Lobste.rs
github.com
github.com
I spent three years writing code for a bank and Lobsters is a tech site that I visit occasionally.
The corporate firewall as well as the Bluecoat proxy banned it (Bluecoat also banned basically everything while I wasn't on VPN).
When I inquired about this ban, an incredibly bureaucratic person responded that they had reports that ".rs domains perpetrated lots attacks" on the company's security systems so therefore they were unwilling to whitelist the site.
Would you prefer a different TLD or do you think your work should be more flexible?
Every blog is blocked on ours and the reasons listed is “anyone can publish and content.” Yeah welcome to the Internet.
Be prepared to demonstrate some kind of technical competence (online code, writing, whatever), and please don't join to shill your products, projects, or spam news articles, content marketing, or political stuff.
Originally started as "Build your own HN-clone".
I'm one of those people that would rather start from a simpler base and iterate on it than start with a ton of components and get confused trying to figure out how they all fit together.
The last part disses on HN and Reddit. Some of the Lobsters don't like HN. It was actually started after a dispute between its founder Joshua Stein and Paul Graham over moderation. It's not really anti-HN, though, given many of us are active on both sites. There's also a new admin, Peter "pushcx" Harkins, who runs the bootstrapping site Barnacl.es. We have lots of new members and new admin. We're doing new things. I think I speak for Lobsters that are neutral to or like HN (hell, I love it!) in saying they're just different styles of link aggregators and communities. We even cross-post stories and comments on occasion, esp if same article. I love looking at Hacker News and Lobsters comments for same article. I'll sometimes find something golden on one that's not on other and vice versa. And as a differentiator, you'll find the Lobsters comments to be hands-on building stuff more often. And we do lots of CompSci papers or deep dives with many of mine on potentially-useful stuff in formal methods since they get little attention. Some submitters there also do those kinds of things for a living.
I should say something on moderation. Since I have showdead on, I know HN moderation does a good job mostly. Almost all of them are trollish or garbage comments. I've also seen comments disappear in political arguments that weren't mean or anything but unpopular to... majority, vocal minority, or what? I don't know since I lack the data. People on the other side were sometimes more vicious or low-info with their posts without removal by moderators. So, I'm personally convinced there's a filter bubble reflecting the bias of the community, more active downvoters, the moderators, or some combination. That might have started in community's votes with mods going with them to keep them happy, making their own decision... I don't know. It's a black box that predictably favors some stuff, penalizes others, sometimes adapts to new patterns on those, and is sometimes random.
Although political scuffles happen periodically, I rarely ask these questions on Lobsters since we don't censor political or technical disagreement if it's civil. I have good understanding of about everyone's position. The moderators will sometimes ask people to back out of an argument that became a cesspool or just cool off. They do that here, too, with warnings and temporary rate limits. On Lobsters, we go further to support transparent moderation with a moderation log that tracks what happened. The votes on stories and comments were also visible to everyone. Downvotes require an explanation which shows up in divisive situations: +4 up -3 disagree -1 troll -1 spam is an example. All that gives a more accurate picture of what's going on. They did make votes invisible on comments for a few days to hypothetically reduce their influence on arguments. I don't know if it's effective. Only a few unrelenting trolls and spam rings have been banned that I can recall. It's also an invite-only system which helped early on. I think that has less effect these days since many people are happy to offer invites. Probably reduces spam and moderator workload, though. Having showdead on is why I know that's work for mods on a popular, open-to-join site like HN. The community, too, for those flagging the stuff.
So, there it is. It's a site with a strong focus on deep content, building more often than usual, low noise, and transparent moderation. It is mostly programming related vs the huge variety of topics on HN. Front page changes more slowly with less comments per article than HN. Sometimes none even on a story they like (surprises new submitters). You will see people on there drop deep or just useful comments you won't see somewhere else since they only do them there. They have high ratio of CompSci or deep dives since it's a focus area. These are all the things people on HN may like or dislike about Lobsters depending on their preferences. Just watch it for a few weeks to decide for yourself if you want to add it to your list of sites to enjoy. Again, it's not either/or: I love the good things in both sites and communities. :)
Note: I'm not currently doing invites. You don't need them to read the site. Many members have contact info in profile, too. If you want to post or comment, get on #lobsters in Freenode and ask for an invite.
EDIT: I didn't realize Peter had an account here. He's the "Harkins" in this thread. He's "pushcx" on Lobsters.
How did that work? I do wonder what the geographical distribution is of Lobsters since it grew through invites.
The strange thing for me was people rarely commented. Some didn't even vote on articles they liked but emailed me. Aside from stories inviting frivilous debates, the comments were often useful in some way. The mass invite increased low-content comments but it's usually new people learning the norms of the community. Noise drops again sometime after that. I try to message them describing the site a bit to smooth that process over a bit.
It's been pretty fascinating to observe those patterns. It was a strange site with a slow, but steady, stream of interesting submissions, comments, and people but hardly any comments. I just kept sharing and learning more overtime. It became part of my daily routine like Hacker News.
I've never gotten around to getting an account though, just following the links is usually enlightening.
Lobsters is a nice community to follow. It has interesting content for software engineers open to learning new things.
The key might be to out-compete HN in Show HNs. It’s difficult to get your own projects onto the front page, and once there, most people tend to focus on business aspects rather than raw hacker / tinkerer aspects.
If you mix in some intellectually gratifying stories to fill the downtime, then you’d end up catching the interest of makers. And that seems like a recipe for a competitor.
That would basically become ProductHunt. And if you emphasize Ask HN, you end up with early Quora.
The real killer, imho, would be to give automatic prominence to actual experts and "players" in their fields. The best side of HN for me is (or was) watching the interaction of "nerd-celebs" and makers, but they are now discouraged by the volume of noise (which includes yours truly). Moderation can only do so much.
I've found that HN tends to upvote "good" comments, so most threads end up bringing the important stuff on top. Usually the insightful stuff comes from experts, since being an expert helps! And people like patio11 end up consistently on the top of comment threads because it's Good Content(TM). But sometimes someone relatively unknown will simply be making a good point. That's what I'm here for, the good information. And at least in our industry, either the experts are on here, or they're not but their followers will post a link to their blog/G+ and the information shows up on here anyways.
If we had Twitter-style "voice proportional to follower count/retweet potential" stuff, then a lot of things would fall through the cracks. Sometime's I'm curious about what person X thinks about a thing, but I've found it's a feeling too similar to wanting to hear gossip/validation of my own thoughts, rather than the Quest For Knowledge.
1. They're already speaking from a position of superiority in a certain sense, whereas on HN you're just in a conversation with everybody. You might be pretty important, but then maybe Alan Kay will jump in or something.
2. There isn't the same kind of prompting on Twitter that we get from the stories here which commenters are replying to. Instead, it's just the expert talking about whatever they want: maybe interesting to them, but not so much to everybody else.
3. The Twitter format doesn't encourage the same depth of discussion as HN, stemming from the initial character limit, but perhaps now just a vestigial consequence.
It could be interesting to have a site somewhere between HN and Twitter though—something that filters out more newbs/trolls, but doesn't exclude capable unknowns. Maybe you need an invite from someone involved in order to join, or maybe there are some questions you'd be required to answer which might establish you're on the right side of some threshold of intelligence, creativity, decentness, ability to communicate, etc.
Then again, I also agree HN is doing a pretty good job of ensuring good comments become visible.
In a lot of ways, I think Advogato[2] was on to something with their web of trust. The line on wikipedia Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato have been gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution is faulty. seems like sour grapes. I still think its worthy of another couple of steps down that path.
Also, I think folks miss handling the joy of tangents cause a lot of problems in moderation that are really just a structure problem. Mostly they are marked as off-topic and down-voted which cuts down on some amazing streams of knowledge. I have yet to see a system that allows branching of something the poster knows will be off-topic but is a tangent of the main article. It seems like generated articles might be the way to go and leave a "tangent pointer" in the main article. I think solving the tangent problem would solve a lot of moderation problems and hard feelings of the users.
I really don't like some solutions, like shadow banning or making every comment by a user drop to the bottom of the sort right away with little hope of getting "above the fold" no matter how many upvotes the comment gets.
1) Although, quite a few people actually do want to be part of the majority with only the "acceptable" opposition represented. This pattern repeats so often, it makes me think its just baked into humanity's tribal thinking.
I've had some discussions with the lobste.rs folks about another attempt to do a sophisticated trust metric, but nothing ever rose to the level of "we should do this."
Interestingly, a lot of people know who the real experts are. I sometimes wonder about why most systems focus on the internal to the exclusion of any real world input.
1. Managing egos can become a problem, maybe some sort of ability for users to tag comments with logical fallacies to try and encourage rational arguments?
2. Could users use some sort of anonymous verification for throwaway comments? A global key to sign their anonymous comment? There's definitely work done in this category, I found https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-36213-2_... after a quick google.
I think you bring up a slightly different point in the end, the gatekeeper/moderator is a much harder problem to solve and related to the clash of egos. Ultimately, rewarding critical thinking, limiting power of censorship and growing the community organically are key here
Depending on how you do the accounting, I imagine HN is very profitable. How many people apply to the incubator because of HN? How many of their startups get a big word of mouth boost from the free publicity and association?
Regardless of how it's entered on the tax forms, I imagine the HN costs are considered well worth it by the investors.
It’s tantalizing to think it’s possible to make that site right now.
Reddit has become a write off, no better than endlessly scrolling through a garbage can. HN and Lobste.rs is where its at now :)