Definition of a threat:
a statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone in retribution for something done or not done.
Let’s assume for a second that the Apollo dev DID in fact mean what they thought he meant at first. Can someone explain to me how that would make it a threat? "Buy my app, or else… " what? Or else what? In what universe could that even have been a threat?
I keep thinking back on this and how this whole argument about whether or not it was a threat is a complete red herring because there was nothing he can threaten them WITH, so how can you construe it as a threat?
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 part I don’t get there is Reddit could easily block api access to certain apps, so if that was the threat it’d be a pretty empty one.