Lobsters
github.com
github.com
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 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.
And that is not the only one on the front page right now that's submitting mostly their own stuff.
It's a neat system but doesn't see much use in practice, aside from the occasional [sysop] warning.
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.
Maybe, "Italy Announces New Restrictions For the Unvaccinated"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/world/europe/italy-vaccin...
Or, right-wing stuff about immigration?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/25/matteo-salvini...
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?
https://subredditstats.com/r/italy
... implying that the sub was destroyed by its moderators.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Now that is mostly gone. The business side of the discussions has completely vanished.
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.
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.
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 ..
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.
I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.
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.
Exaggerating doesn't make reflect well on your argument.
HN doesn't have a notable problem with self-promotion.
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.
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.
This is a good thing.
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.
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 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.
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.
It's the "crowd I find of interest" also found "this stuff to be interesting".
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?)
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.
Also, I haven’t seen anything like tone policing and ‘unprofessionalism’, and I think the boundaries usually are quite objective and trivial.
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.
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
(d: mine)
<20 comments (votes, even) on most posts
It's pretty ghostly for a site that's been around since 2012
Why would anyone else care that there's discussion on a discussion forum? Because that's the point of it lol
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
Maybe it's ok if you're just passively using it as an aggregator of interesting links?
Shoot me an email, it's in my profile.
At least two of the tales of woe posted in this discussion have shown that the user was not in fact blameless.
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!
But most of the users there are cool. Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad users to make the experience of posting uncomfortable.
how can you tell?
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.
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.
Don't know anyone IRL who is already there I guess.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I can't possibly imagine why you ever had a problem
Edit: sorry I forgot to add the /s. I really thought it would be obvious this time.
Also, Hillel Wayne already politely explained this to you! https://lobste.rs/s/ebztmj/now_we_know_which_cs_publication_...
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.
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 :)
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.
A submission on lobste.rs will stay on top of recent/newest for days, on HN it might be minutes.