I am the opposite. I had a Reddit login for years but never used it. When I found out about Apollo, I gave it another go and it quickly became my Number 1 Internet time sink.
With Apollo no longer functional, Reddit (for me) is no longer functional.
The fuckery was just the icing on the cake to force me to delete my account.
Good web design and App makers being aware that for these demographics, these apps may be a users only link to community.
They don’t see their niche interest groups migrating to a different platform.
Smaller subs may have had just enough critical mass when accessing the entire reddit user graf, but new platforms are not there yet. It is much easier to gain traction in a unified user base than in a federation of disparate user bases.
It all comes down to mobile UI. Most of most peoples web usage is on mobile phones, occasionally a tablet, rarely sitting at a desk with a laptop or desktop computer.
The reason 3rd Party apps is such a sticking point for Reddit users is because the “factory” options are shite. Both the new and old web interfaces are garbage compared to the factory app, which is also garbage compared with any third party app.
The Steve Jobs Sweet Solution of WebApps was flawed. Twitteriffic and other pioneering mobile Smartphone apps proved that. Proprietary Apps with no alternative destroy intrinsic value of a platform to users. Facebook.app and YouTube.app prove that.