With apps like Mlem on iOS, we are getting very close to an Apollo+Reddit experience. How can Reddit successfully monetize what are basically just forums? What makes it special anymore ?

If something like this can pop up in weeks and provide all of the functionality people need, what makes Reddit valuable in the first place?

Critical mass and inertia. That’s not a product I’d want to invest in, though.
Lemmy has been around for years.

to answer your question. ability to scale to millions of users and having broad appeal.

features can be copied but scale and other non functional requirements like security takes time

Wefwef offers an almost identical experience to Apollo and is a webapp so you don’t need to mess with TestFlight and also works on Android.

God damn, this is sick! I was not aware of this.
Instantly became my favourite way to browse lemmy. Been using it the last two days ish and I love it
I am in the minority but I hate PWA. I like memmy tho it’s been great Apollo replacement for me
Wefwef is so good and open source.

I also meant Memmy, not Mlem.

Mlem is basically Apollo for Lemmy. I’m enjoying Memmy too. Honestly the only value Reddit has is the user base. The diversity of apps and the lack of corporate ownership already make this space far more exciting than Reddit

To answer the title question: reddit is a part of the zeitgeist, and people use it fairly regularly. By serving everyone ads disguised as posts (and shutting down API access to ensure that all traffic is served ads) they can greatly increase their revenue. Most social media has this same model.

Yup. They already have millions of users hooked, so they can feed them ads and low-quality content and most will stay.

It is often still The Answer

I like mlem and am in fact using it to write this comment. I’m a fan and think it’ll get better over time, and will absolutely support the author monetarily if I end up moving off Reddit. Let’s not overstate its feature set or usability though; it’s a LONG way off from Apollo.