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I think the killer feature that HN has compared to any other site I know is Dang.

• tptacek 3y ago
  Lobsters has had a series of thoughtful moderators.
  • GaggiX 3y ago
    That's not really what people are sharing in this thread, to be honest.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      I've read the thread and don't know what you mean.
      • GaggiX 3y ago
        It's literally the top comment and its children.
        • tptacek 3y ago
          I've certainly read that thread, and I don't know what you're trying to say.
          • GaggiX 3y ago
            Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought you were trying to compare the Lobsters moderators to Dang in a positive way, something not really emphasized in the top comment and its children.
            • stephenr 3y ago
              Pretty much any complaint about moderation from anyone always has another side to the story. At least two of the tales of woe posted in this discussion have shown that the user was not in fact blameless.
              • GaggiX 3y ago
                If that what tptacek meant he could have said that instead of saying "I don't understand, I don't get it" ahah
                • tptacek 3y ago
                  Even that is not what I meant. The top comment on that thread consists of a complaint that self-promotion rules appear inconsistently enforced. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't; I don't know. But that doesn't contradict what I said about Lobsters moderation. This is just another example of the tired message board trope of blowing any complaint about anything into a blanket condemnation. Nuance is boring to write, strident declamation isn't. Unfortunately, for the reader, it's the opposite.
• lmm 3y ago
  HN versus Lobsters made me realise how important moderator freedom/discretion is. Like in principle I'd rather be on the site that had a moderator action log and clear rules about what gets people banned, and I complain about the moderation here plenty, but in practice I'll take the site that manages to ban annoying users who stay on just the right side of any written code.
  • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    Despite the mod log and clear rules, I personally find that Lobsters relies a lot on norms. There's nothing wrong with that, I mean my D&D table isn't open to everyone and has the norms that come with being a personal friend of mine which are vague and contained only in my head. But Lobsters is an invitation-based public site. Norms are a challenging thing to communicate in face-to-face communications. They're even harder to communicate online where all we have is text. They can also lead to the perception of selective enforcement. The discussions in this thread on the self-promotion rule and some angst about how certain topics and community members get better treatment than others are good examples on how the norms on Lobsters feels unevenly enforced by folks who have used the site. My own experience on the site made me feel that the norms around moderation felt uneven. Some topics and some posters seemed to be more favored than others. The lack of clear moderation is what led me to stop participating on the site; ultimately I felt like I wasn't in the "in-group". Maybe that's the point of a norm-based moderation style. In that regard, even if dang has no modlog, his moderation feels even-handed and consistent enough that I never feel the presence of an in-group and out-group. Of course this site is much larger so it might be a volume thing. A ban or a flag of 1/8 comments "feels" much more impactful than flags on 50/300 comments, but probably much harder to detect. While I don't post on the site much anymore, I don't find us-vs-them dynamics to be particularly useful. They sow rancor where there doesn't need to be much. Lobsters isn't my kind of site but it obviously is for some folks, and that's great!