Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.

So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features, smoother, better. What?

Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not mattering.

UI/UX is not that tricky. Caring about your users is the hard part usually.

Third party clients could be webapps, too, of course.

Apps can bypass websecurity (CORS fetch), that allows for third party clients for example on video platforms using their internal APIs.

I don't think the reddit clients work this way though.

How did you find this? Do you inspect element every article you read? I wonder how you would test if this works because I would add it to my website if it does.

I use Brave browser's Speedreader for reading articles, which rendered the dragon line to me as the first sentence, hence why I took a look at the HTML source.

I use miniflux to consume HN via RSS feed and that text was at the top of the article when I opened it.

In 77 (way before me) Maine also did this and yes it really makes the state much more beautiful especially in the fall.

I think that some people believe that more people leads to more progress, and disagree with the sentiments of people that don’t want kids.