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Lobsters

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161–170 of 212 posts

Re: Lobsters

#161

Post by stephenr »

jart wrote: post #155
stephenr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've read the moderator's description[1] of this event and I don't think you're portraying things fairly.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735833

Re: Lobsters

#162

Post by krapp »

dun44 wrote: post #31
treesciencebot wrote: post #23

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.

>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…

Hacker News has an API[0], awkward as it is (but not rate-limited) and Algolia does as well[1]. It isn't difficult to build a basic reader client.

[0] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/api

Re: Lobsters

#163

Post by [deleted] »

robocat wrote: post #149
bigdubs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Lobsters

#164

Post by corobo »

kbenson wrote: post #111
stephenr wrote: post #40

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.

For what it's worth, I've found reddit and H distinctly different in the down voting behavior. Reddit will down vote on disagree (depending on subreddit) no matter how the info or opinion is presented, but in my experience where it appears HN is down voting on disagreement it's more that the presentation was too forceful. The biggest example of that IMO is people presenting opinions as fact rather than something to b…

> a sprinkling of "I think" or "it seems to me" in in comments goes a long way towards not only not triggering some people into down voting, but also seems to promote more useful discussion

Agreed on this for sure. My comments used to get more downvoted (or at least less upvoted) before I started pointing out that they're just my opinion. Bonus if you mention your opinion on the subject is loosely held and open to correction (personally I love it when someone says something that causes my mind to change! Fresh neuron connections, free dopamine!)

Originally I thought that people would just assume everything I wrote without citing any sources is my opinion but I guess folks just need to be reassured sometimes :)

Re: Lobsters

#166

Post by kevincox »

losvedir wrote: post #94

I like lobsters. One of my main use cases is on my phone in the middle of the night (while rocking my newborn), since it actually has a legit dark mode, unlike HN, which blinds me and lights up the room. I don't understand how HN doesn't...

Also much more mobile friendly in general. I typically use HN more but tends to pull Lobsters up far more often on mobile. Even though I do have a user stylesheet for HN it still doesn't make it great on mobile and I can be bothered to fiddle with it too much myself.

Re: Lobsters

#167

Post by ksec »

narag wrote: post #146
gumby wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

When I first found HN in 2008 it was a refreshing community that actually understands business. Which is a very rare thing on the internet. Because the site is geared towards startup and entrepreneurs, they had to understand business one way or another. And hence this somewhat pro-business stands earned its early reputation as an alt-right site.

Now that is mostly gone. The business side of the discussions has completely vanished.

Re: Lobsters

#168

Post by thombles »

perrygeo wrote: post #141

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.

It often flows the other way too (speaking from experience with some self-authored posts on Lobsters).

Re: Lobsters

#169

Post by evantbyrne »

narag wrote: post #115
evantbyrne wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been lurking on Lobsters for a while, and have definitely noticed that the self-promotion rule is selectively enforced. Just pivot into exclusively writing content about an impractical docker alternative, and you should be golden. Snark aside, they could codify exactly what frequency of self-posting is allowed, and let the existing voting system dictate what rises to the top. I'm not sure Lobsters sees any issue…

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.

> More esoteric content than HN?

In bits and pieces. The advice and some things that trend diverge significantly from HN. I prefer to think of Lobsters discourse as sort of an Inverse Cramer Index, but for software development.

Re: Lobsters

#170

Post by StressedDev »

gaws wrote: post #89
jart wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Lobsters banned me for spamming and self-promotion along with every single person I invited to the site over the years. From the admins: > Inviting many spammers and helping them circumvent the restriction on unseen domains from new users for spam. Seems justified.

You are assuming the moderators are not lying. Unfortunately, mods on some sites do lie and do claim innocent posters violated rules. I myself was temporarily banned on one site because I argued that the Epic game store was good for competition and would help bring down prices for both consumers and game developers.

The stated reason for the banning was something like “trolling”. Not much to say other than some mods are good but some abuse their power.

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