Ask HN: Why isn't Hacker News open-source?

What does that even mean?

If memory serves me correctly, it was (is) [1] open sourced on the Arc language, but certain spam catching and ranking algorithms were made closed to prevent gaming.

[1] http://arclanguage.org/install

IIRC Lobsters[0] is an open-source[1] alternative, if you want.

[0] https://lobste.rs/

[1] https://github.com/jcs/lobsters

HN is basically an instance of the arclanguage's example app, 'news.arc'.

See: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

It's a product intended to benefit for-profit companies, and it doesn't require community input to function. What benefit is there for anyone if it's open-source? It's hardly the best UX in this category of software.

There is also open source Telescope app, Meteor self-hosted hacker news/reddit website

[1] http://www.telescopeapp.org/