[HN Gopher] How the Lobsters front page works
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How the Lobsters front page works
Author : g0xA52A2A
Score : 61 points
Date : 2026-01-18 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (atharvaraykar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (atharvaraykar.com)
| written-beyond wrote:
| How does the HN front page work?
| esseph wrote:
| There are existing posts about this.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
|
| https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...
| elphard wrote:
| How difficult is it to get invited to join Lobsters?
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Fork the repo, deal with an open issue and humbly ask if you
| could get an invite... seems like that could be the ticket.
| elphard wrote:
| Thanks! That's an interesting approach for filtering new
| joiners.
| gerikson wrote:
| Disregard sibling comment
|
| From the about page
|
| > The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to
| someone you recognize from the site. If you wrote a link that
| was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you
| join the community. Finally, if you can't find anyone you know
| in the invitation tree and didn't author something posted to
| the site, consider getting to know the community in the chat
| room.
|
| Chat: https://lobste.rs/chat
|
| I used to be active in chat and invited many users but I'm not
| that active now.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Not very difficult if you have an online presence somewhere you
| can use as proof that you will act in good-faith. Having a
| hacker news account for instance can make joining as easy as
| sending someone an e-mail (as I did) and asking. It is a
| website much more built upon trust, and so if you invite
| someone and they get banned for something, you are directly
| connected to that.
|
| For more see: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations and the user
| invite tree https://lobste.rs/users
| andy99 wrote:
| I recently learned Bear blog (a small blogging platform, posts on
| which often appear on HN) has a "discover" section with a front
| page style ranking. Their algorithm is on the page
| This page is ranked according to the following algorithm:
| Score = log10(U) + (S / (B * 86,400)) Where, U =
| Upvotes of a post S = Seconds since Jan 1st, 2020 B =
| Buoyancy modifier (currently at 14)
|
| See https://bearblog.dev/discover/
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is a good exploration of the algorithm. In my experience,
| Lobsters has much more active moderator involvement in a more
| opinionated way than HN. Much of what's referred to as moderation
| here is user-driven via flagging and votes, whereas on Lobsters
| the moderators are injecting more of an opinionated style into
| the site. For example, requiring the "vibecoding" tag on all
| stories about AI even though very few of them are about
| vibecoding.
|
| In theory the Lobsters moderation log is also public, but in
| practice when someone gets banned if you try to find the post
| that triggered the banned it will have been edited away by the
| mods and replaced with their opinion of what was said in a follow
| up comment. I stopped visiting as much after watching someone get
| banned for a rather benign comment which the mods edited away and
| then claimed it said something egregious about a culture war
| topic, which it did not.
|
| The site also puts up a banner at the top of your page if you
| receive enough negative votes. The banner invites you to delete
| your account as the last sentence (or it did in the past). In
| practice, if you comment something that isn't the popular and
| accepted opinion on the site, no matter how diplomatically, you
| could end up with the banner stuck on your page views for a
| while. There have been some high profile and valuable
| contributors to the site who abandoned it after getting stuck
| with this banner for posting informative content that
| nevertheless triggered some downvotes.
|
| It's an interesting site, but in my experience the algorithms are
| only a small part of it. The experience there is more heavily
| aligned toward groupthink and the "right" opinions than even HN
| and differing opinions are much less welcomed.
| bicx wrote:
| Thanks for resolving my internal dialog about returning to
| Lobsters. I'll just stick around here as always.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Thanks for resolving my internal dialog about returning to
| Lobsters.
|
| I still load it from time to time, but the value of going
| there seems to diminish year over year. Every story that gets
| traction on Lobsters is already posted to HN now.
|
| Many of the commenters I valued on Lobsters have given up on
| the site and left.
|
| I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting it
| because I'm worried about going too much against the
| acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter
| how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| >I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting
| it because I'm worried about going too much against the
| acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter
| how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
|
| but it's _exactly_ the same here. hell, even reddit is less
| bad - even a thousand other people can 't silence you
| there. how many terminally online powerusers does it take
| to get a comment [dead] and/or [flagged], three? five? and
| there are dozens of them in every controversial thread,
| where the approved opinions are expressed with as much low
| quality vitriol and snark as they please, while the wrong
| opinions get shut down no matter how civil and/or factual
| they might be, silently downvoted or flagged out of
| existence. I could find a hundred examples from my numerous
| throwaways, but without being as vague as this, I know I'll
| just get flagged.
|
| now I often find myself doing the same thing you do - not
| bothering - and I hate what that means.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's not the same here at all. I get downvoted into
| negatives some times but there are enough people who
| appreciate differing opinions that as long as my comments
| are well intentioned and contain accurate information
| they usually go positive again.
|
| On Lobsters, if you say the wrong thing, even as a well-
| written and researched comment, you could get slapped
| with a banner at the top of every page inviting you to
| delete your account.
|
| > I could find a hundred examples from my numerous
| throwaways,
|
| I'm sorry, but if you have collected a hundred examples
| and had to generate that many throwaway accounts I have a
| hard time believing the comments were actually civil or
| well researched. I can believe that from time to time an
| angry comment section will downvote a good comment until
| it's dead, but if one person is collecting a hundred
| examples across countless accounts then I think there are
| deeper problems with the commenting style that need to be
| evaluated.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| >if one person is collecting a hundred examples across
| countless accounts then I think there are deeper problems
| with the commenting style that need to be evaluated.
|
| no, no, I didn't mean they were all mine - like I said, I
| don't bother making high effort comments when I know for
| sure they'll get [flagged][dead]. what I meant was that I
| could find such comments in any controversial thread I
| ever saw, which I could locate from my throwaways'
| histories.
|
| >as my comments are well intentioned and contain accurate
| information they usually go positive again.
|
| flagged comments don't, and there are no consequences for
| using the flag button to express disagreement.
| andy99 wrote:
| I've seen lots of examples of people on both sides of
| issues criticizing that the HN groupthink is against
| them.
|
| Locally it's true, and there are some sacred cows (try
| criticizing rust) but compared to other sites, there are
| at least a few differences of opinion typically present.
| holsta wrote:
| > For example, requiring the "vibecoding" tag on all stories
| about AI even though very few of them are about vibecoding.
|
| No? You either use AI or vibecoding, like the tag page says:
|
| https://lobste.rs/tags
| Aurornis wrote:
| I should have said "all stories about AI usage" which is
| exactly what your link says. If you post anything related to
| using or exploring AI, it's forced to use the vibecoding tag.
| It doesn't matter if it's about vibecoding or coding at all.
|
| Forcing the "vibecoding" tag on to stories that aren't
| vibecoding related has been a debate on the site for a while:
| https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms
|
| The top voted comments on that thread get to the meat of the
| issue. Vibecoding was embraced as a derogatory term and
| applied broadly to every LLM related topic, even when
| vibecoding wasn't involved.
| bdzr wrote:
| This has also been my experience. I like that it's a small
| community but their toxicity is much more towards AI or
| anything to the right of RMS.
| hotpotat wrote:
| I experienced this with lobsters and deleted my account there.
| They describe it as a garden party, which is accurate. And it's
| very easy to ruffle the feathers of those at the garden party
| if you dare question the politics.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| I was a pretty active member in the comments for a long time
| and left a few years ago after getting chastised by a moderator
| and accused of spamming for sharing a link to a blog post I had
| written, even though the content was purely technical, not
| promoting any product, and does not contain ads or monetize
| content in any way.
|
| My impression is that the site was actively looking for any
| possible reason to remove people from the platform. It's their
| site to moderate as they wish, but that's not a community I
| want to continue participating in.
| pushcx wrote:
| You did not share a link to a blog post. The title was
| "Effective Haskell is a hands-on practical book way to learn
| Haskell. No math or formal CS needed" and it linked to the
| site advertising your book for sale. I removed it because we
| don't get good discussions out of ads.
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(page generated 2026-01-18 23:01 UTC)