You can read HN without an account, and making an account doesn't require providing a phone number. (Discord in some cases locks you out of an account entirely if it thinks that you are "suspicious" until you provide a one-time sms code from a phone # that satisfies them)
Yeah, Hacker News is an ideal community. Part of it is how sequestered our little community is, despite being popular within our own circles. I'm sure if they scaled up their userbase they'd start running into issues with spam and then we would see account verification.
