Has anyone looked at the correlation between HN top posts and Lobsters? I would occasionally lurk on Lobsters until I realized that the majority of content on L had already been posted on HN first. Private community that's basically an echo chamber of existing community's content... no thanks.
Lobsters
141–150 of 212 posts
Re: Lobsters
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Lobsters user, I think you could have avoided those spam flags with a less click-baity title and opening line of the body. “MIT CSG Memo 137 was the first CS publication to use the term "object-oriented"” would have been a better title, since you posted after the result was discovered. Also, Hillel Wayne already politely explained this to you! https://lobste.rs/s/ebztmj/now_we_know_which_cs_publication_...
Which is obviously nonsense. But frankly, I have no desire to reopen this pointless debate. They shall be happy with their platform, just without me.
I don’t use lobsters, but I feel like it’s courteous to summarize and then link, which you did not do.
Re: Lobsters
#143I think the killer feature that HN has compared to any other site I know is Dang.
HN versus Lobsters made me realise how important moderator freedom/discretion is. Like in principle I'd rather be on the site that had a moderator action log and clear rules about what gets people banned, and I complain about the moderation here plenty, but in practice I'll take the site that manages to ban annoying users who stay on just the right side of any written code.
Re: Lobsters
#144I never got an invite there, and hence stopped trying. Don't know anyone IRL who is already there I guess.
Same, I visit the site frequently but I don’t now anybody to get invited
Re: Lobsters
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 kickb…
>you have a very large usebase to keep the sub alive. I don't know about that. You have a large userbase of upvoters sure, but commenter were declining in quantity long before the June API changes on a number of subs that were more discussion based than meme or article upvotes. https://subredditstats.com/r/conspiracy Conspiracy is a good example of a discussion sub, no comment on the actual discussions, driven by upv…
Like the other poster said. Conspiracy is less about the api and more (waaaaaaayyyyy more) about fringe politics becoming mainstream. It was one of the first subs to rot during the 2016 and then died during the 2020 American presidential elections.
Re: Lobsters
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have always felt that invite-only communities have weird vibes to them. So have I. The most weird thing is nobody ever invites me :) Still find it worth lurking for more esoteric content though. More esoteric content than HN? I find a lot of alien topics here. My biggest complain about HN is not on that particular.
What are your complaints about HN?
The tone of the comments have evolved over time. When I first found this site, it had a high percentage of entrepreneurs trying to build startups. Refreshing compared to Slashdot that was getting a little more cultish by the day.
Later the founders got diluted, I guess by the influx of employees of said startups, big tech or consultancies, like myself, then anyone from the outskirts. The vibes changed dramatically, until it was unhospitable for the original population. Many of them vanished. Even pg doesn't write here anymore and when some of his essays are posted the reception is outright hostile.
I'm not talking about politics, not only. A lot of comments are on the opposite extreme from the original curiousity and build mindset. People saying that any idea presented won't work, is useless, is nothing new. People talking about what should be, but in denial about what is and of course never doing anything.
There are many perfectly reasonable things you can't say here.
So we have like... the Internet, more civil than average and with a lot of interesting links. Also there are some fellow commenters that I love to read.
Re: Lobsters
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much any complaint about moderation from anyone always has another side to the story. At least two of the tales of woe posted in this discussion have shown that the user was not in fact blameless.
If that what tptacek meant he could have said that instead of saying "I don't understand, I don't get it" ahah
Even that is not what I meant. The top comment on that thread consists of a complaint that self-promotion rules appear inconsistently enforced. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't; I don't know. But that doesn't contradict what I said about Lobsters moderation. This is just another example of the tired message board trope of blowing any complaint about anything into a blanket condemnation. Nuance is boring to write, strident declamation isn't. Unfortunately, for the reader, it's the opposite.
Re: Lobsters
#148Lobsters 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.
The ghost town link in the readme is gold: https://twitter.com/webshitweekly/status/1399935275057389571
Re: Lobsters
#149Would 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.
Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice! I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.
> 300
Exaggerating doesn't make reflect well on your argument.
HN doesn't have a notable problem with self-promotion.
Re: Lobsters
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior I wonder if it would be possible to split HN (or any other HN-like site) into two halves: one would handle the actual storage of posts and comments, and another would handle the scoring, ie the order the comment tree branches appear in. Then we could have multiple of the latter, competing with each other on the scoring alone, with the actual co…
The reddit open source code was basically this. The whole thing was open, including the scoring, but all the spam functions were just stubs that returned True or False as appropriate, without all the logic. Then we would override those functions with a private library that had all the spam logic. I find your idea interesting about having a service that stores the links and comments (and presumably does spam controls…
There's an interesting less granular pooled approach worth exploring .. seeing the aggregate scoring of {people you follow} | {friends} | {Dev community} | {carpentry fans}.
It's the "crowd I find of interest" also found "this stuff to be interesting".