I feel like Lobsters has better quality discourse nowadays though, due to its much more explicit vetting system. I am not part of that website, yet I love reading the comment section there.
Signed up day one with a one char username. Tried to use it a few years later and by then it had been deleted. Understandable I guess, but I'm still salty about it. Just had to get that story off my chest.
Was lobster.rs ways invite only? I thought I remembered having an account a long time ago...but my email isn't registered when I go to reset my PW. Because it's a much smaller community it does suffer from low comment counts on posts. Comments are the best part of HN.
Invite only to write, open to read. But the main trick is tracking the invite tree - if the person that invited you gets banned, you get banned too (or need to appeal to have your “branch” of the invite tree adopted by someone else).
Mainly the interaction (though the graphical design itself definitely isn't what you'd call modern). No notifications or gui animations, no thumbnails or header images, being as hard to navigate as possible, scroll position gets reset all the time, can't even reply to a comment while looking at the rest of the thread because everything is its own separate page, nothing has outlines so text has no clear separation, etc. In a nutshell it feels like a site made in the 90s entirely with HTML forms without a line of javascript.
I mean I do absolutely hate the new reddit redesign and almost exclusively use old.reddit, but the functionality there is still on another level when compared to HN.
Actually, HN is the only social media site where my browser can consistently keep the scroll position. Animations and endless scrolling are what breaks it.
You better start believing in vetted online communities Miss Turner, you're in one!
It may not be vetting by moderators, but HN's dated frontend definitely acts as a forcefield against many kinds of people.