Biography
Christian Selig is a Canadian iOS software developer best known as the creator and sole maintainer of Apollo, a widely admired third-party client for Reddit that he built and ran from 2015 until 2023. Apollo was praised for its polished design and feature set and developed a devoted user base, becoming one of the most prominent of the many third-party apps that accessed Reddit through its public API.
The trajectory changed in April 2023, when Reddit announced — ahead of a planned initial public offering — that it would begin charging for access to its API. The company framed the move partly as a way to stop large firms from freely harvesting Reddit content to train AI systems. When Reddit disclosed its pricing terms, Selig calculated that operating Apollo at its existing scale of roughly seven billion requests per month would cost about $1.7 million per month, or approximately $20 million per year, a figure he described as untenable for an independent developer.
Selig's public disclosure of these numbers became a catalyst for a platform-wide revolt. In June 2023 thousands of moderators set their communities to private or restricted in protest; by June 13 an estimated 8,500 subreddits had gone dark, in one of the largest coordinated actions in the site's history. Selig announced that Apollo would shut down on June 30, 2023, as a direct consequence of the new pricing, noting that even a subscription model could not cover the per-user request costs.
The dispute turned personal. In an internal memo and a subsequent company AMA, chief executive Steve Huffman accused Selig of attempting to blackmail Reddit — claiming Selig had implied he would walk away in exchange for a roughly $10 million payment, and characterizing his conduct as threatening. Selig rejected the accusations and released audio recordings of his calls with Reddit staff, which he said disproved the blackmail claim and showed cordial exchanges. The recordings and Huffman's combative stance further inflamed the protest and pushed many subreddits to extend their blackouts. Selig has since remained an independent developer, and the 2023 API controversy is widely regarded as a turning point in relations between Reddit and the volunteer and developer communities it depends on.