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Comment by ambivalence | Hacker News Reader

A fair point about what? Threads is out for less than a day, I have 8 followers there so far. I originally posted this information on Mastodon, actually: https://mastodon.social/@ambv/110665808046065754

However, I have a much larger following on Twitter, so it was the tweet that got picked up by someone here on HN.

We'll see how this looks like in twelve months.

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A fair point that it's stupid to implement a mostly plain text publishing site that doesn't support linking to any of the text published there.

Edit: Someone kindly pointed out that you can see the content in the browser without an account from following a direct link. (You just can't have the app installed or it will open that and drop you on the login page.) This makes me a lot happier with the product!

You can’t link to threads? By design?

I was seriously considering trying it out, but if there’s no search engine visibility, there’s no point. Most of the searches for my real name pull up tweets.

Hopefully it’s just a missing feature that will be added later. Even TikToks are linkable, and those have very little google visibility.

It seems like you can generate links, but they don't do anything for people who don't have the app (except direct you to install the app). I haven't fiddled with it to see if they've implemented something to make the content visible to search engines. (Which presumably would mean I could see it too with some effort.) But I haven't seen such a thing yet.

At least there are links. That’s a good sign. TikTok survived on mostly that model, though it’s still important to make the content visible without installing an app.

Check my edit: It turns out this does work for deep links to threads and user profiles (the homepage is still entirely useless) as long as you don't have the app installed. Definitely much better than I thought.

I am able to view links to Threads from a web browser without being logged in: https://www.threads.net/t/CuVaOg1PgU4/

I think Facebook/Instagram pioneered login walls for public post content.

Pay walls have been around longer than facebook

Pinterest felt especially egregious.

You can link to it, what are you talking about? An example fetched from a verge article -> https://www.threads.net/t/CuVaOg1PgU4/

Oh nice! Thanks!

I hadn't seen one of these deep links before I installed the app. After I installed the app they just opened the app but did nothing because I don't have an account. But I just uninstalled the app and now I see. This makes me a lot more positive on this product!

They don't even have the dotcom?

This is the first time I'm seeing this. I'm surprised they have a .net domain and that the design is so terrible.

They just extracted Instagram comments and threw them in a sea of whitespace. No thought is given to anchoring content by importance or context, nor is there any esthetic apeal to it.

That link doesn't work for me - just get a splash page

Same. Worked when I tried Chrome, but apparently they did not test Firefox.

Linking to it works better than linking to Twitter, in fact, as of this week (Twitter no longer shows replies unless you're logged in...)

Twitter no longer shows anything unless you're logged in. Everything just redirects to a login page.

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