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Lobsters

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41–50 of 212 posts

Re: Lobsters

#41

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. Wh…

[flagged]

Re: Lobsters

#42

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.

> know no one on it

Shoot me an email, it's in my profile.

Re: Lobsters

#43
post #30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I care about these numbers? It has up to date discussion on interesting news, so it's alive and kicking.

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

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?

Re: Lobsters

#44
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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.

Re: Lobsters

#45
post #41

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. Wh…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Lobsters

#46

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. Wh…

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.

Re: Lobsters

#47
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Lobsters

#48

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.

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.

Re: Lobsters

#50

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.

> 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.

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