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Lobsters

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Re: Lobsters

#191

Post by rollcat »

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, 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.

Good point. You can see it as a part of a "defense in depth" strategy. Ideally you want the system's security architecture to stand it's ground, even if everything (except for the private keys) gets leaked. In practice you'll conceal some of these details to gain an extra edge.

Lisp famously allows your software to be extremely dynamic, so I don't see why such functionality shouldn't be implemented as a closed plugin, while the core of the site would remain open to public contributions. And boy does this website need a couple fixes... (dark mode? mobile CSS? large comment thread performance? dupe link detection?)

Re: Lobsters

#192

Post by narag »

evantbyrne wrote: post #169
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.

> 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.

That's interesting. My personal advice is to look at trends here as evidence of who's the public, but be very skeptical of their usefulness. What's good for faang or for a money-burning-a-series startup will kill you.

Boring tech like RDBMS, Unix servers and native clients mixed with simple web apps are better solutions for most other companies. Or even Lisp if you are in a startup and need to move fast.

But if you look at trends, you might think that you absolutely need some cloud rusty golang key-value store, with a scrum functional serverless proof-of-work nft SPA :)

Re: Lobsters

#193

Post by narag »

boffinAudio wrote: post #181
gumby wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ..

Why do you think "American military-industrial complex" exists? and why is it the most powerful military-industrial thingy in the world?

Re: Lobsters

#194

Post by jbd0 »

xena wrote: post #129
some_furry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a ghost town, it's just not as noisy as HN. It's quite active.

I mean, compared to Hacker News in comment velocity and overall homepage change rate yeah it's a lot slower. Microscopically slow in comparison. Some people that are used to the fast-paced change of feeds like you have on bigger social media websites get used to the rapid pace of how things change. It can feel really weird when things _don't_ change that fast (such as how people bounce off of Mastodon because they do…

I think I would prefer a slower comment velocity. By the time I get around to replying on HN, everybody has moved on. But I really like how articles aren't limited to technology on HN.

Re: Lobsters

#195

Post by boffinAudio »

narag wrote: post #193
boffinAudio wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ..

Why do you think "American military-industrial complex" exists? and why is it the most powerful military-industrial thingy in the world?

It exists because the American people have been lulled into the false narrative that their nation protects the world .. when in fact the absolute opposite is true - the worlds safety is constantly under pressure from the 1000 torture sites the American people pay for every single year - the ruling elite of the rest of the world knows this and responds accordingly, thus feeding the loop which justifies yet more actual repression from the USA, with regards to its military ..

Re: Lobsters

#196

Post by zlg_codes »

kaba0 wrote: post #187
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.

It's important to choose who you invite, and who invites you, carefully. If the invitee screws up, it reflects poorly on the inviter. If the inviter screws up, everyone they invited may also get looked at.

I don't know anyone on Lobsters enough to have that sort of relationship with. I don't really submit things, even here; not worth the trouble of being told something's a bad fit, off-topic, repost, bad title, or some other nitpick. There is likely to be friction if I were to participate there, so it's for the best.

If it works for you, that's good.

Re: Lobsters

#197

Post by evantbyrne »

narag wrote: post #192
evantbyrne wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's interesting. My personal advice is to look at trends here as evidence of who's the public, but be very skeptical of their usefulness. What's good for faang or for a money-burning-a-series startup will kill you. Boring tech like RDBMS, Unix servers and native clients mixed with simple web apps are better solutions for most other companies. Or even Lisp if you are in a startup and need to move fast. But if you l…

Absolutely. HN is more representative of what is popular amongst software developers, but software developers have a nasty tendency to chase shiny things. Lobsters trends on the other hand feel consistently contrarian, and being contrarian tends to be highly impractical. They have been right about the return to server rendering HTML though. It's a place to find different perspectives, for better or worse.

Re: Lobsters

#198

Post by rewmie »

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,…

> 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.

I am one of the new users who contributed to dilute entrepreneurial founder. I didn't worked for a startup when I joined. What made me join and stick around is that NH hosts the best stream of tech-related submissions, and discussions tend to attract knowledgeable people who know what they are talking about, and some of which are even the leading expert on the topic.

I am also an ex slashdot lurker. That place used to serve that itch, but nowadays it reads like their comment section attracts mostly the 4chan crowd. Quite the fall from grace.

Re: Lobsters

#199

Post by stephenr »

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…

Lobste.rs has an open moderation log: you can see what was done by who. It's one of the few places where I think it's possible to actually trust the moderators are treating things fairly.

Re: Lobsters

#200

Post by bcantrill »

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…

I wrote "What Punch Cards Teach Us About AI Risk", and I was really surprised -- and frankly, disappointed -- that they pulled it. It was the #1 story on Lobsters when they pulled it, with plenty of comments (and some good discussion!). It was also shocking to me that their moderation involves scrubbing it from the site entirely; at least on HN, the story can get modded down, but if people still wish to discuss the topic, they can. (And in fact, I have seen some discussions that were too hot cool down and become reasonable when the stories themselves have been modded down.)

The whole thing left me with a very sour taste (and not for the first time!) about Lobsters. I will continue to check in there from time to time, but I will hesitate to submit stories or participate in discussion: the moderators are simply too capricious for my tastes -- and we clearly disagree about what is on topic and what is off topic for technologists. Conversely: Lobsters has reminded me how much I appreciate HN; thank you dang and other HN mods for everything you do!

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