Having a smaller community doesn’t mean "same composition of people, just fewer of them".
I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters.
Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower.
The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic.
I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters.
Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower.
The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic.
¹ https://lobste.rs/hats