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Comment by aleph- | Hacker News Reader

How so, it's a method for dealing with spammers/marketers and the like who would post low effort or off topic content regularly.

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Its true that this system blocks spammers and marketers. At the same time it also prevents a large amount of genuine users who want to take part in the dicussions because its hard to get an invite. So overall the system does more harm than good.

There are like five people in this thread offering invites, it's not that hard.

So that renders the invite system about as useful as a captcha. What's the point again?

https://lobste.rs/about#invitations

> Invitations are used as a mechanism for spam-control, to slow registrations to a pace we can acculturate and to encourage users to be nice, not to make the Lobsters userbase an elite club.

I got an invite by just asking nicely on IRC with some details about myself.

And spammers/marketers cant do that?

I’ve declined to invite a number of “growth marketers”...

Why not ask some questions in the sign up form and make the process more straightforward instead of having users ask for invite in random places?

I'm personally not happy with the randomness of the chat invite system. I have some ideas on how to streamline it but I haven't had time to present them, and I lack the Ruby chops to actually contribute to the site's code.

It's not that hard to get an invite. Ask in an HN thread and there's a good chance somebody will hook you up, assuming they either know you, OR can tell from your HN comment/submission history that you're not some weirdo who is going to spam lobste.rs with crap.

> Ask in an HN thread and there's a good chance somebody will hook you up

That works for users who have seen this thread. How does a person who has not seen this thread knows that they have to ask in some random HN thread to get an invite? What about users who don't have an HN account?

If you read HN you can figure it out. If you see the fine print on lobste.rs you can see there is a possibility to ask in their chat.

On some level it's not open invite and you have to be ok with that.

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