i love that you patiently answer these hopelessly antagonistic comments with reason and substance. you'll never convince them, but still i respect that you don't lose your cool. ofc, you're no stranger to this.
replyExcept this isn't indexing, this is creating a replacement frontend.
reply> 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.
I don't know why people decided to jump on this one specific project but there have been numerous replacement frontends for HN published over the years, and put on Show HN. And clones of HN. And datasets of HN comments.
replyI can't speak for other people, but I commented here because the person I replied to shared their project and then in response to concerns about it copying other people's content, tried to position that first as being OK because they'd offer opt-out, and then said that was viable because if it were opt-in the site wouldn't be possible.
reply> replacement frontend
replyNo, 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.
It feels odd to nitpick the terminology of somebody who is agreeing with your concern.
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