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Golly. I almost never log in to any of those services. Am I missing out? Yikes. Self doubt starts, gnawing at me....

• derefr 6y ago
  Presuming you "browse" the service (e.g. look at whatever equivalent it has to a front page), you're seeing only the "mainstream" of its content, without any "niche" content. For many of these services, most of the reason that people even use/recommend them is that they allow each person to conveniently "browse" within the set of long-tail niches that interest them. Reddit, for one, is certainly not popular because of its mainstream/default subreddits. It's popular in spite of them. On the other hand, presuming you do no "browsing" of the service, but just get linked to specific content on the service from elsewhere, you're pretty much getting the full experience either way. (I think one difference is that some services won't show you all the comments unless you log in; and sometimes the comments themselves are what was interesting-enough to link to.) Also, some particular services (e.g. YouTube) track you and build a viewer profile of you even if you never create an account there, and so "browsing" them will still result in niche content if that's what you've previously visited there. But most services don't do this.