Voat is a great place to go for people skeptical about Jews, non-whites, the overweight and transsexuals to freely share their... concerns.
So I don't think software is sufficient to compete, you need heavy community moderation.
The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.
Once they can get 3rd party usage below a certain threshold of engagement, they'll block the API.
TBH if they block third party I'm done with them. Def won't be accepting the default user experience.
And also, they'll get third party usage below a certain threshold if people don't use it so... Don't help them!
Already exists and made by one of the earlier reddit employees: https://tildes.net
Privacy oriented, open source, user funded, focused on quality content, aiming to develop a user-centric moderation system like slashdot and stack exchange that puts moderation into the hands of the people who participate in each individual community.
If you have a reddit account, you can visit /r/tildes and leave a reply in the sticky invite thread to get an invite code within a day. Or, you can send an email to [email protected] to get one.
It's worth noting that Tildes is created and operated by Deimos, the same guy who created reddit's automoderator and subredditsimulator.
Reddit's money grabs piss me off.
To bootstrap the thing I'd crawl Reddit and copy threads, users, subreddits, comments - everything. Users could prove account ownership or create any account that wasn't already allocated. If Reddit sues, they'd face backlash. Comments all used to be GFDL (then Creative Commons) anyway.