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. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.
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 issues with how they self-moderate though. Personally, I have always felt that invite-only communities have weird vibes to them. Still find it worth lurking for more esoteric content though.
This is a common failure mode that's seen in some reddit subs.
In reddit, the moderators of that sub get a particular idea of how their sub should look, which oddly enough includes the idea that what they do is always right. Any sub that can have physical products backing it, such as makeup, will commonly fall in this trap.
Mods: "You cannot promote products here... (unless you're one of my friends or giving me kickbacks".
Now with Reddit, you have a very large usebase to keep the sub alive. But small sites will commonly strangle themselves by doing this.
>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 upvotes and were did all the commenters go before June's API disruption while the subscribers kept climbing?
> when I attempted to post my things, I get told that this content is not welcome on the site. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.
I feel the same. I spent a fair bit of time on the site, including posting ~600 articles and commenting. Some of my posts got a fair bit of upvotes. I got a couple of warnings when I posted my own content, even though it was 5-10% of my posts. Super frustrating, so I told the moderator I wasn't going to participate any more. And I haven't. Their site, their rules, but I don't have to spend my time there.
Weird because primarily submitting one's own stuff seems to be pretty common there. Random example from a user currently on the front page: https://lobste.rs/~rednafi/stories
And that is not the only one on the front page right now that's submitting mostly their own stuff.
I had a similar experience. I simply deleted my account and left the site. If my contributions weren't welcome then that's the choice of the moderators, but I had no desire to try to participate in a forum where simply linking to relevant non-promotional content that happens to be posted on your own website will get you accused of being a spammer.
I remember once I mentioned something about lobste.rs in Twitter (trying to actually be positive for the community) and the creator went all crazy against me . shrug Thanks but no thanks
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!
"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.
yeah, the problem with invite only is that it removes the best and the worst users. it self-selects for the sort of terminally-online people willing to put up with an invite process. people like me.
the best content on sites like this is the random comment that appears from somebody who's the absolute undisputed expect on some subject, and doesn't normally leave comments, but sees an opportunity to share their knowledge and does so because it's low enough friction.
There's a little button on the submit form that adds a tag to say you're the author. If you forget it and it comes out, people tend to assume it's on purpose.
Lobsters has a simple but effective and fairly strongly enforced tag system that makes it far easier to curate your feed than HN. Despite what others have said here, it is not a ghost town at all, it's intentionally lower noise and they'd like to keep it that way.
Roughly 100 tags on the page. I see "news" and "ipv6" marked as no longer active. I'm guessing that "inactive" implies dropping from SQL indexes as an economy measure, while retaining unmodified in the original post's metadata.
> Quite a disciplined policy by the stewards of the website. How does the enforcement work against say, overtagging?
Tags are used as negative signal, rather than positive (as in, you filter out tags you don't like, rather than taking the ones you do), so overtagging would kill the submission, and missing tags will be added by others via suggestions (which automatically add the tag after some threshold amount of suggestions).
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.
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.
I don't have an account although a couple things I wrote got posted there, if I'd realized it at the time that apparently qualifies me.
Overall I don't know if the quality is better than HN, even if the SNR is higher, there is just so much less total that the sum of good stuff is lower. It's almost completely free of politics, gossip, non-tech stuff though which is nice. For example I don't think any of the OpenAI drama was covered there.
Otoh the links posted there are essentially a subset of what's posted on HN.
From my experience in invite-only forums, it can only assure some bottom line (mainly, fewer troll posts), but it doesn't help at all on the quality of comments.
The only thing I saw that ever significantly improved the quality of comments is vote-based comment system when it firstly started to emerge (I'm thinking Reddit in its first few years). But unfortunately it nowadays has been gamed to death, probably even worse than old public forums.
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.
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 don't know how to curate their feed anymore). I kinda like it, but I've been trying to break the addiction cycles of things like Twitter, so for each their own.
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.
But I don't think there has been any public updates since that release (edit: updates from YC. There is a community-led project that continues to improve the codebase after that release)
I would guess it's part of the ethos of not spending more time and effort on HN than strictly needed. Perhaps also a bit of the standard silicon valley culture of building on open source but not actually contributing anything meaningful back.
>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 content being common.
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 too) but anyone can put their own scoring/sorting algo on it.
> 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?)
There's probably not all that much to see past the decade-old public release from the arc project. The parts of it that aren't public past that are non-public by necessity, like the voting ring detector stuff.
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 instinctual level.
I've considered looking for an invite, but I don't think I'd be well received and I don't care for being reprimanded by a stranger over tone or 'unprofessionalism' when I see straight trolling or passive aggression in comments.
The invite system is solid but I would change a few things to turn it into a place I might have a chance of being welcome.
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.
Hello, this post actually made me make a post of my own.
I think you can have your cake and eat it here.
If you filter HN with uBlock Origin to remove topics and sources you are not interested in, i.e. non-technical ones in my case, probably the case for many others too, then you can create what Lobsters was going for, but here on HN.
You get the fully populated, buoyant chat, whilst fine tuning the scope of topics and sources you see.
Is there an equivalent of https://hckrnews.com/ (especially the top 10 / top 20 filters) for lobste.rs? That's the main way I browse HN, I wish I could do the same for lobste.rs. The closest seems to be https://lobste.rs/top but it seems to only cover the past week.
Readit News
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. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.
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 issues with how they self-moderate though. Personally, I have always felt that invite-only communities have weird vibes to them. Still find it worth lurking for more esoteric content though.
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.
In reddit, the moderators of that sub get a particular idea of how their sub should look, which oddly enough includes the idea that what they do is always right. Any sub that can have physical products backing it, such as makeup, will commonly fall in this trap.
Mods: "You cannot promote products here... (unless you're one of my friends or giving me kickbacks".
Now with Reddit, you have a very large usebase to keep the sub alive. But small sites will commonly strangle themselves by doing this.
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 upvotes and were did all the commenters go before June's API disruption while the subscribers kept climbing?
I feel the same. I spent a fair bit of time on the site, including posting ~600 articles and commenting. Some of my posts got a fair bit of upvotes. I got a couple of warnings when I posted my own content, even though it was 5-10% of my posts. Super frustrating, so I told the moderator I wasn't going to participate any more. And I haven't. Their site, their rules, but I don't have to spend my time there.
https://lobste.rs/~mooreds is my profile.
And that is not the only one on the front page right now that's submitting mostly their own stuff.
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 relate to computing.) but "What are you working on this week?" is okay.
3. "What Punch Cards Teach Us About AI Risk" https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-tea... is not okay (Business history is off-topic) even though specific implementations of punch card machines are discussed
There will always be sharp edges to moderation but I've generally found more permissive policies to be more fair.
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!
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.
the best content on sites like this is the random comment that appears from somebody who's the absolute undisputed expect on some subject, and doesn't normally leave comments, but sees an opportunity to share their knowledge and does so because it's low enough friction.
However, I have seen a few self-promotion links that were brilliant, so I have some mixed feelings on the topic.
I don't have any answers, but I definitely can spot the problems.
Dead Comment
Quite a disciplined policy by the stewards of the website. How does the enforcement work against say, overtagging?
Also this:
> Inactive tags can no longer be used on new stories.
https://lobste.rs/tags
Roughly 100 tags on the page. I see "news" and "ipv6" marked as no longer active. I'm guessing that "inactive" implies dropping from SQL indexes as an economy measure, while retaining unmodified in the original post's metadata.
Tags are used as negative signal, rather than positive (as in, you filter out tags you don't like, rather than taking the ones you do), so overtagging would kill the submission, and missing tags will be added by others via suggestions (which automatically add the tag after some threshold amount of suggestions).
[0]: https://github.com/SimonHalvdansson/Harmonic-HN
Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.
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.
https://lobste.rs/about
I don't have an account although a couple things I wrote got posted there, if I'd realized it at the time that apparently qualifies me.
Overall I don't know if the quality is better than HN, even if the SNR is higher, there is just so much less total that the sum of good stuff is lower. It's almost completely free of politics, gossip, non-tech stuff though which is nice. For example I don't think any of the OpenAI drama was covered there.
Otoh the links posted there are essentially a subset of what's posted on HN.
I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.
The only thing I saw that ever significantly improved the quality of comments is vote-based comment system when it firstly started to emerge (I'm thinking Reddit in its first few years). But unfortunately it nowadays has been gamed to death, probably even worse than old public forums.
Exaggerating doesn't make reflect well on your argument.
HN doesn't have a notable problem with self-promotion.
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.
Deleted Comment
This is a good thing.
But I don't think there has been any public updates since that release (edit: updates from YC. There is a community-led project that continues to improve the codebase after that release)
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 content being common.
I find your idea interesting about having a service that stores the links and comments (and presumably does spam controls too) but anyone can put their own scoring/sorting algo on it.
[0] https://github.com/HackerNews/API
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/api
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?)
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 instinctual level.
I've considered looking for an invite, but I don't think I'd be well received and I don't care for being reprimanded by a stranger over tone or 'unprofessionalism' when I see straight trolling or passive aggression in comments.
The invite system is solid but I would change a few things to turn it into a place I might have a chance of being welcome.
Also, I haven’t seen anything like tone policing and ‘unprofessionalism’, and I think the boundaries usually are quite objective and trivial.
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.
I think you can have your cake and eat it here.
If you filter HN with uBlock Origin to remove topics and sources you are not interested in, i.e. non-technical ones in my case, probably the case for many others too, then you can create what Lobsters was going for, but here on HN.
You get the fully populated, buoyant chat, whilst fine tuning the scope of topics and sources you see.
I detailed the uBO rules here a moment ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510651