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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

But Twitter, Reddit, HN, and most other such places are just websites and can be indexed fine. Same with Wikipedia, which is very much a silo (they don't have regular links in text in the hypertext spirit, but only footnotes).

Facebook and Instagram are more of a walled garden, like Quora, but there is a lot of junk there anyway.

It's sad for the WWW, but I don't really think it is a fundamental problem for search engines. In fact Twitter for example gives a direct pipe to Google. If you tweet something, it is immediately findable. Similar for StackExchange, but there I think the site is so "small" that Google can afford to just continuously index it.

View on HN

Twitter and Reddit still can be indexed, but they've also become increasingly hard to use without an account. Reddit doesn't let you fully expand threads when you're unlogged. Twitter limits the amount of things you can read and shows a modal. Both of them heavily limit usage on mobile devices without installing an app.

Sure, an account is free but might require giving information you don't want to give. Twitter asks me for a phone number a few minutes after creating an account, even if I don't post anything). Reddit at least lets you skip giving an email.

Sure, there are workarounds such as using lite versions (old Reddit, mobile Twitter), but that's not known to all people coming from a search engine.

It feels as if HN are the only one that's not a partially walled garden yet (and Wikipedia of course).

> Reddit doesn't let you fully expand threads when you're unlogged.

that's what old.reddit.com is for!

old.reddit will be gone soon, it is inevitable. Especially once they go public.

Yup. It's bound to happen. And when it does, Reddit will no longer exist in my eyes.

Agreed. IDK how I feel about Reddit. I've been on it since 2010 when Fark lost its spark. I remember some great times but a lot of it was "junk" content that in the end was very meaningless. I wish I could say I used it to develop my career in tech but that isn't true either; I use specific blogs, books, and tutorial sites to learn instead.

I suppose I mostly view it as a continuous party, yeah it's fun if you attend but after a few hours I wish I was doing something more productive.

Isn't it a bit ironic that a site - or its operator - 'going public' means all the content on said site actually 'goes private'?

Exactly, I mentioned it. But not only it's bound to go away sometime, it's also not trivial to find to anyone who's not an expert Reddit user, unfortunately.

And isn't great to get a link to Reddit or Twitter, and you click the link, and try to navigate to the comments for context or the answer, and you go to click the link to expand it, and then you get a demand to log in and install their app? Don't talk about walled gardens and not include Reddit or Twitter just because they let you look at one brick before demanding their tax.

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