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Lobsters

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Re: Lobsters

#181

Post by boffinAudio »

gumby wrote: post #120
narag wrote: post #115

Earlier 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?

Just try being critical of the American military-industrial complex. You will get stomped by members whose livelihood depends on the perpetuation of the phony moral authority that is necessary to continue that heinous state of affairs ..

Re: Lobsters

#182

Post by prakashn27 »

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...

I use Firefox in built dark mode feature when browsing at night in mobile.

Re: Lobsters

#183

Post by kaba0 »

gumby wrote: post #120
narag wrote: post #115

Earlier 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 general quality of discussion is ridiculously low on anything not strictly CS-related. Software engineers tend to be quite cocky, self-confident also regarding unrelated stuff to their expertise, and it shows very much.

With that said, the occasional gem of some well-known expert of the field chiming in is worth digging through some bullshit comments, I just dislike that CS-topics are quite rare compared to just general news.

Re: Lobsters

#184

Post by Vulume »

schmudde wrote: post #179
Hakashiro wrote: post #32

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…

The moderation is quite arbitrary. Here are three specific examples I've noted: 1. "Don't hate Jira, hate your manager." https://lobste.rs/s/n4v6a8/you_don_t_hate_jira_you_hate_your... is okay but "Making time for planning" https://lobste.rs/messages/h9z5ee is not (Management is off-topic.) 2. "A normal week (in tech)" https://blog.ignaciobrasca.com/work/2023/05/01/a-normal-week... is not okay (Article does not relat…

"What are you working on this week?" is a weekly thread since forever where people often talk about computing anyways.

I don't see why moderating posts should be fair. Better to remove a few good stories by accident than to leave up trash. You'll never have enough time to read all good ones anyways. They're very careful with banning though.

Re: Lobsters

#185

Post by kaba0 »

StressedDev wrote: post #170
gaws wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I will handily take the mods side of the story, it’s quite clear from the effort put in the respective comments, and the underlying incentives (what would a mod win from making up such a complicated story, vs that of the offender party?)

Re: Lobsters

#186

Post by kaba0 »

Xiol32 wrote: 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.

If you request an invitation here, I’m sure someone will happily invite you.

I wouldn’t recommend the recommended IRC route, I’ve tried doing that multiple times and it was never fruitful, it’s kinda dead.

With that said: I do find Tildes’s approach much better (though probably quite hard on the admin), where you can just message the admin with a short “motivational letter” and get a registration link.

Re: Lobsters

#187

Post by kaba0 »

zlg_codes wrote: post #139

Good site design, poor community culture. Their design allows them to focus on 'acculturating' new users, but does very little to spell out that culture or present unambiguous guard rails. There are some prominent posters whose personal projects get free passes. I don't feel like Lobsters is a community friendly to people on the spectrum. They expect allistic members who all understand socializing on an intuitive and…

If you request an invite here publicly (and have an email in your profile), I’m sure you can easily get one.

Also, I haven’t seen anything like tone policing and ‘unprofessionalism’, and I think the boundaries usually are quite objective and trivial.

Re: Lobsters

#188

Post by capableweb »

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…

Funnily enough, you're basically describing Bluesky/AT Proto: https://atproto.com/guides/overview

Re: Lobsters

#189

Post by kaba0 »

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #86

I was always liked the idea of the site, but never got an invite. I lurk there occasionally when I see discussions around a topic that I find interesting that didn’t get traction on HN.

If you share your email, I’m sure you can get an invite now that you publicly asked for it :D

Re: Lobsters

#190

Post by rollcat »

agent281 wrote: post #47
Xiol32 wrote: 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.

I actually do like it that HN doesn't have reply notifications.

I don't feel compelled to read/reply to every message, there's zero sense of urgency, and this is perfect for something you do in your free/idle time.

More importantly, every now and then something you write blows up and gets a disproportionate amount of attention from others. On websites with notifications, or on mailing lists, this gets distracting and disturbing. On HN, I'm happy to find out I've had my 5 minutes of fame the next day.

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