Why the source link matters

Most aggregators want you to forget where the content came from. Apple News wraps articles in its own UI. Flipboard re-flows them into magazine layouts. Twitter strips bylines and adds engagement metrics. The implicit message is: you're here for the platform, not the source.

txtfeed does the opposite. Every piece on the feed links directly to the original — Reddit thread, Hacker News post, Wikipedia article, blog URL. The source name and icon are visible on every card, and a tap takes you off-platform without a friction layer.

On paper this looks insane. Why would a platform send users away? Doesn't that destroy retention? The standard playbook says keep them inside the walls, gate the source, monetize the trapped attention. txtfeed's bet is the opposite: the only sustainable trust is the trust users build when they see you're not playing the trapping game.

There's a practical reason too. txtfeed doesn't pay for content. The pipeline pulls from public RSS, Reddit's free API, HN's free API, Wikipedia's free API. The implicit deal with those sources is that we send traffic back. Strip the source link and the deal breaks — the platform becomes a parasite, the sources start blocking us, the pipeline dies.

But the deeper reason is about the kind of product we're trying to build. txtfeed is for people who want to read the open web, not a curated walled-garden version of it. The source link is the proof that the open web is still there, that the platform isn't trying to replace it, that you can leave any time. Paradoxically, that's why people stay.

If you're building a content product and you find yourself debating whether to obscure the source, the answer is don't. Trust compounds. The platforms that hide where things came from end up trusted by no one — readers, writers, or sources. The platforms that show their work get to keep building.