Opt out is the best compromise I can offer. Without it, no site is possible.
But "Why does it need to exist?" kills every art project, side project, or anything built for the love of building. None of those need to exist either.
There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed. The way you lose rights over time is by your existing rights getting clipped off at the edges.
A lot of the criticisms leveled at me here would also apply vs Google back when Larry and Sergey were grad students. If they'd had to worry that indexing content equals copyright infringement, they'd have a steep hill to climb.
> There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed
That's a really fun legal argument but a pretty irrelevant ethical one.
No, they are not "replacement frontends". Those are known as "3rd party clients". These are not clients but clones. They are cloning all the content. That means they've replicated the backend, the frontend, and the database full of content, by scraping/pirating it from the original source.
old.reddit.com is an "alternative frontend". Clones of scraped content are not.
Yes I have, but for some reason I did not go to Union Pacific railyards and pry metal sidings off of the rolling stock. Nor did I siphon diesel fuel out of the locomotives! FFS!
It's open source. The point of open source is that you have a lit candle and I have an unlit one. Lighting mine with yours doesn't extinguish your flame; there are now two flames.
The site will eventually offer an extended API that shows content that the official API doesn't, like downvotes and [flagged] status. It's partly why I made it, since there was no way to see flagged comments without visiting HN directly.
I spit on your fucking illicit candle, bro! I slap that candle out of your hand! “You Didn’t Build That!”
You pirated it all!
Regarding copyright, copying for display purposes non-commercially seems to be fair use. There are four factors to fair use analysis: purpose (non-commercial art project), nature of the work (short factual public comments), amount taken (individual comments in context), and market harm (none, your comment still exists on HN and YC loses nothing). Three of the four factors favor fair use, and arguably all four.
The point is, it's not as cut and dry as you're portraying it to be. If you post data publicly on the internet, you should expect it to be read. The current legal system seems to support this theory.
Since this neither violates the CFAA nor copyright, it seems ok. Publicly posted content carries an implied license for reasonable access and display. That's why you can quote HN comments in a blog post without getting sued.