[HN Gopher] Lobsters
___________________________________________________________________
Lobsters
Author : tosh
Score : 200 points
Date : 2023-12-03 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| 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.
| warkanlock wrote:
| Ghost town? It's active and growing!
| corobo wrote:
| It still seems about the same as it has been for years from
| an outside perspective
|
| <20 comments (votes, even) on most posts
|
| It's pretty ghostly for a site that's been around since 2012
| praptak wrote:
| Why would I care about these numbers? It has up to date
| discussion on interesting news, so it's alive and kicking.
| corobo wrote:
| Why would you personally care? No idea, I don't know you.
|
| Why would anyone else care that there's discussion on a
| discussion forum? Because that's the point of it lol
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I have never thought of it that way, and I'm still not
| sure I understand the idea. For some people the point of
| visiting a site is related to the number of votes or
| comments?
| corobo wrote:
| Well no the numbers aren't going to be a thing anyone
| directly cares about. Of course not, haha. Looking at my
| previous comments I'm not sure I even said anything that
| would imply that?
|
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thanks for clarification. I thought you were suggesting
| size or growth as a value themselves.
|
| 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
| dun44 wrote:
| When things grow, they change, often becoming worse from
| their "old" users point of view. So, why would you want
| it to grow, as opposed to staying the way you like it?
| costco wrote:
| I enjoy HN as much as the next guy but it's easy to get
| high comment counts when you count archive.is links (and
| the ensuing 4 levels nested argument about why they don't
| work with Cloudflare DNS and who's in the right on that),
| complaints about CSS/scroll hijacking, and general
| pedantry. You can find many cases where interesting but
| pretty specific kind of technical stuff sort of
| languishes at the bottom of the front page whereas
| flamebait type articles that tap into the vague
| libertarian anti-surveillance sentiment that is popular
| here get hundreds of comments. Not that I don't generally
| agree with it, just that I've heard all the arguments a
| million times and I'd rather learn about how to use AVX2
| instructions. I think the algorithm should have some sort
| of subject based ranking, where highly repetitive topics
| are penalized. Or maybe it already does and the sheer
| popularity of the stuff makes it show up regardless.
|
| 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.
| corobo wrote:
| I made no comparison to HN, nor would I want to. I try to
| avoid having an "us vs them" mindset because it makes for
| boring conversation. I don't dislike lobste.rs in any
| way, I just prefer a wider variety of opinions to go with
| my tech news so I only really pop by when I'm reminded it
| exists.
|
| 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.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah that's some extremely sparse discussion, on par with a
| really tiny subreddit.
|
| Maybe it's ok if you're just passively using it as an
| aggregator of interesting links?
| stephenr wrote:
| > know no one on it
|
| Shoot me an email, it's in my profile.
| bdcravens wrote:
| No version numbers in the Gemfile? That's brave.
| riffraff wrote:
| I feel versions in Gemfile tend to make things harder to update
| and often end up accidentally retaining some old version. You
| won't get a random version bump unless you do `bundle update`
| anyway, since you have a lock file.
|
| Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be
| free :)
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| that is what Gemfile.lock is for. You are not getting a new
| version unless you do ask for it explicitly.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Yeah, that's actually true. I looked at it from a wrong
| angle.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Those are just as easy when using the standard "semver
| compatible with the specified version" approach. The
| lockfile will prevent such attacks on build, and on upgrade
| it doesn't really matter security wise if the new version
| has the same major version.
| brink wrote:
| Being harder to update is the point.
|
| 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.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| Would be less of a ghost town if they allowed sign ups rather
| than via invitation only.
|
| Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a
| ghost town then it's clearly petered out.
| bigdubs wrote:
| Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for
| comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty
| nice!
|
| I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying
| to promote themselves.
| tapirl wrote:
| Invite doesn't always guarantee insightful comments.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| From my experience in invite-only forums, it can only assure
| some bottom line (mainly, fewer troll posts), but it doesn't
| help at all on the quality of comments.
|
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Except you don't see those 2 really insightful comments
| there.
| robocat wrote:
| > 300
|
| Exaggerating doesn't make reflect well on your argument.
|
| HN doesn't have a huge problem with self-promotion.
| wrs wrote:
| I read HN for the links, because of the quantity, and lobste.rs
| for the comments, because of the quality.
| andy99 wrote:
| They discuss under "invitation tree" how it's possible to get
| an invite if you want one.
|
| https://lobste.rs/about
|
| 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.
| some_furry wrote:
| If you want an invite, ask your friends if anyone has an
| account.
| Tamer wrote:
| Will you be my friend?
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| A good samaritan on the other Blue site gave me one but I
| haven't had good comments to make since.
| some_furry wrote:
| It's not a ghost town, it's just not as noisy as HN. It's quite
| active.
| xena wrote:
| I mean, compared to Hacker News in comment velocity and
| overall homepage change rate yeah it's a lot slower.
| Microscopically slow in comparison. Some people that are used
| to the fast-paced change of feeds like you have on bigger
| social media websites get used to the rapid pace of how
| things change. It can feel really weird when things _don't_
| change that fast (such as how people bounce off of Mastodon
| because they don't know how to curate their feed anymore). I
| kinda like it, but I've been trying to break the addiction
| cycles of things like Twitter, so for each their own.
| insanitybit wrote:
| I post on there most days. It's not really a ghost town, and
| there's a _lot_ less noise than HN with only a bit less signal.
| agent281 wrote:
| It's definitely not a ghost town. It's just not a treadmill.
| It's hard to have a conversation on hacker news because (1)
| articles cycle through quickly and (2) you don't get reply
| notifications. Lobsters is a bit more human scale IMO.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| To get automated email notifications of replies to your
| comments see http://www.hnreplies.com/
| gaws wrote:
| > _rather than via invitation only._
|
| This is a good thing.
| 38 wrote:
| Not a fan of having to beg for an invitation. Seems like HN is
| able to handle moderation with a small crew.
| mariusor wrote:
| Small crew of very high quality *paid* moderators. I don't know
| how many other hats Daniel wears in YC, but based on the times
| he's active here, he's spending _a lot_ of time doing
| moderation work.
|
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Seems like HN is able to handle moderation with a small crew.
|
| 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.)
| voidfunc wrote:
| I had a lobster account and a bunch of invites once upon a time.
| Totally forgot about it. Closed gate HN never really appealed to
| me.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Good posts on software more reliably get to the top of lobste.rs
| than on HN in my experience. Whereas on HN you're competing with
| a wide variety of topics. Lobste.rs is pretty focused on just
| hardware/software hacking.
|
| 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.
| linusg789 wrote:
| Hit the nail on the head.
| xoranth wrote:
| It's not (just) the variety of topics, it is that HN has way
| more users (and therefore way more submissions).
|
| A submission on lobste.rs will stay on top of recent/newest for
| days, on HN it might be minutes.
| treesciencebot wrote:
| Any reason why HN source code is not published? The best I can
| think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior, but
| having an open standard might actually help it improve rather
| than keeping it as a hidden secret that slowly gets discovered by
| independent malicious parties.
| capableweb wrote:
| Here you can find the latest public code:
| http://arclanguage.org/
|
| 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)
| shawnz wrote:
| It shares the same lineage as this code:
| https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news
| dun44 wrote:
| >The best I can think of is not to let people see the
| penalizing behavior
|
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| Kinda like how reddit has "hot", "top", and "best"?
| dun44 wrote:
| More like with Usenet where every user would have their own
| scorefile, which determined the order they would see posts.
| Except without having every user to manage it for
| themselves, instead choosing which "frontend" to use.
| jedberg wrote:
| The reddit open source code was basically this. The whole
| thing was open, including the scoring, but all the spam
| functions were just stubs that returned True or False as
| appropriate, without all the logic. Then we would override
| those functions with a private library that had all the spam
| logic.
|
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| There's an interesting less granular pooled approach worth
| exploring .. seeing the aggregate scoring of {people you
| follow} | {friends} | {Dev community} | {carpentry fans}.
|
| It's the "crowd I find of interest" also found "this stuff
| to be interesting".
| tptacek wrote:
| There's probably not all that much to see past the decade-old
| public release from the arc project. The parts of it that
| aren't public past that are non-public by necessity, like the
| voting ring detector stuff.
| aftbit wrote:
| I would guess it's part of the ethos of not spending more time
| and effort on HN than strictly needed. Perhaps also a bit of
| the standard silicon valley culture of building on open source
| but not actually contributing anything meaningful back.
| Hakashiro wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| > 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.
| andy99 wrote:
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| That user's submissions are all within the past week. You
| may have found someone gaming the site.
| buildbot wrote:
| That's not a particularly good example, their latest self-
| promo post has a warning from the mod on it...
| hwayne wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| Oh I didn't know that! Thanks for the explanation.
| mooreds wrote:
| I stopped posting three years ago, maybe the culture has
| changed?
| andy99 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| lormayna wrote:
| This resembles exactly the description of moderation in
| /r/italy. There are more people banned from there than people
| subscribing this subreddit.
| undersuit wrote:
| WTH happened in November 2021 to kill that sub?
| eszed wrote:
| 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?
| GaggiX wrote:
| I'm on this subreddit, but it doesn't really seem dead to
| me, where does "November 2021" come from?
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| 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.
| undersuit wrote:
| >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?
| pixl97 wrote:
| What happened with conspiracy has a lot more to do with
| politics.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think the sweet spot is opening up x number of
| registrations every few months.
| narag wrote:
| _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.
| gumby wrote:
| What are your complaints about HN?
| narag wrote:
| 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.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| That's probably why it's a ghost town. As far as I'm concerned,
| they can kiss my backside.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| packetlost wrote:
| Lobsters has a simple but effective and fairly strongly enforced
| tag system that makes it far easier to curate your feed than HN.
| Despite what others have said here, it is not a ghost town at
| all, it's intentionally lower noise and they'd like to keep it
| that way.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > fairly strongly enforced tag system
|
| 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.
|
| https://lobste.rs/tags
|
| 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.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| > Quite a disciplined policy by the stewards of the website.
| How does the enforcement work against say, overtagging?
|
| 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).
| kristianp wrote:
| The ghost town link in the readme is gold:
| https://twitter.com/webshitweekly/status/1399935275057389571
| rglullis wrote:
| Aside from the argument for/against lobste.rs, is there anything
| in the codebase that is worthwhile? Any feature/functionality
| that could be implemented in Lemmy, for example?
| whalesalad wrote:
| It's a decent example to follow for a run of the mill rails
| app.
| stephenr wrote:
| Lobste.rs definitely feels like less of an echo chamber: both
| Reddit and HN have a large "I don't agree with you, downvote"
| population - on HN this is officially endorsed as "correct" use
| too.
| Rochus wrote:
| According to my experience rather on Lobsters participants seem
| to be mostly concerned with nagging. Rarely got a useful or
| positive comment for my posts there. There is a small circle of
| users who have a particularly good relationship with the admin
| and flag everything they don't like. I had much better
| discussions and more useful feedback on some subreddits.
|
| 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.
| stephenr wrote:
| Flagged _as what_ though?
|
| 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.
| Rochus wrote:
| Unfortunately many examples; usually it starts with a "-1
| spam", e.g. for this post: https://lobste.rs/s/ebztmj/now_w
| e_know_which_cs_publication_...
|
| 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.
| stephenr wrote:
| > you get some obviously wrong claims
|
| 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_.
| Rochus wrote:
| Well, I was (unfortunately) not surprised because it
| already happened with some posts before. There are some
| really destructive people there.
| bb010g wrote:
| As a Lobsters user, I think you could have avoided those
| spam flags with a less click-baity title and opening line
| of the body. "MIT CSG Memo 137 was the first CS
| publication to use the term "object-oriented"" would have
| been a better title, since you posted after the result
| was discovered.
|
| Also, Hillel Wayne already politely explained this to
| you! https://lobste.rs/s/ebztmj/now_we_know_which_cs_publ
| ication_...
| Rochus wrote:
| Which is obviously nonsense. But frankly, I have no
| desire to reopen this pointless debate. They shall be
| happy with their platform, just without me.
| metabagel wrote:
| I don't use lobsters, but I feel like it's courteous to
| summarize and then link, which you did not do.
| kbenson wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've found reddit and H distinctly
| different in the down voting behavior. Reddit will down vote on
| disagree (depending on subreddit) no matter how the info or
| opinion is presented, but in my experience where it appears HN
| is down voting on disagreement it's more that the presentation
| was too forceful.
|
| 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.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| If you want Lobsters style tags and filtering on Hacker News
| stories: https://histre.com/hn/
|
| (d: mine)
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Don't see any clues here as to how the tags are chosen and
| matched to stories. Can you provide further?
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Sure, here is the Show HN for it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988 Thanks for
| checking it out. Please let me know if you have any other
| questions.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I think the killer feature that HN has compared to any other site
| I know is Dang.
| tptacek wrote:
| Lobsters has had a series of thoughtful moderators.
| GaggiX wrote:
| That's not really what people are sharing in this thread, to
| be honest.
| tptacek wrote:
| I've read the thread and don't know what you mean.
| GaggiX wrote:
| It's literally the top comment and its children.
| tptacek wrote:
| I've certainly read that thread, and I don't know what
| you're trying to say.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought you were trying to compare
| the Lobsters moderators to Dang in a positive way,
| something not really emphasized in the top comment and
| its children.
| stephenr wrote:
| Pretty much any complaint about moderation from anyone
| _always_ has another side to the story.
|
| At least two of the tales of woe posted in this
| discussion have shown that the user was not in fact
| blameless.
| GaggiX wrote:
| If that what tptacek meant he could have said that
| instead of saying "I don't understand, I don't get it"
| ahah
| tptacek wrote:
| Even that is not what I meant. The top comment on that
| thread consists of a complaint that self-promotion rules
| appear inconsistently enforced. Maybe they are, maybe
| they aren't; I don't know. But that doesn't contradict
| what I said about Lobsters moderation. This is just
| another example of the tired message board trope of
| blowing any complaint about anything into a blanket
| condemnation. Nuance is boring to write, strident
| declamation isn't. Unfortunately, for the reader, it's
| the opposite.
| lmm wrote:
| HN versus Lobsters made me realise how important moderator
| freedom/discretion is. Like in principle I'd rather be on the
| site that had a moderator action log and clear rules about what
| gets people banned, and I complain about the moderation here
| plenty, but in practice I'll take the site that manages to ban
| annoying users who stay on just the right side of any written
| code.
| hiq wrote:
| Is there an equivalent of https://hckrnews.com/ (especially the
| top 10 / top 20 filters) for lobste.rs? That's the main way I
| browse HN, I wish I could do the same for lobste.rs. The closest
| seems to be https://lobste.rs/top but it seems to only cover the
| past week.
| __rito__ wrote:
| I never got an invite there, and hence stopped trying.
|
| Don't know anyone IRL who is already there I guess.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Same, I visit the site frequently but I don't now anybody to
| get invited
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| I was always liked the idea of the site, but never got an invite.
| I lurk there occasionally when I see discussions around a topic
| that I find interesting that didn't get traction on HN.
| losvedir wrote:
| I like lobsters. One of my main use cases is on my phone in the
| middle of the night (while rocking my newborn), since it actually
| has a legit dark mode, unlike HN, which blinds me and lights up
| the room. I don't understand how HN doesn't...
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Darkreader is available for most browsers, desktop and mobile:
| https://darkreader.org/blog/mobile/
| mminer237 wrote:
| Harmonic[0] has a dark mode.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/SimonHalvdansson/Harmonic-HN
| tonoto wrote:
| How come that this is the first time (might have visited that
| site several years ago, recognize the CSS in some way) that I
| hear about lobster.rs? Is the site entirely by invitation or are
| there at least a couple yearly signup openings?
| kristianp wrote:
| Now there's a thread on there pointing here:
| https://lobste.rs/s/5vs9tv/lobsters_hacker_news
| doe88 wrote:
| Great site, especially for PL and security links, I read it for a
| while now but never had the chance to know someone with an
| account/invite.
| pja wrote:
| If you ask politely on the IRC & share a bit about who you are
| it's fairly likely someone will send you an invite. No
| guarantees though - the likelihood probably depends at least
| partially on how long it's been since the last bunch of self-
| promoting spammers set up their own little invite ring after
| being invited in...
| tkellogg wrote:
| Here's the lobste.rs post about this post
| https://lobste.rs/s/5vs9tv/lobsters_hacker_news
| dalanmiller wrote:
| It's not a ghost town. I really enjoy it for the quality of
| discussion.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| I like the discussions there but looking for an account so I can
| post. Currently going through github issues and finding things I
| can fix so someone rewards me.
| aftbit wrote:
| You seem like someone who can add to a discussion, and you like
| SDR stuff too. Figure out how to contact me using the info in
| my profile and I'll send you an invite.
| h_o_o_t wrote:
| Hello, this post actually made me make a post of my own.
|
| 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
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Good site design, poor community culture.
|
| 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.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Has anyone looked at the correlation between HN top posts and
| Lobsters? I would occasionally lurk on Lobsters until I realized
| that the majority of content on L had already been posted on HN
| first. Private community that's basically an echo chamber of
| existing community's content... no thanks.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-03 23:01 UTC)