Whenever a forum dies, a lot of answered questions are lost that would have been useful to people googling it in the future.
Reddit is like the mother of all forums, and it also has had a lot of internet history being made on it.
I really think we need a Reddit archive that is availabel for random people from Google. The best case scenario is that Reddit just limps on for years, therefore doing this conservation work better than anyone else could.
Lately, when I’m looking for answers and my googling gives me a Reddit link, I pull up the actual reddit page in The Wayback Machine. Admittedly my sample size is small but it hasn’t failed me yet.
Some day, though, if Reddit goes down completely or otherwise becomes unavailable to search engines, it will be much harder to find Reddit content by Googling for it.
The other thing I think is a hidden gem of useful info on Reddit is the wikis. It seemed that even sites like Libreddit (when it worked) didn’t provide access to those.
There is The Archive Team. They still seem to be actively archiving Reddit (probably via web scraping, not any particular API.) I’m not sure if/how the results of Archive Team scrapes are made available to others, though.
I forgot about all the wikis and helpful links. This is such a loss.
For some reason, many of the reddit posts on web archive seem to have no comments because they haven’t been archived recently.😕
I wonder if there’s a browser extension to automatically try to load way back links for specific domains