Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#61

Post by untog » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

o10449366 wrote: post #33

laumars wrote: post #23

The down-vote feature (for those who didn't read the article: you have to provide feedback to down-vote) is something I've spent years saying HN badly needs. These days I just don't bother posting most of the time because while I shouldn't be bothered by abuse of negative rep; you can't help be pissed off when you've spent a short while including detail only for someone who doesn't understand the subject or has a per…

Downvoting isn't the problem - it's spam flagging. There's no better tool for suppressing ideas and viewpoints you disagree with than flagging it. Only on HN can a story occupy #1 on the front page due to overwhelming upvotes, and 30 seconds later be sunk to the depths of page 2 or 3 by a handful of flaggers who disagree with the content that's presented.

Strongly agreed. If I recall HN also has some built in functionality that downranks posts when the comments on it come in at high volume, indicating some level of flame war.

I get the motivations behind both, and in some situations it works great. But a lot of the time it helps to enforce a monoculture on the site: any disagreement, particularly strong disagreement, is seen as a negative signal and is vanished from the site. Next time you see a post about, say, women software engineers, you’ll be able to watch it happen in real time.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#62

Post by kemonocode » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

While I do agree that having to give a solid reason before downvoting would be a much welcome feature to HN, being invite-only makes it a non-starter, and it only fosters elitism.

Sure, it'll always have a small, curated community, but you can be assured the politeness will stay skin-deep before long and there simply won't be enough differing points of view to allow insightful discussion of any kind. It's the same issue I keep seeing time and time again in other closed communities (e.g. invite-only Mastodon instances) where it ends up rotting them from the inside out: they're too big to remain cohesive as just a group of friends, but too small to receive any fresh air. I'd believe "cliques" would be the less polite way to call them.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#63

Post by azhenley » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

One thing I noticed is that the search feature on there is far worse than HN's. Doing a side by side comparison, I have to go to the 2nd or 3rd page on Lobste.rs to get the results that I would have expected to be first.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#64

Post by orkon » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

One popular tech site in Russian was invite-only for a very long time: https://habr.com I remember you could get in by someone inviting you or if you wrote a good guest post (there was a separate area for this kind of guest posts and no one could see who the author is). I got impression that invite-only system worked quite well as the site was known for high-quality content and discussions.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#65

Post by nathell » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

Tangential: I have recently had my articles featured on the front page of Lobsters and HN within hours of each other. Not the same article, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but:

- It's very hard for a HN post to get noticed. New posts linger in /newest (frequented by relatively few people) for about half an hour before falling down to the second page, and you need to be lucky enough to receive enough upvotes in that timeframe to hit the front page. Lobsters' "success rate" appears to be higher.

- In terms of traffic, I got about 11K hits from unique IPs from HN and about 1.7K from Lobsters.

- I like that Lobsters clearly indicates when a submission is authored by its submitter.

Overall, as people have mentioned, both communities are great. I've been here for 10+ years – thank you for everything, HN!

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#66

Post by pseudoroot » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

I haven't tried lobste.rs. but I enjoy HN without tags (In fact I don't think I'd use tags if HN brings this feature). I enjoy reading articles from different domains (other than tech). And this variety is what keeps me engaged to this platform.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#67

Post by _wldu » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #14

And HN is arguably better for not being invite-only. There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment, but would never have become a formal blog post. Invite-only communities intentionally give up on that kind of discourse for... what? Easier moderation?

Agree 100%. I know people who are domain experts but also very introverted. They don't blog, promote themselves or claim to know things that they don't. But, thankfully, they can and do post here on HN and that benefits us all.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#68

Post by mxuribe » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

I like the reasoning behind lobste.rs that was described. When it first came out, i simply thought it was a clone of hacker news. Having read this post, I'm intrigued. I've recently been spending more of my time on tildes.net (and highly enjoying it!) rather than hacker news...So maybe I'll start focusing on tildes.net and lobste.rs, instead of HN...hmmm.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#69

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

preommr wrote: post #40

> This has snowballed and now the community is full of experts in their fields The front page is mostly dead. The most discussed thread has like 17 comments. And a lot of those comments are uninteresting - e.g. "Hey, really nice post!". I think it's more important to have a lot of users, with the occasional user that has a deep expertise in one area rather than a small group of people that are slightly better on aver…

[deleted]

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#70

Post by slg » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

o10449366 wrote: post #33

laumars wrote: post #23

The down-vote feature (for those who didn't read the article: you have to provide feedback to down-vote) is something I've spent years saying HN badly needs. These days I just don't bother posting most of the time because while I shouldn't be bothered by abuse of negative rep; you can't help be pissed off when you've spent a short while including detail only for someone who doesn't understand the subject or has a per…

Downvoting isn't the problem - it's spam flagging. There's no better tool for suppressing ideas and viewpoints you disagree with than flagging it. Only on HN can a story occupy #1 on the front page due to overwhelming upvotes, and 30 seconds later be sunk to the depths of page 2 or 3 by a handful of flaggers who disagree with the content that's presented.

I have complained about this to moderators before. There are certain topics that are almost off limits on HN not due to the rules, but due to the heavy flagging they always receive. Articles by, about, and for women are one common example. These articles being flagged results in this community being pulled further into a dangerous realm of misogyny that already exist in some pockets of the tech world.

EDIT: Another example of semi-banned topics is criticism of HN. This post was number 1 on the front page a few minutes ago. It is already down to 11 with several older posts with fewer points higher up on the front page.

EDIT 2: And now this post is seemingly flagged killed. From number 1 to disappeared in roughly 10 minutes.