> Interviewer: I don’t know if I agree with the characterization that Apollo is a fully direct competitor of Reddit.
> Huffman: Okay, hold on, timeout. You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo, which uses our logo, or something like it, takes our data — for free — and resells it to users making a 100 percent margin. And instead of using our app, they use that app. Is that not competitive?
The Reddit strike should go on forever just for that answer alone.
He has a point, no? Sure, there's a middle ground where API access is priced so both Reddit and Apollo make money. But Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to sell ads, and if they get a large enough market share they can just start their own Reddit.. the codebase is not an effective moat.
> But Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to sell ads...
Reddit could require serving their ads as a requirement for API access. Right now there is no way for Apollo to serve reddit ads even if they wanted to.
Telegram does the same. They just revoke your API access and on continuous violations ban your and your users accounts. Currently there are almost no apps daring to cross that line.
>But Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to sell ads
Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to constantly push recommendations and test new features to boost engagement metrics. If every 10th post on Apollo was an ad it would still be an improvement over the Reddit app.
> and if they get a large enough market share they can just start their own Reddit.
That assumes that Apollo is sufficiently profitable to host the necessary backend systems to support a reddit clone. This also means that they need to have moderators (and if they're volunteer moderates where back at the "reddit takes advantage of volunteer moderators" square). It also means that this instance would have the appropriate legal staff to be able to handle trademark disputes, DMCA claims, and assorted challenges to maintain itself in the face of trolls, unsavory content, and such.
The moat that Reddit has from such upstarts isn't that its hard to build an instance, or stand one up, or even maintaining a community there - but rather making sure that it stays up by following the assorted laws (GDPR, CDA, trademark, copyright, etc...) out while maintaining a sufficient income stream to pay the staff (and maintain advertisers if you're not going full subscription only).
Huffman has a point. How hard would it be for Apollo to establish their own APIs and hosted infra? Not hard I suspect. For instance they could allow users to cross to both Reddit and Apollo when creating new content, etc.
If the number of people using it so tiny then why is such a big problem for Reddit? It's not like calling an API is more cost than using the website itself. Huffman says only 3% of users use 3rd party apps. If that's the case, then why bother with all this crap? For some slice of 3%?
The question to ask is "why are mods taking down the whole site for a tiny app"
almost every company does not allow direct competitors in their platform. I m not even sure about the apps they are "cooperating" with. Down the road, one of them may end up reselling reddit content and come into conflict again.
The fact that reddit made poor decisions in the past should not stop them from making the right decisions now. Unfortunately though they still dont seem to have a good plan
This isn’t just about Apollo, it’s about the API changes in general and how those affect all third party apps as well as the extensive tools that mods have had to build and use to make up for Reddit’s poor tooling.
> Huffman: Okay, hold on, timeout. You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo, which uses our logo, or something like it, takes our data — for free — and resells it to users making a 100 percent margin. And instead of using our app, they use that app. Is that not competitive?
The Reddit strike should go on forever just for that answer alone.