Lobsters

by tosh • 3 years ago

263 179 3 years ago

bmsleight_• 3 years ago

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.

warkanlock• 3 years ago

Ghost town? It's active and growing!

corobo6• 3 years ago

It still seems about the same as it has been for years from an outside perspective

<20 comments (votes, even) on most posts

It's pretty ghostly for a site that's been around since 2012

stephenr5• 3 years ago

know no one on it

Shoot me an email, it's in my profile.

bdcravens• 3 years ago

No version numbers in the Gemfile? That's brave.

riffraff2• 3 years ago

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 :)

rad_gruchalski2• 3 years ago

Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free

A wet dream of anyone looking for a method to perform a supply chain attack.

brink• 3 years ago

Being harder to update is the point.

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.

Xiol32• 3 years ago

Would be less of a ghost town if they allowed sign ups rather than via invitation only.

Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.

bigdubs• 3 years ago

Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice!

I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.

tapirl• 3 years ago

Invite doesn't always guarantee insightful comments.

thrdbndndn• 3 years ago

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.

gtirloni• 3 years ago

Except you don't see those 2 really insightful comments there.

robocat• 3 years ago

300

Exaggerating doesn't make reflect well on your argument.

HN doesn't have a notable problem with self-promotion.

wrs• 3 years ago

I read HN for the links, because of the quantity, and lobste.rs for the comments, because of the quality.

andy993• 3 years ago

They discuss under "invitation tree" how it's possible to get an invite if you want one.

https://lobste.rs/about

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.

some_furry2• 3 years ago

If you want an invite, ask your friends if anyone has an account.

fifteen1506• 3 years ago

A good samaritan on the other Blue site gave me one but I haven't had good comments to make since.

some_furry2• 3 years ago

It's not a ghost town, it's just not as noisy as HN. It's quite active.

xena• 3 years ago

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.

insanitybit• 3 years ago

I post on there most days. It's not really a ghost town, and there's a lot less noise than HN with only a bit less signal.

agent281• 3 years ago

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.

TheSpiceIsLife• 3 years ago

To get automated email notifications of replies to your comments see http://www.hnreplies.com/

rollcat2• 3 years ago

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.

gaws• 3 years ago

rather than via invitation only.

This is a good thing.

kaba05• 3 years ago

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.

38• 3 years ago

Not a fan of having to beg for an invitation. Seems like HN is able to handle moderation with a small crew.

mariusor• 3 years ago

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.

zimpenfish• 3 years ago

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.)

voidfunc• 3 years ago

I had a lobster account and a bunch of invites once upon a time. Totally forgot about it. Closed gate HN never really appealed to me.

eatonphil• 3 years ago

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.

linusg789• 3 years ago

Hit the nail on the head.

xoranth• 3 years ago

It's not (just) the variety of topics, it is that HN has way more users (and therefore way more submissions).

A submission on lobste.rs will stay on top of recent/newest for days, on HN it might be minutes.

treesciencebot• 3 years ago

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.

capableweb2• 3 years ago

Here you can find the latest public code: http://arclanguage.org/

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)

shawnz• 3 years ago

It shares the same lineage as this code: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news

krapp2• 3 years ago

Anarki and its version of the forum is so far removed from the original Arc base that it isn't even worth comparing at this point.

dun444• 3 years ago

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.

solardev• 3 years ago

Kinda like how reddit has "hot", "top", and "best"?

jedberg• 3 years ago

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.

krapp2• 3 years ago

Hacker News has an API[0], awkward as it is (but not rate-limited) and Algolia does as well[1]. It isn't difficult to build a basic reader client.

[0] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/api

capableweb2• 3 years ago

Funnily enough, you're basically describing Bluesky/AT Proto: https://atproto.com/guides/overview

tptacek5• 3 years ago

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.

aftbit2• 3 years ago

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.

rollcat2• 3 years ago

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?)

Hakashiro• 3 years ago

I had an account here. I still do.

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.

mooreds2• 3 years ago

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.

https://lobste.rs/~mooreds is my profile.

andy993• 3 years ago

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.

pixl972• 3 years ago

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.

lormayna3• 3 years ago

This resembles exactly the description of moderation in /r/italy. There are more people banned from there than people subscribing this subreddit.

undersuit3• 3 years ago

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?

evantbyrne3• 3 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro• 3 years ago

I think the sweet spot is opening up x number of registrations every few months.

narag5• 3 years ago

I have always felt that invite-only communities have weird vibes to them.

So have I. The most weird thing is nobody ever invites me :)

Still find it worth lurking for more esoteric content though.

More esoteric content than HN? I find a lot of alien topics here. My biggest complain about HN is not on that particular.

rebeccaskinner• 3 years ago

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.

xtracto• 3 years ago

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

tempodox• 3 years ago

That's probably why it's a ghost town. As far as I'm concerned, they can kiss my backside.

Kye• 3 years ago

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.

notatoad• 3 years ago

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.

schmudde• 3 years ago

The moderation is quite arbitrary. Here are three specific examples I've noted:

1. "Don't hate Jira, hate your manager." https://lobste.rs/s/n4v6a8/you_don_t_hate_jira_you_hate_your... is okay but "Making time for planning" https://lobste.rs/messages/h9z5ee is not (Management is off-topic.)

2. "A normal week (in tech)" https://blog.ignaciobrasca.com/work/2023/05/01/a-normal-week... is not okay (Article does not relate to computing.) but "What are you working on this week?" is okay.

3. "What Punch Cards Teach Us About AI Risk" https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-tea... is not okay (Business history is off-topic) even though specific implementations of punch card machines are discussed

There will always be sharp edges to moderation but I've generally found more permissive policies to be more fair.

Vulume• 3 years ago

"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.

bcantrill• 3 years ago

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!

cpurdy3• 3 years ago

The self-promotion on lobsters is rampant, and not surprisingly, most of the self-promotion is very low quality crap.

However, I have seen a few self-promotion links that were brilliant, so I have some mixed feelings on the topic.

I don't have any answers, but I definitely can spot the problems.

packetlost• 3 years ago

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.

everybodyknows3• 3 years ago

fairly strongly enforced tag system

Quite a disciplined policy by the stewards of the website. How does the enforcement work against say, overtagging?

Also this:

Inactive tags can no longer be used on new stories.

https://lobste.rs/tags

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.

ignaloidas• 3 years ago

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).

kristianp2• 3 years ago

The ghost town link in the readme is gold: https://twitter.com/webshitweekly/status/1399935275057389571

rglullis• 3 years ago

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?

whalesalad• 3 years ago

It's a decent example to follow for a run of the mill rails app.

stephenr5• 3 years ago

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.

Rochus4• 3 years ago

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.

stephenr5• 3 years ago

Flagged as what though?

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.

kbenson• 3 years ago

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.

corobo6• 3 years ago

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 :)

kirubakaran2• 3 years ago

If you want Lobsters style tags and filtering on Hacker News stories: https://histre.com/hn/

(d: mine)

everybodyknows3• 3 years ago

Don't see any clues here as to how the tags are chosen and matched to stories. Can you provide further?

kirubakaran2• 3 years ago

Sure, here is the Show HN for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988 Thanks for checking it out. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

GaggiX7• 3 years ago

I think the killer feature that HN has compared to any other site I know is Dang.

tptacek5• 3 years ago

Lobsters has had a series of thoughtful moderators.

GaggiX7• 3 years ago

That's not really what people are sharing in this thread, to be honest.

lmm• 3 years ago

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.

Karrot_Kream• 3 years ago

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!

hiq2• 3 years ago

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.

packy• 3 years ago

try this: https://lobste.rs/top/<n><duration> n: 1, 2, 3, ... duration: h, d, w, m, y

hiq2• 3 years ago

Ok not bad, thanks! It's still not the same but close enough, I'll try to use that.

__rito__• 3 years ago

I never got an invite there, and hence stopped trying.

Don't know anyone IRL who is already there I guess.

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

Same, I visit the site frequently but I don’t now anybody to get invited

yuppiepuppie• 3 years ago

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.

kaba05• 3 years ago

If you share your email, I’m sure you can get an invite now that you publicly asked for it :D

losvedir• 3 years ago

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...

Modified3019• 3 years ago

Darkreader is available for most browsers, desktop and mobile: https://darkreader.org/blog/mobile/

mminer237• 3 years ago

Harmonic[0] has a dark mode.

[0] https://github.com/SimonHalvdansson/Harmonic-HN

kevincox• 3 years ago

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.

ksec2• 3 years ago

Dark Mode has been promised since 2020 but we still don't have it yet.

prakashn27• 3 years ago

I use Firefox in built dark mode feature when browsing at night in mobile.

tonoto2• 3 years ago

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?

olliej• 3 years ago

tonoto2• 3 years ago

Thanks, I'll keep my eyes open for existing members that I might know then

kristianp2• 3 years ago

Now there's a thread on there pointing here: https://lobste.rs/s/5vs9tv/lobsters_hacker_news

doe88• 3 years ago

Great site, especially for PL and security links, I read it for a while now but never had the chance to know someone with an account/invite.

pja• 3 years ago

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...

tkellogg• 3 years ago

Here's the lobste.rs post about this post https://lobste.rs/s/5vs9tv/lobsters_hacker_news

dalanmiller• 3 years ago

It’s not a ghost town. I really enjoy it for the quality of discussion.

magicmicah85• 3 years ago

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.

aftbit2• 3 years ago

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.

h_o_o_t• 3 years ago

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.

I detailed the uBO rules here a moment ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510651

zlg_codes2• 3 years ago

Good site design, poor community culture.

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.

kaba05• 3 years ago

If you request an invite here publicly (and have an email in your profile), I’m sure you can easily get one.

Also, I haven’t seen anything like tone policing and ‘unprofessionalism’, and I think the boundaries usually are quite objective and trivial.

zlg_codes2• 3 years ago

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.

If it works for you, that's good.

culi• 3 years ago

Not sure if this is a hint, but I've been interested in getting an account for a while if anyone is able to invite

perrygeo• 3 years ago

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.

hoistbypetard• 3 years ago

One person maintains a site that does just that:

https://gerikson.com/hnlo/

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.

thombles• 3 years ago

It often flows the other way too (speaking from experience with some self-authored posts on Lobsters).

snapplebobapple• 3 years ago

When did that go in ite only? I am pretty sure i jist signed ip agds ago no invite necessary

cpurdy3• 3 years ago

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.

jldugger• 3 years ago

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

how can you tell?

cpurdy3• 3 years ago

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.

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