Like some other people point out: Invitation-only means trolls are less likely to show up. But the higher end of quality is not significantly better than HN.
If anything, it might be worse.
My experience with the moderation there is that some people post clear self-promotion articles, but when I attempted to post my things, I get told that this content is not welcome on the site. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.
I've been lurking on Lobsters for a while, and have definitely noticed that the self-promotion rule is selectively enforced. Just pivot into exclusively writing content about an impractical docker alternative, and you should be golden.
Snark aside, they could codify exactly what frequency of self-posting is allowed, and let the existing voting system dictate what rises to the top. I'm not sure Lobsters sees any issues with how they self-moderate though. Personally, I have always felt that invite-only communities have weird vibes to them. Still find it worth lurking for more esoteric content though.
In bits and pieces. The advice and some things that trend diverge significantly from HN. I prefer to think of Lobsters discourse as sort of an Inverse Cramer Index, but for software development.
That's interesting. My personal advice is to look at trends here as evidence of who's the public, but be very skeptical of their usefulness. What's good for faang or for a money-burning-a-series startup will kill you.
Boring tech like RDBMS, Unix servers and native clients mixed with simple web apps are better solutions for most other companies. Or even Lisp if you are in a startup and need to move fast.
But if you look at trends, you might think that you absolutely need some cloud rusty golang key-value store, with a scrum functional serverless proof-of-work nft SPA :)
Absolutely. HN is more representative of what is popular amongst software developers, but software developers have a nasty tendency to chase shiny things. Lobsters trends on the other hand feel consistently contrarian, and being contrarian tends to be highly impractical. They have been right about the return to server rendering HTML though. It's a place to find different perspectives, for better or worse.
The tone of the comments have evolved over time. When I first found this site, it had a high percentage of entrepreneurs trying to build startups. Refreshing compared to Slashdot that was getting a little more cultish by the day.
Later the founders got diluted, I guess by the influx of employees of said startups, big tech or consultancies, like myself, then anyone from the outskirts. The vibes changed dramatically, until it was unhospitable for the original population. Many of them vanished. Even pg doesn't write here anymore and when some of his essays are posted the reception is outright hostile.
I'm not talking about politics, not only. A lot of comments are on the opposite extreme from the original curiousity and build mindset. People saying that any idea presented won't work, is useless, is nothing new. People talking about what should be, but in denial about what is and of course never doing anything.
There are many perfectly reasonable things you can't say here.
So we have like... the Internet, more civil than average and with a lot of interesting links. Also there are some fellow commenters that I love to read.
When I first found HN in 2008 it was a refreshing community that actually understands business. Which is a very rare thing on the internet. Because the site is geared towards startup and entrepreneurs, they had to understand business one way or another. And hence this somewhat pro-business stands earned its early reputation as an alt-right site.
Now that is mostly gone. The business side of the discussions has completely vanished.
> Later the founders got diluted, I guess by the influx of employees of said startups, big tech or consultancies, like myself, then anyone from the outskirts.
I am one of the new users who contributed to dilute entrepreneurial founder. I didn't worked for a startup when I joined. What made me join and stick around is that NH hosts the best stream of tech-related submissions, and discussions tend to attract knowledgeable people who know what they are talking about, and some of which are even the leading expert on the topic.
I am also an ex slashdot lurker. That place used to serve that itch, but nowadays it reads like their comment section attracts mostly the 4chan crowd. Quite the fall from grace.
The general quality of discussion is ridiculously low on anything not strictly CS-related. Software engineers tend to be quite cocky, self-confident also regarding unrelated stuff to their expertise, and it shows very much.
With that said, the occasional gem of some well-known expert of the field chiming in is worth digging through some bullshit comments, I just dislike that CS-topics are quite rare compared to just general news.
Just try being critical of the American military-industrial complex. You will get stomped by members whose livelihood depends on the perpetuation of the phony moral authority that is necessary to continue that heinous state of affairs ..
It exists because the American people have been lulled into the false narrative that their nation protects the world .. when in fact the absolute opposite is true - the worlds safety is constantly under pressure from the 1000 torture sites the American people pay for every single year - the ruling elite of the rest of the world knows this and responds accordingly, thus feeding the loop which justifies yet more actual repression from the USA, with regards to its military ..
Our world is unjust and replete with suffering. The question is what are you going to do about it?
There's a lot of things you can do to improve your life and the life of people around you. Discussing world problems in an online forum is not one of those things.
These up and down arrows near the comments give us the illusion that we can vote for the solution of everything.
One most certainly can be an individual example of change. For example, I refuse to make excuses for the war crimes, crimes against humanity and massive violations of human rights, committed in my name, by my nation.
Discussing it online is perfectly acceptable. Nobody is expecting the criminal Joint Chiefs of Staff to be reading HN, have an epiphany and frog-march themselves in chains into The Hague - but we certainly can put the idea into our fellow citizens minds that this would be a just action and perfectly acceptable way to re-gain control over our society ..
This is a common failure mode that's seen in some reddit subs.
In reddit, the moderators of that sub get a particular idea of how their sub should look, which oddly enough includes the idea that what they do is always right. Any sub that can have physical products backing it, such as makeup, will commonly fall in this trap.
Mods: "You cannot promote products here... (unless you're one of my friends or giving me kickbacks".
Now with Reddit, you have a very large usebase to keep the sub alive. But small sites will commonly strangle themselves by doing this.
Those are hot-buttons that have ruined other communities, so whatever the specifics for that sub, my guess is Political Controversy. Anyone on here know anything for sure?
I don't think those are the specific topics that ruined this subreddit. The moderators killed this subreddit: if you express a slightly different opinion than liberal left wing, you will be banned for being "not welcoming and create a bad mood". And you will be banned also to express any polite kind of criticism to all the minorities, except one: the catholics. For them, every insults is accepted.
>you have a very large usebase to keep the sub alive.
I don't know about that. You have a large userbase of upvoters sure, but commenter were declining in quantity long before the June API changes on a number of subs that were more discussion based than meme or article upvotes.
https://subredditstats.com/r/conspiracy Conspiracy is a good example of a discussion sub, no comment on the actual discussions, driven by upvotes and were did all the commenters go before June's API disruption while the subscribers kept climbing?
Like the other poster said. Conspiracy is less about the api and more (waaaaaaayyyyy more) about fringe politics becoming mainstream. It was one of the first subs to rot during the 2016 and then died during the 2020 American presidential elections.
Well then where did all the politicers go? https://subredditstats.com/r/politics
has a similar Subscribers to Commenters ratio decline that Conspiracy had.
> when I attempted to post my things, I get told that this content is not welcome on the site. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.
I feel the same. I spent a fair bit of time on the site, including posting ~600 articles and commenting. Some of my posts got a fair bit of upvotes. I got a couple of warnings when I posted my own content, even though it was 5-10% of my posts. Super frustrating, so I told the moderator I wasn't going to participate any more. And I haven't. Their site, their rules, but I don't have to spend my time there.
Weird because primarily submitting one's own stuff seems to be pretty common there. Random example from a user currently on the front page: https://lobste.rs/~rednafi/stories
And that is not the only one on the front page right now that's submitting mostly their own stuff.
To nitpick: that's not a comment from a mod. Posts speaking from a position of mod will have [sysop] next to the title. It's part of a "hats system", which more generally allows people to speak as representative of something. IE if /u/johncheng was a Rust core dev, they can post whatever they want as John Cheng, but also write posts as [core dev] to say they're speaking as part of the core team.
It's a neat system but doesn't see much use in practice, aside from the occasional [sysop] warning.
Personally I don't see a problem with someone posting their own content, especially with voting based ranking. As long as it's not spam and is on-topic for the site, the origin shouldn't really matter. Compared with someone who posts only New York Times articles, I'd rather see someone post their blog entries.
I had a similar experience. I simply deleted my account and left the site. If my contributions weren't welcome then that's the choice of the moderators, but I had no desire to try to participate in a forum where simply linking to relevant non-promotional content that happens to be posted on your own website will get you accused of being a spammer.
I remember once I mentioned something about lobste.rs in Twitter (trying to actually be positive for the community) and the creator went all crazy against me . shrug Thanks but no thanks
I wrote "What Punch Cards Teach Us About AI Risk", and I was really surprised -- and frankly, disappointed -- that they pulled it. It was the #1 story on Lobsters when they pulled it, with plenty of comments (and some good discussion!). It was also shocking to me that their moderation involves scrubbing it from the site entirely; at least on HN, the story can get modded down, but if people still wish to discuss the topic, they can. (And in fact, I have seen some discussions that were too hot cool down and become reasonable when the stories themselves have been modded down.)
The whole thing left me with a very sour taste (and not for the first time!) about Lobsters. I will continue to check in there from time to time, but I will hesitate to submit stories or participate in discussion: the moderators are simply too capricious for my tastes -- and we clearly disagree about what is on topic and what is off topic for technologists. Conversely: Lobsters has reminded me how much I appreciate HN; thank you dang and other HN mods for everything you do!
"What are you working on this week?" is a weekly thread since forever where people often talk about computing anyways.
I don't see why moderating posts should be fair. Better to remove a few good stories by accident than to leave up trash. You'll never have enough time to read all good ones anyways. They're very careful with banning though.
yeah, the problem with invite only is that it removes the best and the worst users. it self-selects for the sort of terminally-online people willing to put up with an invite process. people like me.
the best content on sites like this is the random comment that appears from somebody who's the absolute undisputed expect on some subject, and doesn't normally leave comments, but sees an opportunity to share their knowledge and does so because it's low enough friction.
There's a little button on the submit form that adds a tag to say you're the author. If you forget it and it comes out, people tend to assume it's on purpose.
One small note I'd add is that the Lobsters software has had at least one very unfortunate bug that led to pushcx claiming that I had "disowned all my comments"[1] when I left Lobsters. I had, in fact, not done so.[2] The bug was later fixed[3], but even today, over 2 years later, my comments remain disowned. They were never recovered. Textually, they're still on the site, but no longer associated with my account, which makes them very difficult to find. I'm still a little salty about that because I contributed a sizeable body of comments to Lobsters that would be at least nice to link occasionally.
Anyway, my point is, when pushcx says, "all banned users get an email notifying them of a ban with the Reply-To header set to my email," that's only true if at least the Lobsters software is behaving as it is intended to behave. It may not be.
This is interesting, but I'm having trouble connecting it to the comment I just wrote, and I'm wondering if I'm missing a connection that would be more obvious if I paid more attention to Lobsters.
I'm just saying that you can't necessarily trust that an email was sent to banned users. It's a small point. I honestly don't know what to make of the situation as a whole. It is strange.
Oh. I perceived the parent commenter to simply be saying they were surprised at why they were banned. But 'pushcx explained what happened in detail, and if that explanation is correct (I have no insight into it, other than generally liking 'pushcx, who is not a friend or anything) it's hard to see how they would be confused about what happened.
But I'm just overexplaining myself now. What happened with you and Lobsters is also very interesting (and also yikes, and sorry that happened; I'd be pretty upset if all my HN comments got disowned).
You are assuming the moderators are not lying. Unfortunately, mods on some sites do lie and do claim innocent posters violated rules. I myself was temporarily banned on one site because I argued that the Epic game store was good for competition and would help bring down prices for both consumers and game developers.
The stated reason for the banning was something like “trolling”. Not much to say other than some mods are good but some abuse their power.
Lobste.rs has an open moderation log: you can see what was done by who. It's one of the few places where I think it's possible to actually trust the moderators are treating things fairly.
I will handily take the mods side of the story, it’s quite clear from the effort put in the respective comments, and the underlying incentives (what would a mod win from making up such a complicated story, vs that of the offender party?)
Lobsters doesn't have any contact information (I later learned they have an IRC channel) so I didn't get to hear an explanation from the Lobsters moderator until the topic came up here and ended up getting mediated in a Hacker News thread. The moderator was very clear that I was not only spamming myself, but I was encouraging my friends to spam too. For example, one thing I got specifically called out for was I invited my friend from the University of Tokyo to Lobsters so he could share his https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Lisp_in_Life project. This turned out to be very bad per Lobsters cultural norms.
The Lobsters moderator wants new people to earn their place in the community before doing anything that serves their personal interests. It matters not if your self-interests are aligned with giving the Lobsters community what they want. The moderator said they're a smaller platform where it's not difficult to influence the algorithm, and as a result he's very protective of that. You can't just play the upvote game. You have to make sure the mod knows you and likes you before doing that. Another thing I did was I used a loophole to help my friend share his project. In my culture, figuring out how to work around the rules without breaking them is considered a highly prized skill. When the Lobsters algorithm said his account was too new to post a link, I thought I was vouching for and reviewing his project link by posting it myself. But the Lobsters moderator took it as a personal insult and challenge to his authority.
> When the Lobsters algorithm said his account was too new to post a link, I thought I was vouching for and reviewing his project link by posting it myself.
I'm pretty sure this would be considered a normal vouching & introduction of a member to the site, if those members did not then repeatedly follow up your introduction with repeated self-promotion (including bonus violation of the spirit of the unseen domain policy). As someone inviting others to Lobsters, you were trusted with a small duty to introduce them to the site properly. For most of those you invited, you were both the person initially posting the invitee's relevant unseen domain and the inviter for that invitee. It's respectful there to warn new users of site policy that you don't expect them to know.
When I invited a friend to Lobsters a few months ago so they could post their cool new project there, I made sure to educate them about the self-promotion policy so that both they could continue to use the site and so that I didn't become a problem for the site.
I thought I was. It's just no one told me about the Lobsters policy. I consistently violated the Lobsters policy for several years and no one warned me. I'm just someone who quit her job at Google Brain to build open source code all day in service to the commons. The thought never occurred to me there's people out there who view what I do as spamming and self-promotion. Before I got banned, I'd never heard the word spam used that way, which is why I was so confused. I wish I'd known beforehand that I wouldn't be welcome there, since then I wouldn't have engaged. Honestly I think the real victims here are the Lobsters community members. My work still gets promoted on Lobsters, even though I'm banned. When I publish something new or end up in the news, there's usually a Lobsters thread about it. The only difference is that now I'm not allowed to make myself personally available to my fans, answering their questions, and fixing the bugs they encounter. So I feel like I'm gaining publicity unfairly since Lobsters denies me the ability to fulfill my moral obligation to serve the people whose respect I'm earning.
> I always felt like the Lobsters crowd is the kinds of people who'll tell you what they really think
I genuinely would not have guessed that this would ever be a problem on the internet.
Lobsters has a simple but effective and fairly strongly enforced tag system that makes it far easier to curate your feed than HN. Despite what others have said here, it is not a ghost town at all, it's intentionally lower noise and they'd like to keep it that way.
Roughly 100 tags on the page. I see "news" and "ipv6" marked as no longer active. I'm guessing that "inactive" implies dropping from SQL indexes as an economy measure, while retaining unmodified in the original post's metadata.
> Quite a disciplined policy by the stewards of the website. How does the enforcement work against say, overtagging?
Tags are used as negative signal, rather than positive (as in, you filter out tags you don't like, rather than taking the ones you do), so overtagging would kill the submission, and missing tags will be added by others via suggestions (which automatically add the tag after some threshold amount of suggestions).
I like lobsters. One of my main use cases is on my phone in the middle of the night (while rocking my newborn), since it actually has a legit dark mode, unlike HN, which blinds me and lights up the room. I don't understand how HN doesn't...
Also much more mobile friendly in general. I typically use HN more but tends to pull Lobsters up far more often on mobile. Even though I do have a user stylesheet for HN it still doesn't make it great on mobile and I can be bothered to fiddle with it too much myself.
It's definitely not a ghost town. It's just not a treadmill. It's hard to have a conversation on hacker news because (1) articles cycle through quickly and (2) you don't get reply notifications. Lobsters is a bit more human scale IMO.
I actually do like it that HN doesn't have reply notifications.
I don't feel compelled to read/reply to every message, there's zero sense of urgency, and this is perfect for something you do in your free/idle time.
More importantly, every now and then something you write blows up and gets a disproportionate amount of attention from others. On websites with notifications, or on mailing lists, this gets distracting and disturbing. On HN, I'm happy to find out I've had my 5 minutes of fame the next day.
I don't have an account although a couple things I wrote got posted there, if I'd realized it at the time that apparently qualifies me.
Overall I don't know if the quality is better than HN, even if the SNR is higher, there is just so much less total that the sum of good stuff is lower. It's almost completely free of politics, gossip, non-tech stuff though which is nice. For example I don't think any of the OpenAI drama was covered there.
Otoh the links posted there are essentially a subset of what's posted on HN.
From my experience in invite-only forums, it can only assure some bottom line (mainly, fewer troll posts), but it doesn't help at all on the quality of comments.
The only thing I saw that ever significantly improved the quality of comments is vote-based comment system when it firstly started to emerge (I'm thinking Reddit in its first few years). But unfortunately it nowadays has been gamed to death, probably even worse than old public forums.
If you request an invitation here, I’m sure someone will happily invite you.
I wouldn’t recommend the recommended IRC route, I’ve tried doing that multiple times and it was never fruitful, it’s kinda dead.
With that said: I do find Tildes’s approach much better (though probably quite hard on the admin), where you can just message the admin with a short “motivational letter” and get a registration link.
I mean, compared to Hacker News in comment velocity and overall homepage change rate yeah it's a lot slower. Microscopically slow in comparison. Some people that are used to the fast-paced change of feeds like you have on bigger social media websites get used to the rapid pace of how things change. It can feel really weird when things _don't_ change that fast (such as how people bounce off of Mastodon because they don't know how to curate their feed anymore). I kinda like it, but I've been trying to break the addiction cycles of things like Twitter, so for each their own.
I think I would prefer a slower comment velocity. By the time I get around to replying on HN, everybody has moved on. But I really like how articles aren't limited to technology on HN.
Any reason why HN source code is not published? The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior, but having an open standard might actually help it improve rather than keeping it as a hidden secret that slowly gets discovered by independent malicious parties.
But I don't think there has been any public updates since that release (edit: updates from YC. There is a community-led project that continues to improve the codebase after that release)
I would guess it's part of the ethos of not spending more time and effort on HN than strictly needed. Perhaps also a bit of the standard silicon valley culture of building on open source but not actually contributing anything meaningful back.
>The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior
I wonder if it would be possible to split HN (or any other HN-like site) into two halves: one would handle the actual storage of posts and comments, and another would handle the scoring, ie the order the comment tree branches appear in. Then we could have multiple of the latter, competing with each other on the scoring alone, with the actual content being common.
The reddit open source code was basically this. The whole thing was open, including the scoring, but all the spam functions were just stubs that returned True or False as appropriate, without all the logic. Then we would override those functions with a private library that had all the spam logic.
I find your idea interesting about having a service that stores the links and comments (and presumably does spam controls too) but anyone can put their own scoring/sorting algo on it.
There's an interesting less granular pooled approach worth exploring .. seeing the aggregate scoring of {people you follow} | {friends} | {Dev community} | {carpentry fans}.
It's the "crowd I find of interest" also found "this stuff to be interesting".
More like with Usenet where every user would have their own scorefile, which determined the order they would see posts. Except without having every user to manage it for themselves, instead choosing which "frontend" to use.
> The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior, but having an open standard might actually help it improve rather than keeping it as a hidden secret that slowly gets discovered by independent malicious parties.
Good point. You can see it as a part of a "defense in depth" strategy. Ideally you want the system's security architecture to stand it's ground, even if everything (except for the private keys) gets leaked. In practice you'll conceal some of these details to gain an extra edge.
Lisp famously allows your software to be extremely dynamic, so I don't see why such functionality shouldn't be implemented as a closed plugin, while the core of the site would remain open to public contributions. And boy does this website need a couple fixes... (dark mode? mobile CSS? large comment thread performance? dupe link detection?)
There's probably not all that much to see past the decade-old public release from the arc project. The parts of it that aren't public past that are non-public by necessity, like the voting ring detector stuff.
Their design allows them to focus on 'acculturating' new users, but does very little to spell out that culture or present unambiguous guard rails.
There are some prominent posters whose personal projects get free passes.
I don't feel like Lobsters is a community friendly to people on the spectrum. They expect allistic members who all understand socializing on an intuitive and instinctual level.
I've considered looking for an invite, but I don't think I'd be well received and I don't care for being reprimanded by a stranger over tone or 'unprofessionalism' when I see straight trolling or passive aggression in comments.
The invite system is solid but I would change a few things to turn it into a place I might have a chance of being welcome.
It's important to choose who you invite, and who invites you, carefully. If the invitee screws up, it reflects poorly on the inviter. If the inviter screws up, everyone they invited may also get looked at.
I don't know anyone on Lobsters enough to have that sort of relationship with. I don't really submit things, even here; not worth the trouble of being told something's a bad fit, off-topic, repost, bad title, or some other nitpick. There is likely to be friction if I were to participate there, so it's for the best.
Hello, this post actually made me make a post of my own.
I think you can have your cake and eat it here.
If you filter HN with uBlock Origin to remove topics and sources you are not interested in, i.e. non-technical ones in my case, probably the case for many others too, then you can create what Lobsters was going for, but here on HN.
You get the fully populated, buoyant chat, whilst fine tuning the scope of topics and sources you see.
Is there an equivalent of https://hckrnews.com/ (especially the top 10 / top 20 filters) for lobste.rs? That's the main way I browse HN, I wish I could do the same for lobste.rs. The closest seems to be https://lobste.rs/top but it seems to only cover the past week.
I was always liked the idea of the site, but never got an invite. I lurk there occasionally when I see discussions around a topic that I find interesting that didn’t get traction on HN.
Aside from the argument for/against lobste.rs, is there anything in the codebase that is worthwhile? Any feature/functionality that could be implemented in Lemmy, for example?
I quite like Lobste.rs - yes it is is a ghost town. I dont have a login as know no one on it. But it less reddit that maybe modern day Hacker news can be.
I enjoy HN as much as the next guy but it's easy to get high comment counts when you count archive.is links (and the ensuing 4 levels nested argument about why they don't work with Cloudflare DNS and who's in the right on that), complaints about CSS/scroll hijacking, and general pedantry. You can find many cases where interesting but pretty specific kind of technical stuff sort of languishes at the bottom of the front page whereas flamebait type articles that tap into the vague libertarian anti-surveillance sentiment that is popular here get hundreds of comments. Not that I don't generally agree with it, just that I've heard all the arguments a million times and I'd rather learn about how to use AVX2 instructions. I think the algorithm should have some sort of subject based ranking, where highly repetitive topics are penalized. Or maybe it already does and the sheer popularity of the stuff makes it show up regardless.
That being said, I haven't seen that many interesting things on Lobsters that weren't also on HN. Only one that comes to mind is the Go 1.22 inlining overhaul but I just googled it and apparently that was also on HN, I just missed it.
I made no comparison to HN, nor would I want to. I try to avoid having an "us vs them" mindset because it makes for boring conversation. I don't dislike lobste.rs in any way, I just prefer a wider variety of opinions to go with my tech news so I only really pop by when I'm reminded it exists.
For the record my preferred variety of opinions does not include spam and the other repetitive guff you mention haha, I'll be the first on the downvote and/or flag train for those comments. Absolute yawn fests the lot of them.
Anyway I mentioned numbers because they didn't seem to have changed, I'm not saying more numbers = better forum. That would be daft. More varied and therefore more interesting (to me)? Sure, aye. Better or worse? Nah.
I have never thought of it that way, and I'm still not sure I understand the idea. For some people the point of visiting a site is related to the number of votes or comments?
Well no the numbers aren't going to be a thing anyone directly cares about. Of course not, haha. Looking at my previous comments I'm not sure I even said anything that would imply that?
What the numbers represent (how active the community is) is the bit folks would care about.
In any case I used the numbers as a measure of how much the site is growing or not growing in response to the comment I responded to. The numbers seem the same as they've always been, hence it does not look like they are growing as the comment I responded to was claiming.
Thanks for clarification. I thought you were suggesting size or growth as a value themselves.
I agree people want some activity on discussion forums, otherwise what's the point. Another hand I think a lot of people think volume is inversely related to Quality once you get past a certain threshold
When things grow, they change, often becoming worse from their “old” users point of view. So, why would you want it to grow, as opposed to staying the way you like it?
This seems to make a few assumptions I'm not sure I agree with.
Growth is worse. Growing too fast can make things worse, aye. Not necessarily because there's more people in general but because the community changes as a result of them joining. The new users don't adapt to the existing culture quick enough, and because there's so many of them in a short amount of time the culture is disrupted and pushes out the existing userbase, locking in the new culture. This is one of the reasons lobsters has the invite system going by their about page so they seem to be actively trying to prevent this effect. Maybe there's a better way to do it, maybe this is the only way, that one's not really for me to say. Even if it was for me to say I don't have any better suggestions.
I want it to grow. I don't really have an opinion on lobsters in that respect. If it works for them and their users, that's great! Some sites just ain't for me, no worries.
It is currently the way I like it. I like a wider variety of comments, so in its current form lobsters isn't the way I like it. There's plenty of other places on the internet for me to get my fill though, we're on one of 'em now! I wouldn't want them to change on my behalf. If it works for what they're after - again that's great!
While the site isn't my cup of tea I can absolutely see why they run it like they do. If Reddit shut down tomorrow and all the more memey tech users migrated here in one go, this place would become terrible (as always, in my opinion) - I can see why they do what they do, even if I don't personally enjoy the end result. No problem though, it's one less source of easy dopamine. Lord knows I don't need any more of those :)
HN versus Lobsters made me realise how important moderator freedom/discretion is. Like in principle I'd rather be on the site that had a moderator action log and clear rules about what gets people banned, and I complain about the moderation here plenty, but in practice I'll take the site that manages to ban annoying users who stay on just the right side of any written code.
Despite the mod log and clear rules, I personally find that Lobsters relies a lot on norms. There's nothing wrong with that, I mean my D&D table isn't open to everyone and has the norms that come with being a personal friend of mine which are vague and contained only in my head. But Lobsters is an invitation-based public site.
Norms are a challenging thing to communicate in face-to-face communications. They're even harder to communicate online where all we have is text. They can also lead to the perception of selective enforcement. The discussions in this thread on the self-promotion rule and some angst about how certain topics and community members get better treatment than others are good examples on how the norms on Lobsters feels unevenly enforced by folks who have used the site.
My own experience on the site made me feel that the norms around moderation felt uneven. Some topics and some posters seemed to be more favored than others. The lack of clear moderation is what led me to stop participating on the site; ultimately I felt like I wasn't in the "in-group". Maybe that's the point of a norm-based moderation style. In that regard, even if dang has no modlog, his moderation feels even-handed and consistent enough that I never feel the presence of an in-group and out-group. Of course this site is much larger so it might be a volume thing. A ban or a flag of 1/8 comments "feels" much more impactful than flags on 50/300 comments, but probably much harder to detect.
While I don't post on the site much anymore, I don't find us-vs-them dynamics to be particularly useful. They sow rancor where there doesn't need to be much. Lobsters isn't my kind of site but it obviously is for some folks, and that's great!
Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought you were trying to compare the Lobsters moderators to Dang in a positive way, something not really emphasized in the top comment and its children.
Even that is not what I meant. The top comment on that thread consists of a complaint that self-promotion rules appear inconsistently enforced. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't; I don't know. But that doesn't contradict what I said about Lobsters moderation. This is just another example of the tired message board trope of blowing any complaint about anything into a blanket condemnation. Nuance is boring to write, strident declamation isn't. Unfortunately, for the reader, it's the opposite.
I don't think I've ever posted any articles on Lobsters, but there are a bunch of users there that use the "report" feature any time that they see a post that doesn't support their own personal opinion. That aspect of the site does get old, fast.
But most of the users there are cool. Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad users to make the experience of posting uncomfortable.
There's a URL for each user that shows their standing. Any recent (last 30 days) reports are listed there. You can't tell who reported you, but you can tell what they were complaining about (which post, what reason they gave).
The URL is reddit-like, i.e. /u/username/standing
The problem is that there's a downside to being reported, but there's apparently no downside to reporting people. Since there's no down-voting of comments on lobsters, and since reporting comments is apparently free and unlimited, some people seem to use it as their down-vote. And since it's anonymous (the reporting person's name isn't included in the report to the person being reported), and since reporting appears to have no limits or downsides, it inevitably creates some twisted incentives.
I currently have no "reports" there, but that's because I (mostly) learned my lesson: Post your own opinion at your own risk. i.e. You'd better make sure that your opinions aren't unpopular with any users there, and particularly not with the dominant group.
I think someone else mentioned that the things that they posted that were reported, were also the things that received many more upvotes. I can personally confirm this from my own history. However, I don't find this surprising: If something evokes a response that could cause someone to upvote it, it shouldn't be surprising that it would evoke a response that could cause someone to report it. And receiving kudos for an opinion does not absolve that opinion of the responsibility to adhere to the rules and standards of the site.
Coincidentally (and AFAIK not related to this thread here), I did have a comment moderated (i.e. deleted) within the last 24 hours. I'm of mixed feelings on the rationale for the moderation. It's a thread that contains highly-upvoted comments like "I hope those responsible get sued to oblivion. This kind of stuff should result in a corporate death penalty." My comment was: "Just waiting for a case like this to make it up to the US Supreme Court so they can rule that it’s a constitutional right of companies to do this." Apparently, my post was "political". (I can only assume that the "political" aspect was my implication that non-human legal entities like corporations should not be granted legal rights by SCOTUS that expropriate or otherwise displace the rights of actual human beings.) The thread: https://lobste.rs/s/8igrxm/train_firmware_reverse_engineerin...
On the other hand, I do agree that some portion of the topic is very technical in nature (and the technical aspects are interesting), and it's hard to discuss that portion of the topic if people are constantly commenting about relevant aspects of the legal system or whatever. So since the post wasn't specifically about the legal aspects (or "political" aspects, if you insist), I can kind of see the point of the moderation.
If you ask politely on the IRC & share a bit about who you are it’s fairly likely someone will send you an invite. No guarantees though - the likelihood probably depends at least partially on how long it’s been since the last bunch of self-promoting spammers set up their own little invite ring after being invited in...
Has anyone looked at the correlation between HN top posts and Lobsters? I would occasionally lurk on Lobsters until I realized that the majority of content on L had already been posted on HN first. Private community that's basically an echo chamber of existing community's content... no thanks.
For me, even if stuff I'm interested in has already been posted on HN, it often rolls off the front page before I ever see it. The front page there moves more slowly, so there's a greater chance I actually see and discuss it.
How come that this is the first time (might have visited that site several years ago, recognize the CSS in some way) that I hear about lobster.rs? Is the site entirely by invitation or are there at least a couple yearly signup openings?
I like the discussions there but looking for an account so I can post. Currently going through github issues and finding things I can fix so someone rewards me.
You seem like someone who can add to a discussion, and you like SDR stuff too. Figure out how to contact me using the info in my profile and I'll send you an invite.
Small crew of very high quality *paid* moderators. I don't know how many other hats Daniel wears in YC, but based on the times he's active here, he's spending _a lot_ of time doing moderation work.
Lobste.rs, as far as I know, works only with volunteers which probably are an incohesive group of random people with random thresholds for how they moderate. It's entirely reasonable for such a community to build redundancies in the methods for lowering unwanted content.
> Seems like HN is able to handle moderation with a small crew.
A certain amount of moderation. There's still a large amount of content posted on here that should probably have been moderated but isn't (for whatever reason.)
I feel versions in Gemfile tend to make things harder to update and often end up accidentally retaining some old version. You won't get a random version bump unless you do `bundle update` anyway, since you have a lock file.
Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free :)
Those are just as easy when using the standard "semver compatible with the specified version" approach. The lockfile will prevent such attacks on build, and on upgrade it doesn't really matter security wise if the new version has the same major version.
With ruby being untyped and lazy evaluated, it's even worse. If any library's api changes between versions, unless you're sure you have a unit test for that function, it'll happily deploy and crash in production.
Plus as long as you're using a service like snyk.io to make sure that you're covering security vulnerabilities, there's usually not much reason to updating if it works.
Lobste.rs definitely feels like less of an echo chamber: both Reddit and HN have a large "I don't agree with you, downvote" population - on HN this is officially endorsed as "correct" use too.
For what it's worth, I've found reddit and H distinctly different in the down voting behavior. Reddit will down vote on disagree (depending on subreddit) no matter how the info or opinion is presented, but in my experience where it appears HN is down voting on disagreement it's more that the presentation was too forceful.
The biggest example of that IMO is people presenting opinions as fact rather than something to be explored. This can be subtle, and in conflict with how people debate or often discuss between two people, but given it's a public forum, a sprinkling of "I think" or "it seems to me" in in comments goes a long way towards not only not triggering some people into down voting, but also seems to promote more useful discussion around the topic as those or others seem more likely to voice their differences.
> a sprinkling of "I think" or "it seems to me" in in comments goes a long way towards not only not triggering some people into down voting, but also seems to promote more useful discussion
Agreed on this for sure. My comments used to get more downvoted (or at least less upvoted) before I started pointing out that they're just my opinion. Bonus if you mention your opinion on the subject is loosely held and open to correction (personally I love it when someone says something that causes my mind to change! Fresh neuron connections, free dopamine!)
Originally I thought that people would just assume everything I wrote without citing any sources is my opinion but I guess folks just need to be reassured sometimes :)
According to my experience rather on Lobsters participants seem to be mostly concerned with nagging. Rarely got a useful or positive comment for my posts there. There is a small circle of users who have a particularly good relationship with the admin and flag everything they don't like. I had much better discussions and more useful feedback on some subreddits.
I agree that the downvoting possibility encourages misuse. There is no downvoting on Lobsters, but people instead flag whatever they don't like, even if there is objectively no violation of the site rules. Actually I would prefer a site where you can only upvote or flag, not downvote, but the admin in that case should charge people who misuse flagging.
Without seeing actual examples of posted articles that were flagged it's honestly impossible to make any judgement.
Edit: I should point out that this isn't a hypothetical question either. As the moderation log is open, we can see exactly why a user was banned or post was removed etc.
And if you then complain that the post doesn't violate house rules, you get some obviously wrong claims from someone of the inner circle why it does; if you then contradict to these claims or present facts, you usually get flagged for trolling, and eventually your comments are removed by the admin. I have still an account but don't spend more time there.
As a Lobsters user, I think you could have avoided those spam flags with a less click-baity title and opening line of the body. “MIT CSG Memo 137 was the first CS publication to use the term "object-oriented"” would have been a better title, since you posted after the result was discovered.
Good posts on software more reliably get to the top of lobste.rs than on HN in my experience. Whereas on HN you're competing with a wide variety of topics. Lobste.rs is pretty focused on just hardware/software hacking.
I don't mean that negatively. I'm glad we talk about varied topics on HN. But it's also nice to have a place that almost only talks about software/hardware.
Sometimes I've thought about starting a "software internals" forum but then I remember that's basically exactly what lobste.rs already is.
Like some other people point out: Invitation-only means trolls are less likely to show up. But the higher end of quality is not significantly better than HN.
If anything, it might be worse.
My experience with the moderation there is that some people post clear self-promotion articles, but when I attempted to post my things, I get told that this content is not welcome on the site. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.