
Lobste.rs - tosh
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
======
whalesalad
I like the code that plays a little lottery to assign a user a rare lobster
color as the theme of the site:
[https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/6553de202e36757047...](https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/6553de202e36757047e776f8b47cd8e69e1dedf7/app/controllers/application_controller.rb#L87-L108)

------
rkho
Kind of an interesting story:

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.

~~~
atomi
This reads like a grievance. I can't tell.

Would you prefer a different TLD or do you think your work should be more
flexible?

~~~
rubyfan
We have blue coat as well. It’s a tool for tyrants.

Every blog is blocked on ours and the reasons listed is “anyone can publish
and content.” Yeah welcome to the Internet.

~~~
alanpost
lobste.rs sysadmin here. Would you be willing to email me a screenshot or the
error message you get accessing lobste.rs and having it blocked by Blue Coat?

------
angersock
For folks that are curious, lurk on the site a bit and swing through the
#lobsters IRC channel.

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.

------
sideproject
Love lobsters. :) I run and manage a tool similar to Lobsters (not open
source).

[https://www.hellobox.co](https://www.hellobox.co)

Originally started as "Build your own HN-clone".

~~~
gigaftp
Just thought I would let you know your site is broken. It can't load Vue
Analytics.

~~~
sideproject
Arrggg! Sorry about that. It's up now. :)

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dboreham
Arrrgh. They have a link to this thread, so now I'm in an infinite recursive
loop..

~~~
abhishekjha
More like a deadlock than recursion.

------
siruncledrew
What I like about forums like Lobster.rs and HN is they are easier to
understand and replicate without too much front-end over-complication.

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.

------
nickpsecurity
There might be people wondering what differentiates Lobsters from Hacker News.
We are a diverse crowd with different preferences. We also did a mass invite
not long ago that changed things up a bit. That said, I think friendlysock's
post on What Lobsters Is and Isn't was the best summary of what the site is
really about. Since it was in a debate, I've snipped the parts that matter
here into a Pastebin for yall:

[https://pastebin.com/mLfFRUG4](https://pastebin.com/mLfFRUG4)

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.

~~~
protomyth
> We also did a mass invite not long ago that changed things up a bit.

How did that work? I do wonder what the geographical distribution is of
Lobsters since it grew through invites.

~~~
nickpsecurity
It's hard to tell. It was chaos at first but stabilized a bit. We have
Americans in many areas, Canadians, a bunch in Europe, at least one in Peurto
Rico, Asians... fairly diverse. The programmers include people doing web tech
like what's posted here, people doing simplified or hardcore stuff in C,
people in CompSci working on theory, some in companies sharing technical
aspects of their work, some cultural, and occasionally just whatever's going
around in tech news.

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.

------
sitharus
I've been watching lobste.rs for a couple of years and the content is
generally excellent.

I've never gotten around to getting an account though, just following the
links is usually enlightening.

------
mankurt
[https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs)

Lobsters is a nice community to follow. It has interesting content for
software engineers open to learning new things.

------
garybusey
anyone want to give me an invite :)

~~~
mabynogy
Yeah I can invite you. You can reach me here under the same nick:
[http://dailyprog.org/chat/](http://dailyprog.org/chat/)

------
xrd
As the site has grown it seems like the barrier to get an account has grown
too. I've never been able to comb through the list of users and find someone
who I knew. I should do a search for "hack lobste.rs" and see if there is a
better way.

~~~
ngoldbaum
Drop by irc and don't be a huge jerk immediately.

------
shawn
I’ve been thinking how to make an HN killer for several years. (I’m not sure
why — I love this place — but I also love a good challenge.)

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.

~~~
toyg
_> The key might be to out compete HN in Show HNs._

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.

~~~
rtpg
To be honest, Twitter has been pretty eye opening about the value of "expert
opinions" on a lot of stuff. It has become the perfect platform for self-owns
(granted, the format doesn't help)

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.

~~~
westoncb
That's an interesting (and valid, imo) point. My guess is that on Twitter the
prominent experts are less interesting because:

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.

------
golemiprague
For a moment I thought it is something to do with Jordan Peterson

~~~
Harkins
That has become a common misconception. See
[https://lobste.rs/about#michaelbolton](https://lobste.rs/about#michaelbolton)

------
Kenji
Lobste.rs is basically Hacker News without intransparent moderating based on
whims, liberofascist social justice warriors, stalinists and feminazis. I like
browsing it, but it doesn't have as much activity as Hacker News.

~~~
hoophoop
You are very, very confused. Some datapoints on HN:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitHNSays/top/?sort=top&t=month](https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitHNSays/top/?sort=top&t=month)

