Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members | Hacker News Reader

Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members

lobste.rs

29 pointsentelechy14 comments

haven't been there in 2 years. it had some flair initially since the topics that HN would consider borderline were demoted much stricter on lobste.rs. so it appealed to the SW developer in me but over time I moved back here and forgot they existed. in the end most discussions from lobste.rs already had HN counterparts with much comments in the threads due to huge difference in user-base. But I also felt there were a lot of HN haters over there and an attitude that lobsters would be a better HN.

imvho lobste.rs is annoyingly managed top-down by the founder. Opinions usually have to resonate with his (and his bros) ... maybe this is just because the community isn't yet big enough to actually incorporate other sides of the bubble. The discussions I have seen him fight out, and ban people over were ugly. They usually started on the premise of technical disagreements and escalate into a war because of the founder being high on lobsters being his platform so his opinion has to be the right one ...

it felt a lot like majordomo email lists for tech/devel discussions in the 90ies. If you didn't agree with the admin (no matter if their technical points where moot) you were out (that being a poorly managed list - there were ofc many great places where it was a great place exactly because it was ruthlessly managed). But if you want to scale to these dimensions I think founder ego can clash with the growth of the platform.

For me having this behavior witnessed against some of the lobste.rs users, the platform just felt like another bro-culture I could happily live without.

What for me feels narrow might feel "more puristic" to others. But I think lobste.rs could do more in terms of creating a welcoming environment by either distributing the power a little. It's not a thing the community can do since the founder has to be OK with and embrace it. Until then I'm happy to reduce my HN addiction by just limiting to HN.

Again this was some time ago. Maybe this has all long since changed. I'd hope so.

jcs is no longer the admin

And this is a hilariously incorrect mischaracterization of what happened, see https://lobste.rs/s/fdyztr/new_user_downvoting#c_acmwjt

> The discussions I have seen him fight out, and ban people over were ugly. They usually started on the premise of technical disagreements and escalate into a war because of the founder being high on lobsters being his platform so his opinion has to be the right one ...

Examples of this?

> Examples of this?

Me. I was forcefully removed from the lobste.rs community by "pushcx" (after years of activity) for posting "a lot of really negative comments" and not playing along with his culturally insensitive offer to "help".

When will these people learn that faking cheerfulness cannot be imposed on the whole world? Anyway, to add insult to injury, all my comments with negative scores were deleted after the ban.

"I appreciate that you haven't attacked anyone", he wrote, before going on his little power trip. Involuntary humour is better than no humour at all, I guess...

I like that they show who invited who. Wonder how many members hacker news has?

Haha, I thought it was a social network for Jordan Peterson fans.

https://lobste.rs/about#michaelbolton

For folks that are interested in joining, feel free to swing by #lobsters on freenode and ask for an invite. You'll probably get asked for your Github, personal portfolio, or some other indication you have technical chops, and then somebody will send you an invite if they feel comfortable attaching your name to their account.

It's not a community for everybody--we deliberately focus on actionable technical information and training, and tend to skip over more entrepreneurial or marketing stuff ( https://barnacl.es is a sister site that's way better for biz talk).

The culture is ongoing in refinement ( https://lobste.rs/s/oackyq/lobsters_community_standards#c_sy... ) and evolution, reinforced by periodic meta threads where aspects of the site and culture are drug up and commented on and tweaked.

It's probably the most rewarding and healthy tech community I've been involved with in the last decade. :)

I always found it fascinating this seems to purposefully (accidentally?) prohibit employees of big companies who are prohibited from open source software development work without jumping through a lot of hoops.

Can’t you just give them your company email if you’re insistent on joining? I’m sure they’d put a SWE at FAANG in the “has technical chops” bucket.

The poster's speculation was incorrect. We don't care about employer.

(context: I'm the admin of Lobsters)

Not purposefully, and a link to code projects isn't needed; users are welcome to invite based on their own criteria. A lot of people have been invited from the chat room just for describing an insightful comment they'd like to post, or by idling and chatting for a while.

My least favorite thing about the invite system is that it's a bigger hurdle to new developers who have a smaller professional network, have few or no public code repos, and have the least confidence to speak up in an unfamiliar social situation like the chat room. We previously had a formal invite request system to encourage them but had to turn it off when spammers outnumbered the newbies (it's still there behind a feature toggle for the sister sites using the codebase). Open signups would be much worse for spam, eternal September, sockpuppets, etc. If you (or anyone!) has suggestions for addressing this problem, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts (email in profile, or #lobsters on Freenode).

I'd wager such people are in the minority.

If your company doesn't let you put up dotfiles, or blog about some neat framework trick you learned, I'd be shocked.

Folks that don't have the time/inclination to display those things frankly probably aren't going to have the time/inclination to contribute meaningfully to the community, and the accumulation of a nonparticipating majority is one of the pathologies of these sorts of forums.

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