12 ms·

Lobsters

297 points by relation 14y ago

samgranieri 14y ago
I'd like to register on the site
Xcelerate 14y ago
Huh, this looks pretty cool. I like the transparency. JCS, can I get an invitation?
- polshaw 14y ago
  Me too. I'm not a member of a startup community (outside of this forum), so unless they are given out/open up soon, i guess i will be excluded.
- ww520 14y ago
  Can I get an invite as well? Thanks.
- yesimahuman 14y ago
  I'd love an invite as well! I love how damn fast and nimble it feels, and I've already enjoyed some of the discussion.
- prezjordan 14y ago
  I'd love to contribute to this.
- finnw 14y ago
  How about allowing automated signup for read-only accounts? I don't want to post comments on lobste.rs, but it would be nice to have access to other features (e.g. tag-based filtering.)
joshu 14y ago
Ha, I was just thinking about how to architect a discussion forum (ala HN) this morning.
shpoonj 14y ago
Is this the thread where you request an invitation to lobste.rs?
olalonde 14y ago
No about page, no way to register, no mention of Yehuda Katz... edit: Apparently, the site was launched by Joshua Stein (after getting hellbanned from HN), not Yehuda Katz. https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
- why-el 14y ago
  Yehuda is one of the active users: https://lobste.rs/u/wycats https://lobste.rs/u/wycats Update: The site is also open source: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters Last shameless update: Would love an invite. Email in my profile.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    There's also some more information here: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters
    - jpdoctor 14y ago
      Thanks for that link. FTL: Hacker News is operated by a company, Y Combinator, which has a significant financial incentive to censor or promote the links and discussion posted on the site that relate to Y Combinator-funded startups (or competitors of them). Haven't seen much discussion about this HN flaw. Interesting...
      - slurgfest 14y ago
        It is brought up constantly but it is not the kind of discussion which seems to be much approved of. (In the interest of disclosure, I don't even care)
        pbiggar 14y ago
        As a YC founder, whose YC startup got torn apart on HN, I find no truth to this statement.
wmf 14y ago
About Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters This isn't linked anywhere obvious on the site itself.
xutopia 14y ago
It's invite only. Tried a few different urls and got this one: https://lobste.rs/signup https://lobste.rs/signup
- rhizome 14y ago
  So it's not actually launched, but more of a ShowHN.
  - prezjordan 14y ago
    It's very much launched. Been out for a month and a half now. And I don't think OP has any affiliation.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Why ever would it be appropriate to post this here, not to mention with the (now-edited) false headline, in read-only mode?
      - prezjordan 14y ago
        People can still check out what's happening there. It's nice to hear about a new site (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise). Also, I'm not sure what the title (used) to be so I can't comment on that.
        rhizome 14y ago
        "Yehuda Katz launches Lobste.rs" where he is only a user and not involved behind the site at all. As noted elsewhere, it is run by someone who was banned by HN because they were banned from HN, so, to me, a presumption of bad faith is warranted.
andrewljohnson 14y ago
I was trying really hard to register so I could make some votes and comments, but could not.
tptacek 14y ago
Neato.
akashshah 14y ago
According to https://jcs.org/projects/ https://jcs.org/projects/ "Lobsters (2012 - present) - A link aggregation site that I created after I was banned from Hacker News." EDIT - also found https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters which explains some features
- tptacek 14y ago
  JCS was banned from Hacker News? What the hell?
  - wglb 14y ago
    He seems to now be unbanned: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324381 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324381.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Joshua is user 'there.
  - akashshah 14y ago
    He links to https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker... from the projects page
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - akashshah 14y ago
    The irony is that the current submission's title needs to change from "Yehuda Katz..." to "Joshua Stein..."
  - jsprink_ban2 14y ago
    I got the same treatment he did -- and have on accounts I have made since -- and we exchanged emails during development. We both went through each others' posts and couldn't find any rational reason for the treatment (slow banning and hell banning, in both of our cases). Lack of transparency is a pretty big deal on this forum, and once you've crossed Paul -- without knowing how -- it's scorched earth on any account you make. That's why Josh developed Lobsters, and why I'm user #2, and why I'm glad to see it's gaining traction as a community. This site is more threatening to opinion and discourse than any on the public Internet, and that isn't hyperbole. The irony is that this is a hacker community, and most hackers would be appalled at slamming the door and creating a curated garden of ideas. I've posted as jsprink_banned and jsprinkles on the topic, if you're interested; won't spam this thread with it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mattdeboard 14y ago
Honestly Prismatic is so very good at content curation -- at least for me and my friends -- that a "tech/startup/general geekery news" content aggregator is superfluous. I come to HN now to see the comments on the articles I read on Prismatic.
lathamcity 14y ago
I prefer HN's background.
silentscope 14y ago
I wonder if this article will be removed...
chj 14y ago
Oh no, invitation only.
swah 14y ago
I remember how much I really enjoyed seeing points...
bhousel 14y ago
It's about time.
jeffool 14y ago
Exclusionary tagging seems nice. More than giving why you're downvoting, I wish HN didn't ban/banish-to-purgatory people for low karma, but for upheld flagged posts. Someone can be horribly wrong, often, and still learn, and become worthwhile to the group. At least in theory.
edw519 14y ago
When it comes to learning, sharing, and growing together, online or otherwise, there are no competitors, winners, or losers. Just a bigger pie. (Good luck to lobste.rs, but I'll probably be staying right here on hn.)
- hnriot 14y ago
  that's not entirely true, the amount of time any of us spends online looking at tech news is finite, therefore as the pie gets bigger some of the online communities shrink their viewership, have less participation and less engagement. So the idea of competition is actually quite valid. It's like saying there's room for Facebook and Google+, while that's true there definitely are winners and losers because user engagement in a community is a function of its health and status.
  - chc 14y ago
    I think you either missed or ignored his point.
    - shpoonj 14y ago
      I think he/she accurately pointed out its flaws.
  - shanelja 14y ago
    I applied for lobste.rs, sending an 8 paragraph email about myself, the admin didn't even take the time to reply to me, which I find extremely rude, if I am too lowly for his application, then letting me know how to improve would really have been polite. As it is, because of how I was treat by them, I have an extreme aversion to this website. I don't see it as competition for HN, I was merely curious about the community there and it's comparison to the one here. I guess I got my answer...
    - daeken 14y ago
      When did you send it? I don't know about the recipient of your email, but it's not uncommon for me to have a multi-week backlog of email. Long emails tend to get a long reply, so those take even longer.
marshallp 14y ago
Great, another a site with ruby on rail kids discussing shiny web design.
- samgranieri 14y ago
  whats wrong with that?
  - marshallp 14y ago
    It's great if you're a kid, but when you grow up you should work on solving cancer or making spaceships.
    - lwat 14y ago
      Which of those are you doing?
      - marshallp 14y ago
        both
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Now if he can implement the multi-root voting system that would be way cool.
inuhj 14y ago
My favorite forum feature is 'the blender'. I first saw it on nuclearphynance.com(and not since). Once a critical number of people blend a thread it gets deleted so as not to pollute the list of threads. In practice it worked very well. The overwhelming majority of blended threads were from new users who were still getting a hang of the quality standards for posting in the forum.
- 1gor 14y ago
  What are 'blended threads'?
  - inuhj 14y ago
    When speaking about forums each topic and its associated posts are referred to as a thread.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
jsprink_ban2 14y ago
Some thoughts from user #2: - Joshua Stein developed Lobsters by himself. Yahuda Katz was, to my knowledge, uninvolved. - The site is invite only because, and I'm speaking for Josh here and mostly guessing (he'd be a better person to ask), it's still trying to identify itself. Communities are grown organically and I gather Josh is letting Lobsters grow slowly, intentionally. I don't think he has "launched" it, per se. - I emailed Josh to support him when he was hellbanned (as my HN story parallels his), and a couple months after that exchange he invited me to the site. I don't participate much at all -- heads down on a product -- but I think it has potential. - I have 5:1 odds the headline will not be fixed, even though there are three factual errors in that tiny bit of text (Katz, HN Competitor, Launched).
bane 14y ago
Seems to solve my biggest HN complaint, downvotes without reasons. I'd love to give it a spin and see how that works in practice.
- saurik 14y ago
  Slashdot also had upvotes with reasons, and I personally think that is just as important if you agree with downvotes with reasons: it lets you differentiate between things that added new information, made good arguments, or was simply funny. That said, the problem with downvotes with reasons is that it now feels much more harsh. I'm downvoting something that is clearly an insulting comment that should not have been made on the site, and yet I'm wondering "do I really want to use the term 'troll'? that seems harsh".
- adestefan 14y ago
  I always feel bad when I hit the down vote button by accident on my mobile devices. I wish there was a way to undo those fat finger goofs.
tszming 14y ago
Quite good, e.g. enforced SSL, responsive layout, tag, built in search, feed ordered by time ...
rauljara 14y ago
Explanation for the site being invite only: "Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." Seems basically sane, though I imagine the site would be pretty cliquish at first. You do have a pretty strong disincentive for inviting people you don't know. Any member want to break up the cliquishness by inviting me? If you trust metrics, my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably.
- veyron 14y ago
  "my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably." If anything all this means is that you conform to the culture of HN, precisely what (it would seem) Lobsters is trying to break from.
  - roryokane 14y ago
    https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters says nothing about trying to break from the culture of HN. Lobsters differs from HN in features, moderation transparency, and spamming-prevention techniques, but it doesn’t say it tries to have a different user culture. So rauljara conforming to HN culture would not be a reason to avoid inviting him to Lobsters.
- JohnsonB 14y ago
  Seems like the cost of slower adoption isn't worth the upside to spam control, given that that's a relatively small problem for sites like these with proper IP control and user moderation. Lower quality comments is the bigger problem and that wouldn't easily be solved by being invite only.
  - jsnell 14y ago
    Slower adoption? By default a site like this is going to have no traction, since there are a gazillion other reddit clones around. But make it appear exclusive, and you immediately have people begging for invites. (Edit: I don't mean to imply that hype-generation was the real reason to make it invite-only. I'm sure that the stated reasons are the real ones. The interest generated by exclusivity is just a nice byproduct.)
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
I Like it. Needs some modern design, minimalist and clean. It would be sad to see HN die, but if you don't water your plants...
- Kilimanjaro 14y ago
  It definitely needs some background, cue from /r/apple might be a good idea. Also a distinctive header in a different color. A footer. Remove bold from links in front page and Font-size 1.2em Line-height 1.2 Hmm, I'll work on something tomorrow. You guys should open a contest just to let the good vibe flow.
  - fakeempire 14y ago
    > It definitely needs some background, cue from /r/apple might be a good idea. Please, please no. Its fine the way it is.
patdennis 14y ago
I'd be interested in trying this out. Can anyone offer an invite? My email is available via my profile.
grandpoobah 14y ago
An invite would be nice.
davyjones 14y ago
There is also the open sourced clone Lamer News (http://lamernews.com/ http://lamernews.com/) by antirez.
sgdesign 14y ago
This headline does seem unusually misleading. I already came across this site 10 days ago, it doesn't seems like it was "launched" in any fashion? And it's not by Yehuda Katz, and also doesn't seem like a HN "competitor" since it probably doesn't want to attract as big an audience. So basically there are three things that are flat-out wrong with this headline.
- why-el 14y ago
  It is a HN competitor. The person who built says they did so out of frustration with HN.
  - jsprink_ban2 14y ago
    The motivation for creating something is not necessarily its primary purpose.
spitfire 14y ago
It's much faster than HN. No long pauses when loading pages.
- Lazare 14y ago
  That may mean you've been slowbanned from HN. If you slightly annoy a moderator around here they'll flag your account so you see very long page load delays. Try logging out of HN, and see if the long pauses go away for you.
  - Macro 14y ago
    That happens to me most of the time and Why would that happen to me when I have posted very few comments/posts?
  - spitfire 14y ago
    Oh, there's almost zero doubt I've annoyed a moderator at some point. There's no list of moderators anywhere is there? I could tick off the ones I haven't annoyed.
    - Lazare 14y ago
      Nope, no list of moderators. You'll never know who, and you'll never know why, and you probably won't be able to get it reversed. Also, Macro: The step beyond slowbanning is hellbanning, where nobody can see your comments except you, and users with "show dead" on. You've been hellbanned for over a year. As to why...maybe some mod thought your first comment was a bit content free. Maybe they were just having a bad day. I'd recommend getting a new account.
      - tedunangst 14y ago
        wow. Macro posts one slightly vapid but inoffensive comment and is struck by instant death lightning.
      - spitfire 14y ago
        Well we know why. I pissed off one of the cool kids. That's crime enough.
mindcrime 14y ago
If somebody would be kind enough to invite me, it would be much appreciated. Email in profile...
benologist 14y ago
This looks pretty good but a few things come to mind: - no comment collapsing, long comment threads will become a problem just like they are here which ends up sucking, I'd love to see something like reddit's threading / collapsing and I'd really love to a see a whole other forum-ish way to browse stories as well so discussion is even more emphasized - no registration sucks, there are easier ways to identify spammers such as their obvious affiliation with particular website(s), auto-submission honey pots, even a manual glance at submission and other stats can be pretty revealing The biggest concern though is the site's own affiliations ... digg needed their widget everywhere which ensured the quality was locked into a downward spiral. HN gives TC traffic in exchange for publicity, and of course all the preferential treatment and posts by YC startups is less interesting now that their batches are so large. What happens when it's time for lobste.rs to pay for itself? I really do think it's time to replace HN though, it's mainstream and it's targeted by rubbish publications and it's full of users who are here to exploit it or to be exploited by rubbish sites who manipulate them with stunning precision. I'd love an invite if someone's giving them out.
dmix 14y ago
After 4.6 years of using HN obsessively, I'm surprised to find that I'm really hoping this takes off (I was ready to hate on it). After hearing the JCS story and remembering my own experience of PG manipulating headlines + killing my own frontpage submission, I'm all for this. I'm also tried of the YC job listings from companies that launched 4yrs ago flooding the homepage.
- SimianLogic2 14y ago
  coughHeyZapcough
subsection1h 14y ago
I want a site for discussing software development news that has the equivalent of a kill file. There are a handful of prolific users at Hacker News who post multiple low-quality messages every day. I avoid Hacker News because of users such as these. I honestly believe that at least a few of these users are secretly employed by the companies that they promote and defend daily. I don't know if they're paid to post here or that they're simply blind loyalists. Either way, they deserve to be plonked. Below are two examples (posted by a prolific user) of the type of messages I would like to see less of, which could be filtered by a kill file feature: "HN is going to hell because its overrun with people who practice an ideology of socialism -- pro-google because its "Free" and anti-Apple because they actually innovate and have the audacity to charge for their products." "Apple has done far more to make the world a better place than any corporation I've ever heard of. Far more than any government in history ever has. Far more than any charity every has or ever could."
- plinkplonk 14y ago
  +1 for a kill file. I'd also love a 'follow' mechanism. Only a small subset of HN users post deeply insightful posts and if I could see only their posts and comments, that would be a great time saver.
  - lotharbot 14y ago
    Follow mechanism: http://hackerfollow.com/ http://hackerfollow.com/
- seanalltogether 14y ago
  I see this idea pop up on every community I've been involved in, and the simple answer is that it's extremely taxing to build individual comment pages for individual users. So this type of thing usually gets passed back to end users in the form of "build a browser plugin to hide these people on the client side"
  - ktizo 14y ago
    If you want to do it on the client side, it would be perfectly easy to script it on the page.
roryokane 14y ago
Can an existing user of Lobsters please send me an invite? (My email is in my profile.) According to https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters, the only reason Lobsters is invite-only is to prevent spammers from signing up. So if you want to check that I’m not a spammer, just glance at my past comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane) and submissions (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=roryokane http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=roryokane). If you still want another reason to send me an invite, I support the idea of an improved Hacker News – pg seems to barely care about improving HN. I might contribute to the Lobsters code at https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters.
- MoOmer 14y ago
  I'll take an invite as well, if someone has access.
- roryokane 14y ago
  Someone sent me an invite – thanks!
  - rjsamson 14y ago
    That's awesome - any chance you could pay it forward? My email is also in my profile. Thanks!
  - kcbanner 14y ago
    I'm looking for an invite as well, if you wouldn't mind, thanks!
- LiveTheDream 14y ago
  I'd appreciate an invite as well. Email in profile, along with submission and comment history of course.
- nnash 14y ago
  I'd appreciate an invite too (my email is in my profile as well).
stratos2 14y ago
dont like the white background. at all.
calgaryeng 14y ago
I'd like an invite...
- Devilboy 14y ago
  Me too please! Pretty please? ^_^ I promise to behave!
lupatus 14y ago
This reminds me of a tale from the Internet of yesteryear... Long ago, circa the year 2000, I was a member of the very first niche social network, makeoutclub.com (MOC)[1], a site originally about indie rock music. One day, a group of members got tired of gibby's (the owner) benign dictatorship and mutinied. The group started lipstickandcigarettes.com (L&C), which is now a parked domain. At the time, L&C targeted the same demographic, but was very restrictive on which hipsters could join and had a more savvy GUI than MOC. It had great early success in attracting members interested in indie rock from MOC. Eventually, though, the proprietors of L&C lost interest and let the community there dissolve in order to pursue other interests (there were rumors of drug addiction at the time, IIRC). MOC, on the other hand, is still going strong and presumably making money for gibby. I suppose the moral to my story is this: unless your social network fiefdom actively feeds your pocketbook (as MOC does for gibby and HN does for pg), expect to lose interest in maintaining it once the novelty of protest has worn off. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub
bravura 14y ago
Interestingly, you can see the user invitation tree here: https://lobste.rs/u/ https://lobste.rs/u/ So if you want an invitation, you should see if you know anyone on that lists. [edit: "If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." If your parent gets banned, do all children get banned?]
DigitalSea 14y ago
I would really love an invite to this. Competition is good regardless of whether or not it was created out of spite. I often wish there were more competing sites to HN because the quality of the moderation and the way things work around here has really deteriorated as of late. I don't know the reasoning of Paul Graham hell-banning people on this site for merely questioning the way it's moderated or for whatever reason, but the lack of transparency on HN is a big issue that needs to be fixed. As much as I love HN, I think it's time for a change and whether it be Lobsters or another site, I am really hoping a successor breaks the ranks and perhaps PG and the moderator team will then make an effort to fix this place.
ulisesrmzroche 14y ago
Can anyone spare an invite? I'd really like to join up!
ilaksh 14y ago
Looks cool. But what about people like me who don't have any friends but still have interesting ideas?
- citricsquid 14y ago
  I would like to see an invite only site that had an application process where an inviter can pick out applications they like from the pool. This way the people of value but without networking are fine.
  - robotmay 14y ago
    I think that's how Dribbble works, and it's quite a good way of doing it.
jrawlings 14y ago
can anyone spare an invite? :)
tomwalsham 14y ago
Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the history of internet communities, particularly those centred around tech. Usenet had immense value in well defined subgroups prior to the Eternal September (and for some time after, regardless of what people may say). IRC ha(s|d) similar values, and remains a force within niche communities on the tech side. Slashdot was an early mover in the moderated community space which had to arise from the newfound populist web. I still think /.'s comment moderation was superior to the HN system (pre and post-visible comment scores), but the firehose was too late and too poorly implemented to solve editorial issues. In the middle of this, Kuro5hin rose and fell, metafilter grabbed some component of the serious moderated discussion which it still retains. Fark came and went. Boingboing, SA, b3ta. All significant for a time but not names on people's lips today. HN cannibalised a significant portion of /., but failed to convert the greybeards - the discussion here is noticeably different because of it (and lacking the perspective sometimes). Digg suffered greatly from demagogues (as does HN to an extent), descended too rapidly into linkbait and celebpop trash, and fell to Reddit. The redesign was just the nail in the coffin of an already dead community. Reddit became a very granular experience from its initial tech focus, with a current frontpage of dubious intellectual interest, but their popularity speaks wonders for the ad-hoc community created by diverse interest groups with a common central park. They struggle with discovery for new members, and an apparently descending base age group. Communities come and go. Small herds migrate towards the latest point of interest and some stick. Groupthink is a large driver of community malaise, certainly within the tech discussion arena. Individuals dominate submissions and discussions and evolve to minor demagogue status. Some communities evolve to tackle a smaller arena than just the general topical discussion field, but topicality remains critical. Quora has tackled 'big answers'. StackOverflow 'correct answers'. These are some minor elements of the value of the larger communities, much in the same way that Hipmunk, AirBnb etc have abstracted value away from Craigslist. Hyperlocal is the next big thing with FrontPorchForum and NextDoor tacking non-technical local discussion. I still view the approaches to these problems as relatively unsolved and ripe for disruption, in particular the algorithms related to subject and comment popularity, user 'karma' (for better or worse), and approachable comment threading when a userbase grows beyond the 'scan a single page' scale. I'm not convinced that a one-size-fits-all approach will ever work, but even within niche tribes there remains a problem with staying 'current' while avoiding alienating the 1-2% who drive much of the discussion. I fully expect a new dominant discussion forum to arise in the tech scene in the next couple of years, but Lobsters seems to be a kneejerk reimplementation of HN that even if it claws some traction would have to evolve rapidly to solve problems rather than dangling the 2013 model of a 2012 carrot.
dbecker 14y ago
It's a shame there isn't an about page that suggests what will be different (or better) about lobste.rs from HN. If it's just a clone site where a different set of people post the same articles and similar comments, I won't waste my time.
- roryokane 14y ago
  There is an about page, though there’s no link to it on the site: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters
nikcub 14y ago
* clone HN * put a link to it at the top of HN * expect something different to HN?
reustle 14y ago
I feel it's pretty hard to look at. HN is simple, but still designed well. This, on the other hand, feels cramped.
w1ntermute 14y ago
One thing I liked right off the bat was a good mobile experience. The fact that you still can't get this on HN is quite appalling to me.
tlear 14y ago
Remember reading it a while ago and half the front page was RoR circlejerk, seemed to have gotten much better lately.
orangethirty 14y ago
Variety is what makes HN so engaging. If I wanted to read exclusivly about computers, I would just hit usenet.
jcr 14y ago
It's unfair to blame Paul Graham for every moderation decision made on HN. It's been stated that YC funded founders help with moderation and editing on HN, and it's a safe bet that YC partners also have elevated permissions here. If you're like me, a normal HN user, then you will never know all the details. If you find yourself having a bias based on knowingly incomplete information, then you need to stop and rethink your position. The most any normal user can say for certain about jcs getting hellbanned is, he did something annoying enough that someone did something about it!!! --Unfortunately, if you believed the previous sentence, you are mistaken. The reality is, a lot of stuff on HN is automated. If you do bad stuff, bad things happen to you (your account) automatically. For example, if you get into a flame war and pass the "posting too fast" threshold, you could get warnings initially, and if you still don't stop, you could hellban yourself. In other words, you simply never know if a human being with moderator privileges did something, or if you did it to yourself. Also, you don't know if it's permanent or temporary. The most I can say with real certainty is, pg is smart enough to design a system which merely gives users enough rope to hang themselves. I would do the same, and if you've studied the problem in depth, you would too. Eliminating human moderation through computerized automation is the only sane way to design a discussion forum. Now if you were a long time, active contributor like jcs, and you ensnared yourself in the sites protective automation, and you thought someone was doing it to you, then ya, you might be miffed. You would probably react harshly, and by doing so, make matters even worse for yourself and give yourself even more "reason" to be upset. Have you ever watched someone get absolutely livid at a chat bot? It's hilarious. It may be a wee bit sadistic to let them keep trading increasingly heated insults with a machine, but it's still fun to watch. At the end, they might learn a valuable lesson. With pg, there's one thing I've come to rely on; he means well. There is no requirement to agree with him on everything, but if over many years you've watched him carefully, studied the things he's said and done, or better, interacted with him, then you can be reasonably certain that he means well. If you know anything at all about Y-Combinator, then you already know that Paul has far more important things to do than mess around with HN. If you don't know the history of HN, you're at a disadvantage; it was started as a for-fun side project to test out the ARC programming language, and HN was originally called "Startup News" for a very good reason -- to attract people with an interest in startups. The name was eventually changed to "Hacker News" due to the retrospectively obvious oversight; a lot of the best coders haven't really thought about doing a startup, and the people interested in startups are often already doing one. Broadening the scope of appeal with the name change makes sense. If you haven't read everything Paul has written, then you don't about the massive amount of time and effort he's put into thinking about the interactions between people on (open) forums, and how to encourage beneficial exchanges between (potentially conflicting) people. HN is now, and always has been, an ongoing experiment to improve the ratio of beneficial exchanges in discussions, as well as reduce human moderation overhead. It's fun watching it evolve. And lastly no, of the small bits of HN secret sauce I've discovered over the years, I absolutely refuse to give you the details. If the details were public, then some people would use them to game the system.
donnfelker 14y ago
It looks like a cool site, would be nice if we could register.
npguy 14y ago
What is really needed, is a HN for other domains outside of technology.
marcamillion 14y ago
Hell-banned and slow-banned? I didn't know that mods for HN would do that to users they disagree with. Spammers, I can understand....but users you disagree with. Wow....just wow.
marcamillion 14y ago
I would like an invitation also - if someone is monitoring this and giving new ones away. Thanks :)
sajithdilshan 14y ago
if reddit and HN had a child, it would look like lobster.
jasonkester 14y ago
Nice. Notice how it so neatly slices off exactly one demographic from here and transplants it over there, without anything that would distract them. It's focussed just on one topic: Software development stuff for Software Developers. There are four main camps here at HN: - "Software Entrepreneurs", building Big Important Startups or quaint little "lifestyle businesses" that let them drive their cute little "italian supercars" around their quaint little midwestern town. - "Computer Programmers", talking about languages, deployment strategies, open source stuff and how to configure their dotfiles to automatically convert tabs to spaces. - "Tech Gossip Afficianodos", excited about what Techcrunch has to say about who got funded, and taking sides in fights between giant corporations. - And the guy who just wants to point out that pirating movies off the internet is technically just "copyright infringement" and therefore not bad at all (and really HBO's fault anyway.) These guys grabbed just their team, and now they're free to talk shop without any of the myriad distractions they'd get trying to do it here. It's a little selfish to note that I actually see this as a good thing for a slightly different reason: If Camp 2 leaves, that's more HackerNews for those of us in Camp 1, which is the reason I'm here. We'll still have to flag stuff from the other two distracting groups, but it just might make this place a little nicer as well. Everybody wins.
- thronemonkey 14y ago
  There are also a few scientists!
- Iv 14y ago
  What amazes me is that in 2012 we still haven't found a decent auto-moderation tagging system that would allow these demographics to emerge naturally and we have to hope for someone to leave. I just want 2 moderation buttons : "insighful" (make this contribution more visible) and "relevant to my interests" (make the things this user tags as insightful or relevant more visible to me. May include a partial transitivity of the "relevant to my interests" operator) Does such a system exist? Is it flawed.
  - manmal 14y ago
    It's tempting to install such a system, but it would establish a strong tunnelblick for users. Also, what if I change my interests (interest reset button?)? I could imagine an opt-out system, like "funding stories don't interest me at all", but then, Facebook's IPO would fall into that category and I followed it with interest.
pbiggar 14y ago
While I hope this doesn't split the HN community, I hope it also serves as a wake up call that HN needs to improve or it will die. Some parts of Lobsters are really really good for solving some of the problems that HN has: - invite only to prevent spam and increase accountability - tags are ideal for the problem where not everyone cares about everything - getting to be a major gripe you see a lot ("oh my god, do we have to have another discussion about X") - HN needs significantly better transparency in bans, title rewrites, etc. I don't believe that PG has an agenda or needs to protect YC companies, but the issue comes up so much that it needs to be addressed - reasons for downvotes are genius - private messages are worthwhile IMO - the domain indicator is actually useful (sick of seeing co.uk or github.com instead of myblog.github.com) Other things HN needs: - to work: the fact that "more" barely works is astonishing - an API for all the apps that want to provide a better or different experience - comment collapsing - an essential feature for actually reading past the first comment thread - a meta site where we can actually discuss this stuff without violating guidelines (meta.stackoverflow.com is one of the most innovative and important community tools ever, IMO) I've heard "there are no technical solutions to social problems" as reasons not to do a lot of these, but the same argument could apply to the downvote. HN needs to innovate to keep its community, and I hope it does.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jschuur 14y ago
So it's like a country club for hackers? No explanation of what it is (scope/core philosophy) other than the links. No sign-up, or even an indication of how to join or why there isn't a general sign-up form. Somewhat off putting, elitist first impression.
- jschuur 14y ago
  OK, to be fair, it does look like there's a normal sign-up/application feature that was just quickly disabled/commented out: https://lobste.rs/s/senl3p/lobsters_discussion_on_hacker_news/comments/eiuvbl https://lobste.rs/s/senl3p/lobsters_discussion_on_hacker_new...
hiphopopotamus 14y ago
Where's the about page?
andybak 14y ago
It's frankly embarrassing to have to ask this in public but if anyone would care to invite me, it looks like my kind of place.
bertomartin 14y ago
Did he use emberjs for the interface? If not, why Not?
astrodust 14y ago
This has to go down as the biggest missed opportunity ever. The name has to be in Lobster (http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lobster http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lobster). This is not an optional thing. Come on.
gobengo 14y ago
I support this. It's kind of ridiculous to see YC company's job postings on the front page all the time. And there's no reason to conflate the cult of YC with actual hacker news.
frenchfries 14y ago
is it possible to get invited? or do I need to have a mac book pro and be a ruby fanboy?

Lobsters

297 points by relation 14y ago

samgranieri 14y ago

I'd like to register on the site

Xcelerate 14y ago

Huh, this looks pretty cool. I like the transparency. JCS, can I get an invitation?

polshaw 14y ago
Me too. I'm not a member of a startup community (outside of this forum), so unless they are given out/open up soon, i guess i will be excluded.
ww520 14y ago
Can I get an invite as well? Thanks.
yesimahuman 14y ago
I'd love an invite as well! I love how damn fast and nimble it feels, and I've already enjoyed some of the discussion.
prezjordan 14y ago
I'd love to contribute to this.
finnw 14y ago
How about allowing automated signup for read-only accounts? I don't want to post comments on lobste.rs, but it would be nice to have access to other features (e.g. tag-based filtering.)

joshu 14y ago

Ha, I was just thinking about how to architect a discussion forum (ala HN) this morning.

shpoonj 14y ago

Is this the thread where you request an invitation to lobste.rs?

olalonde 14y ago

No about page, no way to register, no mention of Yehuda Katz... edit: Apparently, the site was launched by Joshua Stein (after getting hellbanned from HN), not Yehuda Katz. https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

why-el 14y ago
Yehuda is one of the active users: https://lobste.rs/u/wycats https://lobste.rs/u/wycats Update: The site is also open source: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters Last shameless update: Would love an invite. Email in my profile.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  There's also some more information here: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters
  - jpdoctor 14y ago
    Thanks for that link. FTL: Hacker News is operated by a company, Y Combinator, which has a significant financial incentive to censor or promote the links and discussion posted on the site that relate to Y Combinator-funded startups (or competitors of them). Haven't seen much discussion about this HN flaw. Interesting...
    - slurgfest 14y ago
      It is brought up constantly but it is not the kind of discussion which seems to be much approved of. (In the interest of disclosure, I don't even care)
      - pbiggar 14y ago
        As a YC founder, whose YC startup got torn apart on HN, I find no truth to this statement.

wmf 14y ago

About Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters This isn't linked anywhere obvious on the site itself.

xutopia 14y ago

It's invite only. Tried a few different urls and got this one: https://lobste.rs/signup https://lobste.rs/signup

rhizome 14y ago
So it's not actually launched, but more of a ShowHN.
- prezjordan 14y ago
  It's very much launched. Been out for a month and a half now. And I don't think OP has any affiliation.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Why ever would it be appropriate to post this here, not to mention with the (now-edited) false headline, in read-only mode?
    - prezjordan 14y ago
      People can still check out what's happening there. It's nice to hear about a new site (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise). Also, I'm not sure what the title (used) to be so I can't comment on that.
      - rhizome 14y ago
        "Yehuda Katz launches Lobste.rs" where he is only a user and not involved behind the site at all. As noted elsewhere, it is run by someone who was banned by HN because they were banned from HN, so, to me, a presumption of bad faith is warranted.

andrewljohnson 14y ago

I was trying really hard to register so I could make some votes and comments, but could not.

tptacek 14y ago

Neato.

akashshah 14y ago

According to https://jcs.org/projects/ https://jcs.org/projects/ "Lobsters (2012 - present) - A link aggregation site that I created after I was banned from Hacker News." EDIT - also found https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters which explains some features

tptacek 14y ago
JCS was banned from Hacker News? What the hell?
- wglb 14y ago
  He seems to now be unbanned: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324381 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324381.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Joshua is user 'there.
- akashshah 14y ago
  He links to https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker... from the projects page
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- akashshah 14y ago
  The irony is that the current submission's title needs to change from "Yehuda Katz..." to "Joshua Stein..."
- jsprink_ban2 14y ago
  I got the same treatment he did -- and have on accounts I have made since -- and we exchanged emails during development. We both went through each others' posts and couldn't find any rational reason for the treatment (slow banning and hell banning, in both of our cases). Lack of transparency is a pretty big deal on this forum, and once you've crossed Paul -- without knowing how -- it's scorched earth on any account you make. That's why Josh developed Lobsters, and why I'm user #2, and why I'm glad to see it's gaining traction as a community. This site is more threatening to opinion and discourse than any on the public Internet, and that isn't hyperbole. The irony is that this is a hacker community, and most hackers would be appalled at slamming the door and creating a curated garden of ideas. I've posted as jsprink_banned and jsprinkles on the topic, if you're interested; won't spam this thread with it.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mattdeboard 14y ago

Honestly Prismatic is so very good at content curation -- at least for me and my friends -- that a "tech/startup/general geekery news" content aggregator is superfluous. I come to HN now to see the comments on the articles I read on Prismatic.

lathamcity 14y ago

I prefer HN's background.

silentscope 14y ago

I wonder if this article will be removed...

chj 14y ago

Oh no, invitation only.

swah 14y ago

I remember how much I really enjoyed seeing points...

bhousel 14y ago

It's about time.

jeffool 14y ago

Exclusionary tagging seems nice. More than giving why you're downvoting, I wish HN didn't ban/banish-to-purgatory people for low karma, but for upheld flagged posts. Someone can be horribly wrong, often, and still learn, and become worthwhile to the group. At least in theory.

edw519 14y ago

When it comes to learning, sharing, and growing together, online or otherwise, there are no competitors, winners, or losers. Just a bigger pie. (Good luck to lobste.rs, but I'll probably be staying right here on hn.)

hnriot 14y ago
that's not entirely true, the amount of time any of us spends online looking at tech news is finite, therefore as the pie gets bigger some of the online communities shrink their viewership, have less participation and less engagement. So the idea of competition is actually quite valid. It's like saying there's room for Facebook and Google+, while that's true there definitely are winners and losers because user engagement in a community is a function of its health and status.
- chc 14y ago
  I think you either missed or ignored his point.
  - shpoonj 14y ago
    I think he/she accurately pointed out its flaws.
- shanelja 14y ago
  I applied for lobste.rs, sending an 8 paragraph email about myself, the admin didn't even take the time to reply to me, which I find extremely rude, if I am too lowly for his application, then letting me know how to improve would really have been polite. As it is, because of how I was treat by them, I have an extreme aversion to this website. I don't see it as competition for HN, I was merely curious about the community there and it's comparison to the one here. I guess I got my answer...
  - daeken 14y ago
    When did you send it? I don't know about the recipient of your email, but it's not uncommon for me to have a multi-week backlog of email. Long emails tend to get a long reply, so those take even longer.

marshallp 14y ago

Great, another a site with ruby on rail kids discussing shiny web design.

samgranieri 14y ago
whats wrong with that?
- marshallp 14y ago
  It's great if you're a kid, but when you grow up you should work on solving cancer or making spaceships.
  - lwat 14y ago
    Which of those are you doing?
    - marshallp 14y ago
      both

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Now if he can implement the multi-root voting system that would be way cool.

inuhj 14y ago

My favorite forum feature is 'the blender'. I first saw it on nuclearphynance.com(and not since). Once a critical number of people blend a thread it gets deleted so as not to pollute the list of threads. In practice it worked very well. The overwhelming majority of blended threads were from new users who were still getting a hang of the quality standards for posting in the forum.

1gor 14y ago
What are 'blended threads'?
- inuhj 14y ago
  When speaking about forums each topic and its associated posts are referred to as a thread.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

jsprink_ban2 14y ago

Some thoughts from user #2: - Joshua Stein developed Lobsters by himself. Yahuda Katz was, to my knowledge, uninvolved. - The site is invite only because, and I'm speaking for Josh here and mostly guessing (he'd be a better person to ask), it's still trying to identify itself. Communities are grown organically and I gather Josh is letting Lobsters grow slowly, intentionally. I don't think he has "launched" it, per se. - I emailed Josh to support him when he was hellbanned (as my HN story parallels his), and a couple months after that exchange he invited me to the site. I don't participate much at all -- heads down on a product -- but I think it has potential. - I have 5:1 odds the headline will not be fixed, even though there are three factual errors in that tiny bit of text (Katz, HN Competitor, Launched).

bane 14y ago

Seems to solve my biggest HN complaint, downvotes without reasons. I'd love to give it a spin and see how that works in practice.

saurik 14y ago
Slashdot also had upvotes with reasons, and I personally think that is just as important if you agree with downvotes with reasons: it lets you differentiate between things that added new information, made good arguments, or was simply funny. That said, the problem with downvotes with reasons is that it now feels much more harsh. I'm downvoting something that is clearly an insulting comment that should not have been made on the site, and yet I'm wondering "do I really want to use the term 'troll'? that seems harsh".
adestefan 14y ago
I always feel bad when I hit the down vote button by accident on my mobile devices. I wish there was a way to undo those fat finger goofs.

tszming 14y ago

Quite good, e.g. enforced SSL, responsive layout, tag, built in search, feed ordered by time ...

rauljara 14y ago

Explanation for the site being invite only: "Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." Seems basically sane, though I imagine the site would be pretty cliquish at first. You do have a pretty strong disincentive for inviting people you don't know. Any member want to break up the cliquishness by inviting me? If you trust metrics, my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably.

veyron 14y ago
"my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably." If anything all this means is that you conform to the culture of HN, precisely what (it would seem) Lobsters is trying to break from.
- roryokane 14y ago
  https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters says nothing about trying to break from the culture of HN. Lobsters differs from HN in features, moderation transparency, and spamming-prevention techniques, but it doesn’t say it tries to have a different user culture. So rauljara conforming to HN culture would not be a reason to avoid inviting him to Lobsters.
JohnsonB 14y ago
Seems like the cost of slower adoption isn't worth the upside to spam control, given that that's a relatively small problem for sites like these with proper IP control and user moderation. Lower quality comments is the bigger problem and that wouldn't easily be solved by being invite only.
- jsnell 14y ago
  Slower adoption? By default a site like this is going to have no traction, since there are a gazillion other reddit clones around. But make it appear exclusive, and you immediately have people begging for invites. (Edit: I don't mean to imply that hype-generation was the real reason to make it invite-only. I'm sure that the stated reasons are the real ones. The interest generated by exclusivity is just a nice byproduct.)

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

I Like it. Needs some modern design, minimalist and clean. It would be sad to see HN die, but if you don't water your plants...

Kilimanjaro 14y ago
It definitely needs some background, cue from /r/apple might be a good idea. Also a distinctive header in a different color. A footer. Remove bold from links in front page and Font-size 1.2em Line-height 1.2 Hmm, I'll work on something tomorrow. You guys should open a contest just to let the good vibe flow.
- fakeempire 14y ago
  > It definitely needs some background, cue from /r/apple might be a good idea. Please, please no. Its fine the way it is.

patdennis 14y ago

I'd be interested in trying this out. Can anyone offer an invite? My email is available via my profile.

grandpoobah 14y ago

An invite would be nice.

davyjones 14y ago

There is also the open sourced clone Lamer News (http://lamernews.com/ http://lamernews.com/) by antirez.

sgdesign 14y ago

This headline does seem unusually misleading. I already came across this site 10 days ago, it doesn't seems like it was "launched" in any fashion? And it's not by Yehuda Katz, and also doesn't seem like a HN "competitor" since it probably doesn't want to attract as big an audience. So basically there are three things that are flat-out wrong with this headline.

why-el 14y ago
It is a HN competitor. The person who built says they did so out of frustration with HN.
- jsprink_ban2 14y ago
  The motivation for creating something is not necessarily its primary purpose.

spitfire 14y ago

It's much faster than HN. No long pauses when loading pages.

Lazare 14y ago
That may mean you've been slowbanned from HN. If you slightly annoy a moderator around here they'll flag your account so you see very long page load delays. Try logging out of HN, and see if the long pauses go away for you.
- Macro 14y ago
  That happens to me most of the time and Why would that happen to me when I have posted very few comments/posts?
- spitfire 14y ago
  Oh, there's almost zero doubt I've annoyed a moderator at some point. There's no list of moderators anywhere is there? I could tick off the ones I haven't annoyed.
  - Lazare 14y ago
    Nope, no list of moderators. You'll never know who, and you'll never know why, and you probably won't be able to get it reversed. Also, Macro: The step beyond slowbanning is hellbanning, where nobody can see your comments except you, and users with "show dead" on. You've been hellbanned for over a year. As to why...maybe some mod thought your first comment was a bit content free. Maybe they were just having a bad day. I'd recommend getting a new account.
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      wow. Macro posts one slightly vapid but inoffensive comment and is struck by instant death lightning.
    - spitfire 14y ago
      Well we know why. I pissed off one of the cool kids. That's crime enough.

mindcrime 14y ago

If somebody would be kind enough to invite me, it would be much appreciated. Email in profile...

benologist 14y ago

This looks pretty good but a few things come to mind: - no comment collapsing, long comment threads will become a problem just like they are here which ends up sucking, I'd love to see something like reddit's threading / collapsing and I'd really love to a see a whole other forum-ish way to browse stories as well so discussion is even more emphasized - no registration sucks, there are easier ways to identify spammers such as their obvious affiliation with particular website(s), auto-submission honey pots, even a manual glance at submission and other stats can be pretty revealing The biggest concern though is the site's own affiliations ... digg needed their widget everywhere which ensured the quality was locked into a downward spiral. HN gives TC traffic in exchange for publicity, and of course all the preferential treatment and posts by YC startups is less interesting now that their batches are so large. What happens when it's time for lobste.rs to pay for itself? I really do think it's time to replace HN though, it's mainstream and it's targeted by rubbish publications and it's full of users who are here to exploit it or to be exploited by rubbish sites who manipulate them with stunning precision. I'd love an invite if someone's giving them out.

dmix 14y ago

After 4.6 years of using HN obsessively, I'm surprised to find that I'm really hoping this takes off (I was ready to hate on it). After hearing the JCS story and remembering my own experience of PG manipulating headlines + killing my own frontpage submission, I'm all for this. I'm also tried of the YC job listings from companies that launched 4yrs ago flooding the homepage.

SimianLogic2 14y ago
coughHeyZapcough

subsection1h 14y ago

I want a site for discussing software development news that has the equivalent of a kill file. There are a handful of prolific users at Hacker News who post multiple low-quality messages every day. I avoid Hacker News because of users such as these. I honestly believe that at least a few of these users are secretly employed by the companies that they promote and defend daily. I don't know if they're paid to post here or that they're simply blind loyalists. Either way, they deserve to be plonked. Below are two examples (posted by a prolific user) of the type of messages I would like to see less of, which could be filtered by a kill file feature: "HN is going to hell because its overrun with people who practice an ideology of socialism -- pro-google because its "Free" and anti-Apple because they actually innovate and have the audacity to charge for their products." "Apple has done far more to make the world a better place than any corporation I've ever heard of. Far more than any government in history ever has. Far more than any charity every has or ever could."

plinkplonk 14y ago
+1 for a kill file. I'd also love a 'follow' mechanism. Only a small subset of HN users post deeply insightful posts and if I could see only their posts and comments, that would be a great time saver.
- lotharbot 14y ago
  Follow mechanism: http://hackerfollow.com/ http://hackerfollow.com/
seanalltogether 14y ago
I see this idea pop up on every community I've been involved in, and the simple answer is that it's extremely taxing to build individual comment pages for individual users. So this type of thing usually gets passed back to end users in the form of "build a browser plugin to hide these people on the client side"
- ktizo 14y ago
  If you want to do it on the client side, it would be perfectly easy to script it on the page.

roryokane 14y ago

Can an existing user of Lobsters please send me an invite? (My email is in my profile.) According to https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters, the only reason Lobsters is invite-only is to prevent spammers from signing up. So if you want to check that I’m not a spammer, just glance at my past comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane) and submissions (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=roryokane http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=roryokane). If you still want another reason to send me an invite, I support the idea of an improved Hacker News – pg seems to barely care about improving HN. I might contribute to the Lobsters code at https://github.com/jcs/lobsters https://github.com/jcs/lobsters.

MoOmer 14y ago
I'll take an invite as well, if someone has access.
roryokane 14y ago
Someone sent me an invite – thanks!
- rjsamson 14y ago
  That's awesome - any chance you could pay it forward? My email is also in my profile. Thanks!
- kcbanner 14y ago
  I'm looking for an invite as well, if you wouldn't mind, thanks!
LiveTheDream 14y ago
I'd appreciate an invite as well. Email in profile, along with submission and comment history of course.
nnash 14y ago
I'd appreciate an invite too (my email is in my profile as well).

stratos2 14y ago

dont like the white background. at all.

calgaryeng 14y ago

I'd like an invite...

Devilboy 14y ago
Me too please! Pretty please? ^_^ I promise to behave!

lupatus 14y ago

This reminds me of a tale from the Internet of yesteryear... Long ago, circa the year 2000, I was a member of the very first niche social network, makeoutclub.com (MOC)[1], a site originally about indie rock music. One day, a group of members got tired of gibby's (the owner) benign dictatorship and mutinied. The group started lipstickandcigarettes.com (L&C), which is now a parked domain. At the time, L&C targeted the same demographic, but was very restrictive on which hipsters could join and had a more savvy GUI than MOC. It had great early success in attracting members interested in indie rock from MOC. Eventually, though, the proprietors of L&C lost interest and let the community there dissolve in order to pursue other interests (there were rumors of drug addiction at the time, IIRC). MOC, on the other hand, is still going strong and presumably making money for gibby. I suppose the moral to my story is this: unless your social network fiefdom actively feeds your pocketbook (as MOC does for gibby and HN does for pg), expect to lose interest in maintaining it once the novelty of protest has worn off. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub

bravura 14y ago

Interestingly, you can see the user invitation tree here: https://lobste.rs/u/ https://lobste.rs/u/ So if you want an invitation, you should see if you know anyone on that lists. [edit: "If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." If your parent gets banned, do all children get banned?]

DigitalSea 14y ago

I would really love an invite to this. Competition is good regardless of whether or not it was created out of spite. I often wish there were more competing sites to HN because the quality of the moderation and the way things work around here has really deteriorated as of late. I don't know the reasoning of Paul Graham hell-banning people on this site for merely questioning the way it's moderated or for whatever reason, but the lack of transparency on HN is a big issue that needs to be fixed. As much as I love HN, I think it's time for a change and whether it be Lobsters or another site, I am really hoping a successor breaks the ranks and perhaps PG and the moderator team will then make an effort to fix this place.

ulisesrmzroche 14y ago

Can anyone spare an invite? I'd really like to join up!

ilaksh 14y ago

Looks cool. But what about people like me who don't have any friends but still have interesting ideas?

citricsquid 14y ago
I would like to see an invite only site that had an application process where an inviter can pick out applications they like from the pool. This way the people of value but without networking are fine.
- robotmay 14y ago
  I think that's how Dribbble works, and it's quite a good way of doing it.

jrawlings 14y ago

can anyone spare an invite? :)

tomwalsham 14y ago

Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the history of internet communities, particularly those centred around tech. Usenet had immense value in well defined subgroups prior to the Eternal September (and for some time after, regardless of what people may say). IRC ha(s|d) similar values, and remains a force within niche communities on the tech side. Slashdot was an early mover in the moderated community space which had to arise from the newfound populist web. I still think /.'s comment moderation was superior to the HN system (pre and post-visible comment scores), but the firehose was too late and too poorly implemented to solve editorial issues. In the middle of this, Kuro5hin rose and fell, metafilter grabbed some component of the serious moderated discussion which it still retains. Fark came and went. Boingboing, SA, b3ta. All significant for a time but not names on people's lips today. HN cannibalised a significant portion of /., but failed to convert the greybeards - the discussion here is noticeably different because of it (and lacking the perspective sometimes). Digg suffered greatly from demagogues (as does HN to an extent), descended too rapidly into linkbait and celebpop trash, and fell to Reddit. The redesign was just the nail in the coffin of an already dead community. Reddit became a very granular experience from its initial tech focus, with a current frontpage of dubious intellectual interest, but their popularity speaks wonders for the ad-hoc community created by diverse interest groups with a common central park. They struggle with discovery for new members, and an apparently descending base age group. Communities come and go. Small herds migrate towards the latest point of interest and some stick. Groupthink is a large driver of community malaise, certainly within the tech discussion arena. Individuals dominate submissions and discussions and evolve to minor demagogue status. Some communities evolve to tackle a smaller arena than just the general topical discussion field, but topicality remains critical. Quora has tackled 'big answers'. StackOverflow 'correct answers'. These are some minor elements of the value of the larger communities, much in the same way that Hipmunk, AirBnb etc have abstracted value away from Craigslist. Hyperlocal is the next big thing with FrontPorchForum and NextDoor tacking non-technical local discussion. I still view the approaches to these problems as relatively unsolved and ripe for disruption, in particular the algorithms related to subject and comment popularity, user 'karma' (for better or worse), and approachable comment threading when a userbase grows beyond the 'scan a single page' scale. I'm not convinced that a one-size-fits-all approach will ever work, but even within niche tribes there remains a problem with staying 'current' while avoiding alienating the 1-2% who drive much of the discussion. I fully expect a new dominant discussion forum to arise in the tech scene in the next couple of years, but Lobsters seems to be a kneejerk reimplementation of HN that even if it claws some traction would have to evolve rapidly to solve problems rather than dangling the 2013 model of a 2012 carrot.

dbecker 14y ago

It's a shame there isn't an about page that suggests what will be different (or better) about lobste.rs from HN. If it's just a clone site where a different set of people post the same articles and similar comments, I won't waste my time.

roryokane 14y ago
There is an about page, though there’s no link to it on the site: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters

nikcub 14y ago

* clone HN * put a link to it at the top of HN * expect something different to HN?

reustle 14y ago

I feel it's pretty hard to look at. HN is simple, but still designed well. This, on the other hand, feels cramped.

w1ntermute 14y ago

One thing I liked right off the bat was a good mobile experience. The fact that you still can't get this on HN is quite appalling to me.

tlear 14y ago

Remember reading it a while ago and half the front page was RoR circlejerk, seemed to have gotten much better lately.

orangethirty 14y ago

Variety is what makes HN so engaging. If I wanted to read exclusivly about computers, I would just hit usenet.

jcr 14y ago

It's unfair to blame Paul Graham for every moderation decision made on HN. It's been stated that YC funded founders help with moderation and editing on HN, and it's a safe bet that YC partners also have elevated permissions here. If you're like me, a normal HN user, then you will never know all the details. If you find yourself having a bias based on knowingly incomplete information, then you need to stop and rethink your position. The most any normal user can say for certain about jcs getting hellbanned is, he did something annoying enough that someone did something about it!!! --Unfortunately, if you believed the previous sentence, you are mistaken. The reality is, a lot of stuff on HN is automated. If you do bad stuff, bad things happen to you (your account) automatically. For example, if you get into a flame war and pass the "posting too fast" threshold, you could get warnings initially, and if you still don't stop, you could hellban yourself. In other words, you simply never know if a human being with moderator privileges did something, or if you did it to yourself. Also, you don't know if it's permanent or temporary. The most I can say with real certainty is, pg is smart enough to design a system which merely gives users enough rope to hang themselves. I would do the same, and if you've studied the problem in depth, you would too. Eliminating human moderation through computerized automation is the only sane way to design a discussion forum. Now if you were a long time, active contributor like jcs, and you ensnared yourself in the sites protective automation, and you thought someone was doing it to you, then ya, you might be miffed. You would probably react harshly, and by doing so, make matters even worse for yourself and give yourself even more "reason" to be upset. Have you ever watched someone get absolutely livid at a chat bot? It's hilarious. It may be a wee bit sadistic to let them keep trading increasingly heated insults with a machine, but it's still fun to watch. At the end, they might learn a valuable lesson. With pg, there's one thing I've come to rely on; he means well. There is no requirement to agree with him on everything, but if over many years you've watched him carefully, studied the things he's said and done, or better, interacted with him, then you can be reasonably certain that he means well. If you know anything at all about Y-Combinator, then you already know that Paul has far more important things to do than mess around with HN. If you don't know the history of HN, you're at a disadvantage; it was started as a for-fun side project to test out the ARC programming language, and HN was originally called "Startup News" for a very good reason -- to attract people with an interest in startups. The name was eventually changed to "Hacker News" due to the retrospectively obvious oversight; a lot of the best coders haven't really thought about doing a startup, and the people interested in startups are often already doing one. Broadening the scope of appeal with the name change makes sense. If you haven't read everything Paul has written, then you don't about the massive amount of time and effort he's put into thinking about the interactions between people on (open) forums, and how to encourage beneficial exchanges between (potentially conflicting) people. HN is now, and always has been, an ongoing experiment to improve the ratio of beneficial exchanges in discussions, as well as reduce human moderation overhead. It's fun watching it evolve. And lastly no, of the small bits of HN secret sauce I've discovered over the years, I absolutely refuse to give you the details. If the details were public, then some people would use them to game the system.

donnfelker 14y ago

It looks like a cool site, would be nice if we could register.

npguy 14y ago

What is really needed, is a HN for other domains outside of technology.

marcamillion 14y ago

Hell-banned and slow-banned? I didn't know that mods for HN would do that to users they disagree with. Spammers, I can understand....but users you disagree with. Wow....just wow.

marcamillion 14y ago

I would like an invitation also - if someone is monitoring this and giving new ones away. Thanks :)

sajithdilshan 14y ago

if reddit and HN had a child, it would look like lobster.

jasonkester 14y ago

Nice. Notice how it so neatly slices off exactly one demographic from here and transplants it over there, without anything that would distract them. It's focussed just on one topic: Software development stuff for Software Developers. There are four main camps here at HN: - "Software Entrepreneurs", building Big Important Startups or quaint little "lifestyle businesses" that let them drive their cute little "italian supercars" around their quaint little midwestern town. - "Computer Programmers", talking about languages, deployment strategies, open source stuff and how to configure their dotfiles to automatically convert tabs to spaces. - "Tech Gossip Afficianodos", excited about what Techcrunch has to say about who got funded, and taking sides in fights between giant corporations. - And the guy who just wants to point out that pirating movies off the internet is technically just "copyright infringement" and therefore not bad at all (and really HBO's fault anyway.) These guys grabbed just their team, and now they're free to talk shop without any of the myriad distractions they'd get trying to do it here. It's a little selfish to note that I actually see this as a good thing for a slightly different reason: If Camp 2 leaves, that's more HackerNews for those of us in Camp 1, which is the reason I'm here. We'll still have to flag stuff from the other two distracting groups, but it just might make this place a little nicer as well. Everybody wins.

thronemonkey 14y ago
There are also a few scientists!
Iv 14y ago
What amazes me is that in 2012 we still haven't found a decent auto-moderation tagging system that would allow these demographics to emerge naturally and we have to hope for someone to leave. I just want 2 moderation buttons : "insighful" (make this contribution more visible) and "relevant to my interests" (make the things this user tags as insightful or relevant more visible to me. May include a partial transitivity of the "relevant to my interests" operator) Does such a system exist? Is it flawed.
- manmal 14y ago
  It's tempting to install such a system, but it would establish a strong tunnelblick for users. Also, what if I change my interests (interest reset button?)? I could imagine an opt-out system, like "funding stories don't interest me at all", but then, Facebook's IPO would fall into that category and I followed it with interest.

pbiggar 14y ago

While I hope this doesn't split the HN community, I hope it also serves as a wake up call that HN needs to improve or it will die. Some parts of Lobsters are really really good for solving some of the problems that HN has: - invite only to prevent spam and increase accountability - tags are ideal for the problem where not everyone cares about everything - getting to be a major gripe you see a lot ("oh my god, do we have to have another discussion about X") - HN needs significantly better transparency in bans, title rewrites, etc. I don't believe that PG has an agenda or needs to protect YC companies, but the issue comes up so much that it needs to be addressed - reasons for downvotes are genius - private messages are worthwhile IMO - the domain indicator is actually useful (sick of seeing co.uk or github.com instead of myblog.github.com) Other things HN needs: - to work: the fact that "more" barely works is astonishing - an API for all the apps that want to provide a better or different experience - comment collapsing - an essential feature for actually reading past the first comment thread - a meta site where we can actually discuss this stuff without violating guidelines (meta.stackoverflow.com is one of the most innovative and important community tools ever, IMO) I've heard "there are no technical solutions to social problems" as reasons not to do a lot of these, but the same argument could apply to the downvote. HN needs to innovate to keep its community, and I hope it does.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jschuur 14y ago

So it's like a country club for hackers? No explanation of what it is (scope/core philosophy) other than the links. No sign-up, or even an indication of how to join or why there isn't a general sign-up form. Somewhat off putting, elitist first impression.

jschuur 14y ago
OK, to be fair, it does look like there's a normal sign-up/application feature that was just quickly disabled/commented out: https://lobste.rs/s/senl3p/lobsters_discussion_on_hacker_news/comments/eiuvbl https://lobste.rs/s/senl3p/lobsters_discussion_on_hacker_new...

hiphopopotamus 14y ago

Where's the about page?

andybak 14y ago

It's frankly embarrassing to have to ask this in public but if anyone would care to invite me, it looks like my kind of place.

bertomartin 14y ago

Did he use emberjs for the interface? If not, why Not?

astrodust 14y ago

This has to go down as the biggest missed opportunity ever. The name has to be in Lobster (http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lobster http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lobster). This is not an optional thing. Come on.

gobengo 14y ago

I support this. It's kind of ridiculous to see YC company's job postings on the front page all the time. And there's no reason to conflate the cult of YC with actual hacker news.

frenchfries 14y ago

is it possible to get invited? or do I need to have a mac book pro and be a ruby fanboy?