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Lobsters

lobste.rs

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71–80 of 228 posts

Re: Lobsters

#71

Post by lupatus »

This reminds me of a tale from the Internet of yesteryear...

Long ago, circa the year 2000, I was a member of the very first niche social network, makeoutclub.com (MOC)[1], a site originally about indie rock music. One day, a group of members got tired of gibby's (the owner) benign dictatorship and mutinied. The group started lipstickandcigarettes.com (L&C), which is now a parked domain. At the time, L&C targeted the same demographic, but was very restrictive on which hipsters could join and had a more savvy GUI than MOC. It had great early success in attracting members interested in indie rock from MOC. Eventually, though, the proprietors of L&C lost interest and let the community there dissolve in order to pursue other interests (there were rumors of drug addiction at the time, IIRC). MOC, on the other hand, is still going strong and presumably making money for gibby.

I suppose the moral to my story is this: unless your social network fiefdom actively feeds your pocketbook (as MOC does for gibby and HN does for pg), expect to lose interest in maintaining it once the novelty of protest has worn off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub

Re: Lobsters

#72

Post by 1gor »

inuhj wrote: post #34

My favorite forum feature is 'the blender'. I first saw it on nuclearphynance.com(and not since). Once a critical number of people blend a thread it gets deleted so as not to pollute the list of threads. In practice it worked very well. The overwhelming majority of blended threads were from new users who were still getting a hang of the quality standards for posting in the forum.

What are 'blended threads'?

Re: Lobsters

#73

Post by bravura »

Interestingly, you can see the user invitation tree here:

https://lobste.rs/u/

So if you want an invitation, you should see if you know anyone on that lists.

[edit: "If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." If your parent gets banned, do all children get banned?]

Re: Lobsters

#74

Post by roryokane »

veyron wrote: post #49
rauljara wrote: post #41

Explanation for the site being invite only: "Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." Seems b…

"my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably." If anything all this means is that you conform to the culture of HN, precisely what (it would seem) Lobsters is trying to break from.

https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters says nothing about trying to break from the culture of HN. Lobsters differs from HN in features, moderation transparency, and spamming-prevention techniques, but it doesn’t say it tries to have a different user culture. So rauljara conforming to HN culture would not be a reason to avoid inviting him to Lobsters.

Re: Lobsters

#75

Post by yesimahuman »

Xcelerate wrote: post #23

Huh, this looks pretty cool. I like the transparency. JCS, can I get an invitation?

I'd love an invite as well! I love how damn fast and nimble it feels, and I've already enjoyed some of the discussion.

Re: Lobsters

#76

Post by DigitalSea »

I would really love an invite to this. Competition is good regardless of whether or not it was created out of spite. I often wish there were more competing sites to HN because the quality of the moderation and the way things work around here has really deteriorated as of late.

I don't know the reasoning of Paul Graham hell-banning people on this site for merely questioning the way it's moderated or for whatever reason, but the lack of transparency on HN is a big issue that needs to be fixed.

As much as I love HN, I think it's time for a change and whether it be Lobsters or another site, I am really hoping a successor breaks the ranks and perhaps PG and the moderator team will then make an effort to fix this place.

Re: Lobsters

#77

Post by MoOmer »

roryokane wrote: post #66

Can an existing user of Lobsters please send me an invite? (My email is in my profile.) According to https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters , the only reason Lobsters is invite-only is to prevent spammers from signing up. So if you want to check that I’m not a spammer, just glance at my past comments ( http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane ) and submissions ( http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ror…

I'll take an invite as well, if someone has access.

Re: Lobsters

#78

Post by JohnsonB »

rauljara wrote: post #41

Explanation for the site being invite only: "Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." Seems b…

Seems like the cost of slower adoption isn't worth the upside to spam control, given that that's a relatively small problem for sites like these with proper IP control and user moderation. Lower quality comments is the bigger problem and that wouldn't easily be solved by being invite only.

Re: Lobsters

#79

Post by spitfire »

Lazare wrote: post #61
spitfire wrote: post #51

It's much faster than HN. No long pauses when loading pages.

That may mean you've been slowbanned from HN. If you slightly annoy a moderator around here they'll flag your account so you see very long page load delays. Try logging out of HN, and see if the long pauses go away for you.

Oh, there's almost zero doubt I've annoyed a moderator at some point.

There's no list of moderators anywhere is there? I could tick off the ones I haven't annoyed.

Re: Lobsters

#80

Post by why-el »

sgdesign wrote: post #48

This headline does seem unusually misleading. I already came across this site 10 days ago, it doesn't seems like it was "launched" in any fashion? And it's not by Yehuda Katz, and also doesn't seem like a HN "competitor" since it probably doesn't want to attract as big an audience. So basically there are three things that are flat-out wrong with this headline.

It is a HN competitor. The person who built says they did so out of frustration with HN.
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