Hacker News Reader

“Walled garden” is orthogonal to “open source”

A walled garden is a site that degrades significantly or is unavailable without an account, like Twitter. Anyone can view all of HN modulo dead comments without an account.

You can have a fully open source walled garden.

I appreciate the clarification, thanks. This forum is open to the public at the moment. Though Hackernews could go down or take the conversation offline at any moment (this is an issue of trust more than anything, and I think HN does a good job, certainly more than Twitter)

Hackernews was released as free / open source some years back. There's a community managed fork: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/

A walled garden is when users contribute the data for free, but the data is stuck. No free API access.

Ah, makes sense, thanks for the clarification