Largely because there was no need, or the experience was much worse. This is starting to change.

The previous controversies have been stuff that it's pretty easy to not care about. This time, it's actually affecting a fair number of people. We'll have to see if this time is different.

Previous controversies include the subreddit dedicated to jailbait and on multiple occasions protecting abusers and pedophiles.

While you might be right, super fucked up if their users care more about third party apps being killed than their long past acceptance of child exploitation.

It never does, until it does.

Tha dam will burst, it's not a question of if but when. It's a guarantee from the ever declining quality of reddit.

You don’t need all of Reddit.

You need enough power users to sustain interest, post content, and launch it.

The goal shouldn’t be to replace Reddit as it exists today, because if you go down that route you are doomed to repeat their mistakes of constant growth at the cost of everything else.

This is exactly my goal with building https://flingup.com

Most Reddit alternatives were founded on the basis of defending "free speech" in direct reaction to Reddit banning places like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/The_Donald. Their userbase predictably filled up quickly with shameless bigots and generated correspondingly bigoted content.

I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.

Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.

This. The main issue is there doesn't seem to be a natural alternative like reddit was to digg (since, as you say, the ones that have popped up so far are often quickly filled with people toxic enough to get banned from reddit). So I think any transition will be a lot messier.