https://lobste.rs/s/5vs9tv/lobsters_hacker_news Active Recent Comments Search Login Login 1. 32 Lobsters | Hacker News meta news.ycombinator.com vladislavp avatar via vladislavp 5 hours ago | [ ] archive Archive.org Archive.today Ghostarchive | 20 comments | +38, -6 off-topic 20 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] 1. [ ] [Post] Preview 2. 1. [ ] 42 carlana avatar carlana 4 hours ago | link Last week on HN, I saw a bunch of people complaining that a site with tools for blind people didn't have screenshots, so you know, every community has its pros and cons. 2. [ ] 25 ahelwer avatar ahelwer 2 hours ago | link Sometime in the past few years the comments on the orange website started to feel like walking into an animated discussion in a first-year college class where the instructor wasn't even present. Things just went in circles because the questions were answered by people who didn't know the answers but were recalling answers to the same question they'd previously seen upvoted. This was particularly clear on the topics where I actually knew what was going on, and so I realized I was just reading peoples' telephone-game confident-sounding opinions on basically every topic there. I don't know what it is that causes websites to transition to this mode of discourse, where they kind of just get stuck watching the world parade on by. Maybe it starts with rewarding & upvoting asking lazy questions, so comment threads just become dominated by 101-level questions & answers. 1. [ ] 10 ploum avatar ploum 1 hour ago | link HN is made by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. And what is an "entrepreneurs" in those circle? Someone who sounds confident enough to convince investors that he's smart. Faking intelligence is a written golden rule ("fake it until you make it"). And people confident enough to convince others often forget that they are faking it. They start to believe themselves. That's the plague of our whole society, not only HN. But HN is still very interesting because you get a lot of broader topics not allowed on lobste.rs: general scientific news, more personal blog posts, etc. 3. [ ] 20 reenigne avatar reenigne 4 hours ago | link I have an account on both sites now. I visit both sites, because (for me) they a just different enough that I get value from both. 4. [ ] 17 cadey avatar cadey 1 hour ago | link Reading Hacker News is like trawling through the loudest parts of the silicon valley collective subconscious. It's a useful thing to do sometimes, but it's not something that you can get definite and discrete signals from. This place just has an unspeakably different vibe that I like a bit more than Hacker News as somewhere to hang out. 5. [ ] 12 twotwotwo avatar twotwotwo 3 hours ago | link There's some discussion there of the self-promotion rule, and I wonder if ratelimiting how much of your own stuff you can post could help limit self-promotion while helping avoid interesting posters being banned - like you only get one "authored by" a week and are expected to always label your authored posts. Maybe you get to bank a couple 'authored by's up if you have a flurry of writing (or maybe if events or just Lobsters briefly getting really into a topic makes your posts more relevant). You could also attack the problem from the other side: you don't want to see a bunch of the same stuff on the homepage, so maybe under some circumstances the ranking will push an item down if it'd be the second on the homepage with the same submitter or source (where source could be domain or well-known-domain/user, like HN does). Favoring dissimilar content also keeps the homepage varied when it's more than one user (say, Bob and his friends post and vote for Bob's work) without having to judge whether that was motivated by genuine interest or a desire to promote Bob's stuff. 1. [ ] 5 gerikson avatar gerikson 3 hours ago | link I do not recall any instance of someone being banned for respecting the reasonable rules for self-promotion, and thus the community losing a valuable voice. 1. [ ] 14 martey avatar martey 2 hours ago | link A look at the moderation log shows that self-promotion is the primary reason why most users are banned. I think the primary problem is that there isn't a clear guideline for people to follow. The percentages of contributions which lobste.rs users think it is okay to be self-promoting range from 10% to 49%, including a bunch of values in between. Other users think that any percentage is fine as long as your contributions are getting votes. I know lobste.rs relies on "community norms", but I don't think that those norms are clear here. I think some of the people who had bad experiences here would still be active here if there was a clear list of rules to follow - like HN's guidelines page. While I realize that some people will submit spam regardless (as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"), clear rules (not subject to interpretation by moderators) could decrease the number of good-faith bad submissions from new users. 1. [ ] 11 pushcx avatar pushcx Sysop 2 hours ago | link Self-promo is also the primary reason why mods PM users, and the vast majority of users reasses site norms and follow them with nothing public appearing in the modlog along the way. We PM because posting a public comment is automatically a punishment by public shaming, but the second-order effect is that it's not obvious that anything ever happened. 1. [ ] abathur avatar abathur 2 hours ago | link Can you reflect on your sense of how the Venn diagram for self-promotion-related PMs and bans looks? Maybe also as intersected by any mitigating factors you tend to consider? (What fraction of people banned for this get a PM first? Does the fraction change if we focus just on users that made a meaningful effort to participate beyond self-promotion?) 1. [ ] 8 pushcx avatar pushcx Sysop 2 hours ago | link Most get at least one a warning first. The ones that haven't gotten warned first about self-promo are doing something real deliberately spammy like setting up a voting ring, creating sockpuppets, or disregarding the big bright red message that warns they're about to earn a ban. Lobsters looks a lot like HN and Reddit so it's not surprising that people carry those sites' norms here. Ideally we want to nudge people into learning how our community works to contribute productively to it, but sometimes we see people who knowingly break rules to benefit themselves. Mods do scale our response to their other site activity. People who are voting + commenting normally on other people's stories get a softer message. People who have zero site activity beyond posting their company blog with a strong marketing call-to-action to buy their thing will get a sterner message and significantly less leeway. This also informs domain bans. If you look at those messages, some are "yeah this is spam and we don't want to ever reward you" and a lot are more like "hey, you're ignoring PMs or not correcting your behavior, so here's an escalated response" when someone submits topical, quality stuff but is treating the site as a write-only promo tool instead of a community to be part of. 2. [ ] 6 david_chisnall avatar david_chisnall 1 hour ago | link The percentages of contributions which lobste.rs users think it is okay to be self-promoting range from 10% to 49%, including a bunch of values in between It's interesting that both of the people in the posts that you linked to said that they'd engage more, but then didn't. One never posted again, the other has posted on two threads that were both about their employer. I wonder if some of these people ever intended to become involved with the community. The best bit of marketing from the last few decades has been to call advertising platforms 'social media'. That phrasing has tainted everything that actually has a social component. 2. [ ] 5 cadey avatar cadey 1 hour ago | link As a serial poster, I stopped posting my own stuff to lobste.rs a while back. I just don't see the need to except in some exceptional/special circumstances (like I did for my Xesite v4 post). Most of the stuff I write is intended for more general audiences, but I enjoy reading the comments on lobste.rs more than anything else. There's a much higher signal : noise ratio here. It's nice. 1. [ ] ploum avatar ploum 50 minutes ago | link I think it boils down to honesty. When I post my own blog post on lobste.rs, it is because I genuinely think it will interest lobste.rs crowd. In doubt, I wait for someone else to post it (but this is possible only because I've readers active on this website. If you read this, thank you a lot!) 3. [ ] nil avatar nil 2 hours ago | link I'd even argue for a two-week limit. After several years on this site, it's rare I see any one author putting out quality content (definitions vary) more frequently than that. 1. [ ] adam_d_ruppe avatar adam_d_ruppe 1 hour ago | link Yeah, I try to write my blog weekly but really in about 2/3 of the weeks I just do the bare minimum because it takes hours to write anything more than just like a basic "here's the features I worked on this week" bullet list and it is just hard to find that kind of time (and even then I think most my blog isn't that interesting). But, on the other hand, there's some cases that are better - Microsoft's Raymond Chen's blog is pretty consistently good, though he's retelling 30 years of stories and writes up a bunch of backlog ahead of time too. So idk, I think some of it is a judgement call, but at the same time if you see a blog you do consistently like, you can always check it yourself instead of waiting for someone to post it here again too. 4. [ ] calvin avatar calvin 2 hours ago | link Seems it's less bans and more people voluntarily leaving after being warned. 5. [ ] ploum avatar ploum 1 hour ago | link It's something I don't understand. I've posted 11 links including 5 to my own blog and 1 to my own project. That's clearly auto-promotion. Yet, I had 4 links removed by moderators. None of them where linking to my own content and, the 4 times, it felt quite harsh as it was "on-topic" but "not-enough". It takes time to learn the rules at lobste.rs. But, according to my experience, this is not related to autopromotion but mostly on the strict "on-topic" rule. 6. [ ] kghose avatar kghose 25 minutes ago | link It's remarkably easy to get invited to Lobste.rs What I like about the invite only system is that you have to contact a person for an invite. I got invited by contacting a person. This simple extra effort is so much better than all the AI tools to filter out bots. I'm sure bad humans do slip in, and now with ChatBots, bad computers impersonating good humans will slip in, but I still think the system is better than something that lets the FSB sign up a hundred thousand accounts and bring down lobste.rs. 1. [ ] proctrap avatar proctrap 8 minutes ago | link I just hopped on IRC - as the about page also suggests About Tags Filter Moderation Log