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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

I don't advise posting to Lobsters for these reasons:

1. The mods there can "steal" your post and any credit for it, reassigning its authorship to one of their friends. This happens more often than you would think.

2. The users there have a major case of groupthink, much worse than us here, considering they don't even allow outsiders to register it they're not recommended by someone on the inside. Inbred is the label that comes to mind.

3. The community hates AI, and will downvote any valid submission just to drag you down to the lowest denominator. If you too hate AI, maybe it is the place for you.

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I agree. I've been on Lobsters for a long time, and the changeover from jcs to pushcx in site ownership really changed the moderation philosophy to lean heavily on editorial control of the site's contents.

I think any community has the right to run itself how it wishes. My major frustration with Lobsters is that it doesn't call out this editorial philosophy. The UX of the site and its legacy under jcs often give the impression that it's like any other link aggregator, so I would appreciate if the guidelines clearly called out the editorial approach of moderation.

That said, I would not use the word "inbred" here. They can run their community how they like and and we can dislike it, but insulting another community is generally counterproductive and petty.

I don't think "inbred" is an insult, at least not to me. I find inbreeding to be more of a spectrum than a binary, when it comes to internet communities. Even on HN, which I rate above other communities, there's a strong tendency to take elite behavior as a role model, and then reproduce it.

> The users there have a major case of groupthink

Isn’t that a common feature of most forums? The orange site, in particular, isn’t generally regarded outside of its own bubble as a bastion of independent thought…

I don't know about lobsters, but every time I see an opinion posted on HN, it seems to get immediately followed by a contrary opinion. I've also changed the settings so the website no longer appears orange, but I'm probably still in the bubble anyways.

Sometimes I post a comment to agree with something someone has written. Like here.

You just invoked Russell's paradox.

I changed the color as a quick tell for when I'm logged in.

Isn't that a product of the industry? Python has one groupthink, Golang another.

Martin Fowler's company is named "Thoughtworks". I guess he's trying to control the way we think about stuff?

Lobsters is trying to do the same thing as Hacker News - avoid the Eternal September effect at all costs. It just has more direct and overt methods of maintaining and enforcing its culture than here, and that starts with barring the door against the rabble.

That's something that Slashdot does by limiting registrations. In contrast, by disallowing anonymous registrations (without a recommendation), Lobsters actively seeks out those who don't think differently at all, perpetuating its closed-mindedness.

They're optimizing for quality and civility - a certain standard of intellectual and emotional maturity - rather than controversy. Vetting through personal relationships and requiring reputation risk to let someone new in is an effective way to do that. Not every platform wants or needs to be a debate club.

On the contrary, quality is not intrinsic; it emerges from a healthy debate, something that isn't generally possible on Lobsters.

I think that's certainly a goal of invite systems but I don't think Lobsters really lands this. The quality of its discussion isn't much to write home about. It is much friendlier to some opinions over others but quality is not the discriminator. If you write a middling article on Rust I can guarantee you that you'll get more positive feedback than a good article on Go or on LLMs simply because of the opinion bias of the community.

I wonder if the Dutch Strategy might work for a link aggregator: explicitly provide a well-signposted "front page", where the rabble congregates and the groupthink is at its Grundyest, yet implicitly expect any non-Septemberist discussions to occur well away from those few sacrificial links?

Looks like we (or just i?) missed this discussion on the frontpage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502659

(Why did you call this dutch strategy, did Dijkstra use it? Ah you mean the oudekerk? Straathoertje?)

I see, you meant the Dutch defence? Sorry zero chess knowledge here..

As a side effect you may observe that PhD cred'd professional designers (architects) are about as rare as nonsocialist(?) "Democratic Republics" (DRC?)

Sorry, "dutch strategy" because the good burghers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, etc. realised that although sailors have deplorable* morals, the burgher's prosperity depended upon having many sailors transiently around, so the burgher's solution was to create neighbourhoods catering to vice, with the idea that it would be tolerated there, and specifically there — far from the "good" neighbourhoods where their silk-skirted patent-leather-shod daughters hung out.

* we've already touched upon LaSalle(?)'s riposte to Bonaparte, right?

Haha first stab was closer then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Wallen#History*

I hear that it's still a question of which came first, De Oude Kerk or De Wallen

*CMI gets a mention, it's where LaSalle would have been practically deployed as a direct commissar of the Man?

Recall also a protodiscussion of standardization of artillery in the revolutionary army vs navy?

excellent! "This suited everyone including the authorities."

(now I'll have to check to see if health checks occurred under the ancien regime, or if Bonaparte introduced them here as well)

direct commissar: yes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41947667

odd, the coastal artillery seems to have been organisationally army but supplied and staffed by navy...

Those links are not sacrificial; it is everything else that is sacrificed. It is a healthy rabble, better called a bustle, that leads to the discovery of wisdom. Everything else is a non-event.

And in what sense are the Shakespearean monkeys an unhealthy rabble?

I'm currently vibing that those popular+attentionally-limited links are necessary, but not sufficient, for wisdom uncovery..

And that a healthier route may involve actively compensating for the intrinsic asymmetry between Rao's weird & hypernormal in his "new systems of survival".

(Contrast with Jane Jacobs' guardian/commercial, or Rao's latest Mandala/Machine dichotomy, when the yinyang dynamic is much more obvious)

As I mentioned to GP earlier, one design bug with the current dynamic is that there is no affordance* for the hook of enlightenment (moksha) to turn into sustainable (re)production (flow, aka samsara)

Imagine the Shakespearean monkeys, but with a mechanism to string together some of the shorter uncoveries..

* Adfordance, heh

Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgeworth%27s_limit_theorem

The issue is much worse on Lobsters because of its registration policy which altogether prohibits anonymous registration and thereby a diversity of voices. People are likely to recommend those who think like them (for a new account) rather than ones who think differently.

I find the Lobsters opinion bubble to be much narrower than HN.

HN these days definitely has its share of meme bubble opinions (like reading the comments on any social media thread), but Lobsters is narrow enough that I can often predict all the comments to a post just based on reading its contents myself. This makes the site pretty boring because if it's so easily to mentally simulate the responses, I may as well just ignore the comments. Tech link aggregators usually source links from all the same places (Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, RSS feeds) that I already do so Lobsters' value on top is minimal.

> ...as a bastion of independent thought…

The long tail on this site is what keeps bringing me back, although I must admit it took both swapping to RSS and manually filtering with an acceptance of Sturgeon's Law to wade through the "Make Mone¥ Fa$t" slush.

(note that the —to my mind, misguided— focus on the front pages means TFA misses a lot of the overlap between the two sites)

These are considered features of lobsters, since to even post there, you have to be invited.

> 1. The mods there can "steal" your post and any credit for it, reassigning its authorship to one of their friends. This happens more often than you would think.

Really? As a Lobsters reader, I occasionally review the first page of the Lobsters Moderation Log, which is public for transparency’s sake: https://lobste.rs/moderations. And I’ve never seen any log about a story’s authorship being reassigned, whether for a good reason or a bad one.

According to my reading of the source code of Lobsters (https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/96cf0b32ee81bb1bd7...), such a change would be described in the Moderation Log as “changed user from the_original_user to another_user”. I just searched all moderation logs of story changes in the last two years (39 pages of logs), and no log contains the string “changed user from”. So whether “stealing” of posts ever happened, I don’t think Lobsters users have to worry about that happening now.

Or are you also accusing the mods of hiding those specific changes from the Moderation Log somehow?

It happened to me within the past year, but I imagine it happened in a different way than the one you analyzed. The mods allow the link to be reposted under a different author who is their friend, then hide the original post, and group the original post under the new post. The new post is then promoted and gets all the credit for the link.

I was pretty active for a few years.

Posted one too many self-promotional posts (though still within the terms and on-topic for the community). About 5-10% of my posts that were self-promotional.

Got read the riot act by the moderator. Wrote him a note saying that part of why I participated in lobste.rs was to share others great stuff, but part was to share my own stuff too. And if that wasn't in keeping with the community he was building, I was out.

Have logged in exactly once since then (to invite someone).

> The community hates AI, and will downvote any valid submission just to drag you down to the lowest denominator.

There's lots of links and decent comments on those: https://lobste.rs/t/ai

I wouldn't describe it as anything close to "hates".

A number of very legitimate AI posts on their site get downvoted and disappear. This is pretty bad for the posting user. Such posts do fine on here for comparison.

I checked https://lobste.rs/moderations for deleted AI stories going back to October. There's nothing I can find there. Downvoting through flagging - any examples?

It's not so much about deletion, but more about unfair downvoting to the extent that the posting user's account itself becomes at risk. This is even for very valid GitHub open source project link posts despite the projects having lots of stars. The theory is that the downvoting users don't want to spend the time to keep up with AI, and also don't want others to spend the time.

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