This approach doesn't work nowadays. We have 3 apps for everything. If your app sucks people will go to one of the other 2.

It works as well as it ever did for its purposes. There's an implicit framing that we need to drive engagement and increase user base. Your comment is doing it too. In the old web, hobby sites existed on their own terms, and didn't have a prime directive of increasing metrics. If someone likes another site better, there's no problem for them to just use that instead.