151–160 of 212 posts
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WTH happened in November 2021 to kill that sub?
I'm on this subreddit, but it doesn't really seem dead to me, where does "November 2021" come from?
https://subredditstats.com/r/italy
... implying that the sub was destroyed by its moderators.
How come that this is the first time (might have visited that site several years ago, recognize the CSS in some way) that I hear about lobster.rs? Is the site entirely by invitation or are there at least a couple yearly signup openings?
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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 numb…
When things grow, they change, often becoming worse from their “old” users point of view. So, why would you want it to grow, as opposed to staying the way you like it?
Growth is worse. Growing too fast can make things worse, aye. Not necessarily because there's more people in general but because the community changes as a result of them joining. The new users don't adapt to the existing culture quick enough, and because there's so many of them in a short amount of time the culture is disrupted and pushes out the existing userbase, locking in the new culture. This is one of the reasons lobsters has the invite system going by their about page so they seem to be actively trying to prevent this effect. Maybe there's a better way to do it, maybe this is the only way, that one's not really for me to say. Even if it was for me to say I don't have any better suggestions.
I want it to grow. I don't really have an opinion on lobsters in that respect. If it works for them and their users, that's great! Some sites just ain't for me, no worries.
It is currently the way I like it. I like a wider variety of comments, so in its current form lobsters isn't the way I like it. There's plenty of other places on the internet for me to get my fill though, we're on one of 'em now! I wouldn't want them to change on my behalf. If it works for what they're after - again that's great!
While the site isn't my cup of tea I can absolutely see why they run it like they do. If Reddit shut down tomorrow and all the more memey tech users migrated here in one go, this place would become terrible (as always, in my opinion) - I can see why they do what they do, even if I don't personally enjoy the end result. No problem though, it's one less source of easy dopamine. Lord knows I don't need any more of those :)
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>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…
What happened with conspiracy has a lot more to do with politics.
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It says you invited spammers. Did you try discussing the matter with the mods?
The Lobsters moderator wants new people to earn their place in the community before doing anything that serves their personal interests. It matters not if your self-interests are aligned with giving the Lobsters community what they want. The moderator said they're a smaller platform where it's not difficult to influence the algorithm, and as a result he's very protective of that. You can't just play the upvote game. You have to make sure the mod knows you and likes you before doing that. Another thing I did was I used a loophole to help my friend share his project. In my culture, figuring out how to work around the rules without breaking them is considered a highly prized skill. When the Lobsters algorithm said his account was too new to post a link, I thought I was vouching for and reviewing his project link by posting it myself. But the Lobsters moderator took it as a personal insult and challenge to his authority.
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.
For me, even if stuff I'm interested in has already been posted on HN, it often rolls off the front page before I ever see it. The front page there moves more slowly, so there's a greater chance I actually see and discuss it.
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It says you invited spammers. Did you try discussing the matter with the mods?
Lobsters doesn't have any contact information (I later learned they have an IRC channel) so I didn't get to hear an explanation from the Lobsters moderator until the topic came up here and ended up getting mediated in a Hacker News thread. The moderator was very clear that I was not only spamming myself, but I was encouraging my friends to spam too. For example, one thing I got specifically called out for was I invit…
I 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.
Norms are a challenging thing to communicate in face-to-face communications. They're even harder to communicate online where all we have is text. They can also lead to the perception of selective enforcement. The discussions in this thread on the self-promotion rule and some angst about how certain topics and community members get better treatment than others are good examples on how the norms on Lobsters feels unevenly enforced by folks who have used the site.
My own experience on the site made me feel that the norms around moderation felt uneven. Some topics and some posters seemed to be more favored than others. The lack of clear moderation is what led me to stop participating on the site; ultimately I felt like I wasn't in the "in-group". Maybe that's the point of a norm-based moderation style. In that regard, even if dang has no modlog, his moderation feels even-handed and consistent enough that I never feel the presence of an in-group and out-group. Of course this site is much larger so it might be a volume thing. A ban or a flag of 1/8 comments "feels" much more impactful than flags on 50/300 comments, but probably much harder to detect.
While I don't post on the site much anymore, I don't find us-vs-them dynamics to be particularly useful. They sow rancor where there doesn't need to be much. Lobsters isn't my kind of site but it obviously is for some folks, and that's great!
Any reason why HN source code is not published? The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior, but having an open standard might actually help it improve rather than keeping it as a hidden secret that slowly gets discovered by independent malicious parties.
It shares the same lineage as this code: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news
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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".