I recognize several of the “unique to Lobsters” links as being on the HN front page over the past few days. E.g:
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-use-our-own-hardware
https://avi.im/blag/2024/sqlite-past-present-futureOh, man. Even the comments are overlapping!
I like the visualization aspect. Curious how the data is being aggregated. Previously, I've used this as a source: https://gerikson.com/hnlo/
A lot of these Lobster-specific links appear to be HN links, just a day or two delayed.
tech link aggregator trophic levels
Or more likely, they browse HN. Lobsters was created because some people disliked the moderation, not the content.
I have both in my RSS reader and use the intersection as heuristic signal for astroturfing. If it shows up twice exactly or as an obviously close match I know I can safely completely disregard.
There's some folks that farm lobste.rs -> HN. Actually just one in particular. They're now in the top10 using this strategy due to how effective it is.
I hope they automated it otherwise I feel sorry for them.
I'm yet to see the first karma ATM, where they can withdraw their karma and live a life well earnt!
I think this one user is automated: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=todsacerdoti
This is cool! is there a github?
Can someone be so kind to invite me to lobste.rs?
Get onto the #lobsters irc channel on libera, hang out for a while and you eventually will get an invite
can i see your github?
It's empty
Here you go, I've collected my most noticeable repositories in this Gist https://gist.github.com/snipe/5512408
I don't advise posting to Lobsters for these reasons:
1. The mods there can "steal" your post and any credit for it, reassigning its authorship to one of their friends. This happens more often than you would think.
2. The users there have a major case of groupthink, much worse than us here, considering they don't even allow outsiders to register it they're not recommended by someone on the inside. Inbred is the label that comes to mind.
3. The community hates AI, and will downvote any valid submission just to drag you down to the lowest denominator. If you too hate AI, maybe it is the place for you.
I agree. I've been on Lobsters for a long time, and the changeover from jcs to pushcx in site ownership really changed the moderation philosophy to lean heavily on editorial control of the site's contents.
I think any community has the right to run itself how it wishes. My major frustration with Lobsters is that it doesn't call out this editorial philosophy. The UX of the site and its legacy under jcs often give the impression that it's like any other link aggregator, so I would appreciate if the guidelines clearly called out the editorial approach of moderation.
That said, I would not use the word "inbred" here. They can run their community how they like and and we can dislike it, but insulting another community is generally counterproductive and petty.
I don't think "inbred" is an insult, at least not to me. I find inbreeding to be more of a spectrum than a binary, when it comes to internet communities. Even on HN, which I rate above other communities, there's a strong tendency to take elite behavior as a role model, and then reproduce it.
> The users there have a major case of groupthink
Isn’t that a common feature of most forums? The orange site, in particular, isn’t generally regarded outside of its own bubble as a bastion of independent thought…
I find the Lobsters opinion bubble to be much narrower than HN.
HN these days definitely has its share of meme bubble opinions (like reading the comments on any social media thread), but Lobsters is narrow enough that I can often predict all the comments to a post just based on reading its contents myself. This makes the site pretty boring because if it's so easily to mentally simulate the responses, I may as well just ignore the comments. Tech link aggregators usually source links from all the same places (Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, RSS feeds) that I already do so Lobsters' value on top is minimal.
I don't know about lobsters, but every time I see an opinion posted on HN, it seems to get immediately followed by a contrary opinion. I've also changed the settings so the website no longer appears orange, but I'm probably still in the bubble anyways.
Sometimes I post a comment to agree with something someone has written. Like here.
You just invoked Russell's paradox.
I changed the color as a quick tell for when I'm logged in.
Isn't that a product of the industry? Python has one groupthink, Golang another.
Martin Fowler's company is named "Thoughtworks". I guess he's trying to control the way we think about stuff?
> ...as a bastion of independent thought…
The long tail on this site is what keeps bringing me back, although I must admit it took both swapping to RSS and manually filtering with an acceptance of Sturgeon's Law to wade through the "Make Mone¥ Fa$t" slush.
(note that the —to my mind, misguided— focus on the front pages means TFA misses a lot of the overlap between the two sites)
Lobsters is trying to do the same thing as Hacker News - avoid the Eternal September effect at all costs. It just has more direct and overt methods of maintaining and enforcing its culture than here, and that starts with barring the door against the rabble.
I wonder if the Dutch Strategy might work for a link aggregator: explicitly provide a well-signposted "front page", where the rabble congregates and the groupthink is at its Grundyest, yet implicitly expect any non-Septemberist discussions to occur well away from those few sacrificial links?
That's something that Slashdot does by limiting registrations. In contrast, by disallowing anonymous registrations (without a recommendation), Lobsters actively seeks out those who don't think differently at all, perpetuating its closed-mindedness.
They're optimizing for quality and civility - a certain standard of intellectual and emotional maturity - rather than controversy. Vetting through personal relationships and requiring reputation risk to let someone new in is an effective way to do that. Not every platform wants or needs to be a debate club.
I think that's certainly a goal of invite systems but I don't think Lobsters really lands this. The quality of its discussion isn't much to write home about. It is much friendlier to some opinions over others but quality is not the discriminator. If you write a middling article on Rust I can guarantee you that you'll get more positive feedback than a good article on Go or on LLMs simply because of the opinion bias of the community.
On the contrary, quality is not intrinsic; it emerges from a healthy debate, something that isn't generally possible on Lobsters.
The issue is much worse on Lobsters because of its registration policy which altogether prohibits anonymous registration and thereby a diversity of voices. People are likely to recommend those who think like them (for a new account) rather than ones who think differently.
These are considered features of lobsters, since to even post there, you have to be invited.
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> 1. The mods there can "steal" your post and any credit for it, reassigning its authorship to one of their friends. This happens more often than you would think.
Really? As a Lobsters reader, I occasionally review the first page of the Lobsters Moderation Log, which is public for transparency’s sake: https://lobste.rs/moderations. And I’ve never seen any log about a story’s authorship being reassigned, whether for a good reason or a bad one.
According to my reading of the source code of Lobsters (https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/96cf0b32ee81bb1bd7...), such a change would be described in the Moderation Log as “changed user from the_original_user to another_user”. I just searched all moderation logs of story changes in the last two years (39 pages of logs), and no log contains the string “changed user from”. So whether “stealing” of posts ever happened, I don’t think Lobsters users have to worry about that happening now.
Or are you also accusing the mods of hiding those specific changes from the Moderation Log somehow?
It happened to me within the past year, but I imagine it happened in a different way than the one you analyzed. The mods allow the link to be reposted under a different author who is their friend, then hide the original post, and group the original post under the new post. The new post is then promoted and gets all the credit for the link.
> The community hates AI, and will downvote any valid submission just to drag you down to the lowest denominator.
There's lots of links and decent comments on those: https://lobste.rs/t/ai
I wouldn't describe it as anything close to "hates".
A number of very legitimate AI posts on their site get downvoted and disappear. This is pretty bad for the posting user. Such posts do fine on here for comparison.
I checked https://lobste.rs/moderations for deleted AI stories going back to October. There's nothing I can find there. Downvoting through flagging - any examples?
It's not so much about deletion, but more about unfair downvoting to the extent that the posting user's account itself becomes at risk. This is even for very valid GitHub open source project link posts despite the projects having lots of stars. The theory is that the downvoting users don't want to spend the time to keep up with AI, and also don't want others to spend the time.
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