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Comment by Hakashiro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> More esoteric content than HN?

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.

That's interesting. My personal advice is to look at trends here as evidence of who's the public, but be very skeptical of their usefulness. What's good for faang or for a money-burning-a-series startup will kill you.

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 :)

Absolutely. HN is more representative of what is popular amongst software developers, but software developers have a nasty tendency to chase shiny things. Lobsters trends on the other hand feel consistently contrarian, and being contrarian tends to be highly impractical. They have been right about the return to server rendering HTML though. It's a place to find different perspectives, for better or worse.

What are your complaints about HN?

The tone of the comments have evolved over time. When I first found this site, it had a high percentage of entrepreneurs trying to build startups. Refreshing compared to Slashdot that was getting a little more cultish by the day.

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.

When I first found HN in 2008 it was a refreshing community that actually understands business. Which is a very rare thing on the internet. Because the site is geared towards startup and entrepreneurs, they had to understand business one way or another. And hence this somewhat pro-business stands earned its early reputation as an alt-right site.

Now that is mostly gone. The business side of the discussions has completely vanished.

> 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.

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.

The general quality of discussion is ridiculously low on anything not strictly CS-related. Software engineers tend to be quite cocky, self-confident also regarding unrelated stuff to their expertise, and it shows very much.

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.

Just try being critical of the American military-industrial complex. You will get stomped by members whose livelihood depends on the perpetuation of the phony moral authority that is necessary to continue that heinous state of affairs ..

Why do you think "American military-industrial complex" exists? and why is it the most powerful military-industrial thingy in the world?

It exists because the American people have been lulled into the false narrative that their nation protects the world .. when in fact the absolute opposite is true - the worlds safety is constantly under pressure from the 1000 torture sites the American people pay for every single year - the ruling elite of the rest of the world knows this and responds accordingly, thus feeding the loop which justifies yet more actual repression from the USA, with regards to its military ..

Our world is unjust and replete with suffering. The question is what are you going to do about it?

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.

One most certainly can be an individual example of change. For example, I refuse to make excuses for the war crimes, crimes against humanity and massive violations of human rights, committed in my name, by my nation.

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 ..

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

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.

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

WTH happened in November 2021 to kill that sub?

Just Googling and guessing:

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?

I don't think those are the specific topics that ruined this subreddit. The moderators killed this subreddit: if you express a slightly different opinion than liberal left wing, you will be banned for being "not welcoming and create a bad mood". And you will be banned also to express any polite kind of criticism to all the minorities, except one: the catholics. For them, every insults is accepted.

I'm on this subreddit, but it doesn't really seem dead to me, where does "November 2021" come from?

Posts per day flatlined that month after being sustained at ~50 per day for years:

https://subredditstats.com/r/italy

... implying that the sub was destroyed by its moderators.

The moderators of this sub are a bunch of fascists. Everyone that express an opinion that they don't like is banned. And this is the result

Interesting, I couldn't really see any difference to before.

>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?

Like the other poster said. Conspiracy is less about the api and more (waaaaaaayyyyy more) about fringe politics becoming mainstream. It was one of the first subs to rot during the 2016 and then died during the 2020 American presidential elections.

What happened with conspiracy has a lot more to do with politics.

Well then where did all the politicers go? https://subredditstats.com/r/politics has a similar Subscribers to Commenters ratio decline that Conspiracy had.

> 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.

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.

That's not a particularly good example, their latest self-promo post has a warning from the mod on it...

To nitpick: that's not a comment from a mod. Posts speaking from a position of mod will have [sysop] next to the title. It's part of a "hats system", which more generally allows people to speak as representative of something. IE if /u/johncheng was a Rust core dev, they can post whatever they want as John Cheng, but also write posts as [core dev] to say they're speaking as part of the core team.

It's a neat system but doesn't see much use in practice, aside from the occasional [sysop] warning.

Oh I didn’t know that! Thanks for the explanation.

That user's submissions are all within the past week. You may have found someone gaming the site.

I stopped posting three years ago, maybe the culture has changed?

Personally I don't see a problem with someone posting their own content, especially with voting based ranking. As long as it's not spam and is on-topic for the site, the origin shouldn't really matter. Compared with someone who posts only New York Times articles, I'd rather see someone post their blog entries.

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.

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

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.

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!

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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