumbo jumbo, trying to make users angry with Apollo dev to divert some blame

Maybe threat of bad PR? That is all I think think of.

Probably a threat to his precious ego

he was being sarcastic and whoever he was talking to from reddit never considered he might be recorded. probably soon this tail to try to score points with spez. big mistake

It’s important to note here that the Apollo dev is in Canada and it is legal for him to record the call as it is single party consent there. So he’s not doing anything nefarious by recording the call and primarily does it for his own record keeping and is good operational prudence really.

Edit: Apollo Dev also only made the recording and transcript available to clear his name after Reddit/Spez accused him of threatening actions.