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Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

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Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#111

Post by laumars »

samatman wrote: post #89
dbattaglia wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one. I’d think if your reply was something low quality you’d end up with more downvotes than the parent you just down voted. Or am I misunderstanding something? My experience on HN is that getting 500 karma was not easy; it’s quite hard to get submissions past “new” and comment karma takes some time to ac…

I'm not on lobste.rs, so I could be getting this wrong. But I believe the system is that you have to choose a reason for downvoting, which is shown to the person you downvote, but that you're not required to reply to the post, and the user doesn't know who in particular did the downvoting.

I'm not on lobste.rs either and if that's their system then that's not entirely what I had in mind. I'd want voting to be first class comments. That way bad moderation surfaces quickly and can be moderated on itself -- thus pushing the abuser below the threshold for access to negative voting.

One thing I think HN does really nicely is that you cannot down vote someone who's replied to your comment. Only 3rd parties can. That too can be abused if there's an argument between 3 people but it's still a better system than not having one at all.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#112

Post by blocked_again »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #93
blocked_again wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its true that this system blocks spammers and marketers. At the same time it also prevents a large amount of genuine users who want to take part in the dicussions because its hard to get an invite. So overall the system does more harm than good.

I got an invite by just asking nicely on IRC with some details about myself.

And spammers/marketers cant do that?

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#113

Post by ahuth »

I'm interested to try out participating... but I cannot get an invite, despite talking with folks in their irc, posting my homepage, some projects, github profile, etc.

Meanwhile, other folks are coming into the channel and getting invites. That's annoying...

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#114

Post by danaris »

ecliptik wrote: post #92
samatman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a better solution, at HN scale, would be to limit the number of downvotes in a 24 hour period. Not clear what the ideal number is; maybe 5 at 500 karma, and 5 more per 500, possibly up to some limit (25?). Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one. I suspect that the recent trend to low-quality downvotes is because 500 is a relativ…

The Slashdot karma system sort of had something like this. It’s been a few years, but comments weren’t given point totals but tags like “insightful”, “funny” for positive or “troll” for negative. This way a comment had feedback on why it was ranked higher or lower. A moderator only had so many points to give for a limited period of time as well as other guardrails. In order to get mod status you had to do things like…

They did also have point totals, but a given comment could only range from -1 to +5.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#115

Post by ddevault »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #91
ddevault wrote: post #78

I replied to the author on Mastodon earlier. Copypasta: >huh, I totally disagree. The moderation on Lobsters is really self-interested and fickle, and there's little done to protect any opinions which differ from the mainstream. I've seen a lot of trolls and hateful threads go unmoderated just because they agree with the party line. The platform also has a censorship problem, in which they merge new posts into old po…

I don't recall ever seeing "hateful" content go unmoderated. Do you have any examples? Also not sure what you mean with "protect opinions outside of the mainstream"? What kind of opinions do you mean? And how should they be protected?

The hateful comments are all passive aggression in my experience. I don't mean anything anti-semitic content or anything along those lines of hate - I just mean bad faith arguments, ad hominem attacks, etc.

As for non-mainstream, basically anything that the moderators don't agree with. Could be about technology or politics. Anything which dissents from the prevailing opinion of a comment thread is also at risk for being moderated. They don't moderate the discussion, they moderate the topic.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#116

Post by rowathray »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #97
NoahTheDuke wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughable to compare the obsessive curation of music on what.cd with any of those platforms, not to mention the fidelity and the vast range, far exceeding what’s available on the other platforms.

@rowathray It's not so much because of the pirating that this service was successful, it's because of the dedicated userbase it held. If something like what.cd integrated with something like Spotify- a legitimate way of accessing lots of music- say "here's a button to stream" somewhere on the site, it would probably be successful. Mind you, one of the other reasons that these sorts of things with torrent or whatever…

Wait, so you endorsing a site that not only engaged in large scale piracy, but also allowed hateful content with no oversight? Wow.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#117

Post by dang »

just-juan-post wrote: post #48
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?

> 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 This is now a myth. HN used to be like this but look for yourself, it's no longer like this. It's no longer worth my time to dig for worthwhile nuggets in the HN comments nor is it worth my time to post a high q…

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if it's the ranking of the current submission, that's because users flagged it, which is the usual reason why stories drop in rank.

As for comments by people with domain knowledge, I was just looking at this a couple weeks ago. Here are a few I randomly ran across:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961 ("I'm the lead author on this paper")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997642 ("I can remember when I first met Gary [Starkweather] in 1988")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906624 ("I’m actually one of the architects of this processor.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012453 ("I'm a dentist who regularly treats OSA with dental appliances")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509 ("As a working scientist" followed by "Biology postdoc here")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127746 ("I'm an anesthesiologist")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744337 ("I wrote the original software for Long Bets")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670257 ("This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood. He actually birthed me")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635488 ("I was the person who blabbed about the top-secret _callback parameter the weekend Pipes launched")

Edit: from a few minutes ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148337 ("I am a computational cognitive neuroscientist")

Edit: from a few hours ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146986 ("I'm a researcher working on exactly this problem")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141584 ("I’m a b-school prof/associate dean")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148438 ("I used to do the soil lab testing for a guy that dealt with this waste in my state.")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161404 ("I started this project")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172066 ("I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days.")

There are tons of these, many of which don't get much notice. We've periodically published a highlights list, but I'd like to come up with a way for users to nominate such posts as highlights when they run across them... something like a positive 'flag'.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#118

Post by gerikson »

dylanaraps wrote: post #60
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?

I agree... I've had my projects (see my hn profile) or my blog posts hit lobsters a bunch of times and finding myself unable to respond to the comments as I don't have an account there.

Content authors usually get an invite when one is asked for in the lobste.rs chat.

Re: Why Lobste.rs Is Better Than Hacker News

#119

Post by oxnrtr »

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?

Having a smaller community doesn’t mean "same composition of people, just fewer of them".

I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters.

Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower.

The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic.

¹ https://lobste.rs/hats

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