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.
<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?
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