HN is not a powerful walled garden.

It’s a site mostly used to share links and comments. Places like it abound on the internet.

In case of any shenanigans, they’re liable to lose users to an alternative faster than you can say digg.

Even though it’s owners are powerful people in tech, I’m willing to bet it’s not generating billions for them.

And with anonymous accounts, their incentive to harvest data and use it for ad targeting is little.

And hacker news content is searchable and accessible by anyone on the internet, not hidden like on so many other services.

This is a big deal for so many things, where solutions and advice can be retrieved instead of having to reinvent the wheel.