Probably would have been interesting to relaunch the Apollo with its own backend as a direct competitor to Reddit. I think one simple push notification would've pulled millions of the most active users over to the new service
That would have required negotiating image hosting, having a significant amount of server power and storage space, dealing with laws about who can see what, and active moderation until volunteers can be found to moderate the content. Having someone to deal with DMCA requests and age verification laws.
If it wasn't a subscription service (that had to front load a lot of its costs), it also involves getting advertisers for people who are demonstrably hostile to advertisements on board.
This requires hiring more than a few people and investing a bit into the infrastructure needed. It isn't just "hey, gonna spin up a server that is API compatible with reddit and switch everyone over."
If you were to try to build something today that competed with Reddit and wasn't just a "here's a bunch of links - vote on what you like (without even comments)", it would take quite a bit more investment.
If you were to build reddit c. 2005 you wouldn't even need a device local app.
Apollo had just over ONE million users. Only 540k of whom were active. And significantly less that paid the fee needed to be able to post.
And most active according to whom? People keep saying Reddit is committing suicide. Do y'all truly believe that most of Reddit useful content was created on mobile? In Apollo? The app that forced you to pay if you wanted to submit content to Reddit?
Probably. But its a prisoner dilemma and part of the reason apps shut down was because they lacked the time to react. There's no way they'd have an alternative ready "in time" even if we all agreed on an alternative and made a big push for it.
And "all agreeing" on the internet is a herculean task to begin with. Some want federation, some want centralization. Some want memes and others want serious discussion. Some don't even want to leave reddit period.
I suspect that those who bothered to go through the effort of downloading a third party app were also power users who most likely also contributed a lot more content than other users. How many content creators did Reddit lose by killing these third party apps?
Reddit doesn’t produce content of their own. If content creators and moderators took away their effort, Reddit would die.
> How many content creators did Reddit lose by killing these third party apps?
Thats a good question. Are there any stats to show that Apollo users were significant in terms of content creation? Or that any small subset of users are significant (besides mods)?
Who recreates all subreddits? Re-establishes all the mods? Re-subscribes all the users? And all the while on a brand-new implementation that has to immediately scale to millions of users flawlessly.
