alt Hacker NewsCreating a clone is basically violating all copyrights of every commenter and contributor here on Hacker News. We could all get together and inundate you with DMCA takedown for our Intellectual Property. We still retain copyright and all rights to our User Content, while we've granted YC a non-exclusive license to it. Scraping and cloning is also a violation of HN's TOS.
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
It's not your content, and you're cheating us all!
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You'll be able to claim your account on the site and then set yourself to "redacted" so that your content doesn't show up on it. (The claiming process is fun: I generate a 6 digit number, you put it in your HN profile, and then you get a link to reset the account password and sign in: https://i.imgur.com/OYaFZOI.png)
Certainly not trying to cheat anyone here. You ever make a model train set? It feels fun like that. Obviously it's not the real HN and I don't claim it to be. Suggestions welcome.
Part of the point of this is to offer an extended API that shows downvotes/flagged/collapsed/dupe/etc, all stuff the official API doesn't cover.
I have a serious question because I'm not aware of what your talking about.
What the heck is the open API for if not to do this exact thing?
Why do they make it available to anyone? What are even the legitimate use cases of using the API?
Is that true? I Don't think they'll delete your posts if you ask iirc. They just anonymize the username
HN offers a publicly available API. Obviously using it (and by extension creating tools and applications that use user and comment data) is within their terms of service, there have been many, many such posted here over the years. YC doesn't have a problem with them as long as they aren't commercial and don't violate YCombinator's brand. But even then I've seen a few projects get real close to the line without consequences.
I don't think you understand what a "non-exclusive license" is.
Are there somewhat popular social networks that require commenters and posters to license their work under a free license (e.g. CC-BY-SA-4.0)? Then anyone would be free to create a "clone" of the website and even make derivatives, all without breaking copyright law.
There are many wikis like this (e.g. Wikipedia) and at least one forum (trisquel.info), but I don't know of anything for more general purposes. Even most fediverse sites, which implicitly grant permission for some specific kinds of mirroring, don't usually have a free license that allows redistribution in completely different contexts, as far as I know.