Turns out community-building is really not a lucrative business, and beyond in-app/service purchases by some dedicated users, you are ultimately reliant on advertising as the largest and sole contributor to your customer lifetime value calculations.
It is very easy for an independent group to create adjacent apps on your service (i.e. Apollo) as they are separate from the economic realities of your business. i.e. Reddit needs to increase ad revenue, and may not priority the same features that Apollo does. Apollo delivered its service at someone's own personal expense (both time and money.) How can a company compete with something being done for free when they have to pay staff and other capital?
But this is the cycle of communities and, like Digg before it, and forums before that, there might be something new and engaging to sway a majority of users to leave. We're already seeing Reddit be aged-out with Discord... So if anything, people might just move there.
Really, its not a technology problem -- its a business problem.