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Lobsters

github.com

61–70 of 212 posts

Re: Lobsters

#61
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghost town? It's active and growing!

It still seems about the same as it has been for years from an outside perspective It's pretty ghostly for a site that's been around since 2012

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?

Re: Lobsters

#63
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]

Other people posting your stuff gets a lot of love though.

Re: Lobsters

#64
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Unfortunately many examples; usually it starts with a "-1 spam", e.g. for this post: https://lobste.rs/s/ebztmj/now_we_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.

Re: Lobsters

#65
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]

It says you invited spammers. Did you try discussing the matter with the mods?

Re: Lobsters

#67
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.

To get automated email notifications of replies to your comments see http://www.hnreplies.com/

Re: Lobsters

#68
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 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.

Re: Lobsters

#69
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately many examples; usually it starts with a "-1 spam", e.g. for this post: https://lobste.rs/s/ebztmj/now_we_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 commen…

> 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.

Re: Lobsters

#70

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 retai…

> 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).

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