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The differences are well summarized on their /about page. I find both HN and Lobsters valuable for different reasons, but and the differences that stand out to

by chao- 11mo ago

The differences are well summarized on their /about page. I find both HN and Lobsters valuable for different reasons, but and the differences that stand out to me are: - Tries to be more purely technical. Generic political or business links are flagged or removed. - Aggressive marketing/self-promotion is moderated: If you join, post three links to your own blog, and nothing else, expect someone to call out if you post a fourth. I know HN does this to some extent, but it is very explicit on Lobsters. - Not "news", not necessarily about recent things. Project/language releases even have a "release" tag so you can hide them systematically. A ten-year-old article explaining some library internals is just as likely to come up. - Instead of "downvotes" there are "flags", which requires choosing a reason. Ideally encourages people to pause and think, instead of scrolling and clicking a down arrow 20 times in a thread. - Weekly community threads of "What are you working on this week?" and "What are you doing this weekend?" which is nice for a smaller community.

wahnfrieden 11mo ago
They are also aggressively anti-AI edit: If you are downvoting because you are also anti-AI, my comment is not about whether supporting AI is good. I'm only remarking that they are aggressively negative about the topic. The aggression is obnoxious and less tolerated with other topics.
- kaycebasques 11mo ago
  The proposal to rename the vibecoding tag to something else provides a pretty good sense of the overall sentiment among the site's members: https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  HN comment sections are full of anti-AI remarks, but there’s enough volume of contents that you can still find some quality info here. On Lobsters it feels like the angry anti-LLM mindset is woven into the site’s culture, like you’re breaking some unspoken rule if you accidentally say something non-derogatory about AI.
  - Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
    As you wrote earlier it's a culture war thing. Lobsters is very big about being on one side of the culture wars there and the American social justice side is anti-AI, so the culture on the site has adopted the same view.
- varjag 11mo ago
  Lobsters is in general very anti grift and marketing. A huge portion of daily hype submissions are low signal fluff. As it happens AI the the hype of the day. Yes it is useful but also it attracts the same insufferable people who were pushing NFTs 4 years ago. So Lobsters have separate AI tag for technical pieces to do with actual development of AI systems and "vibecoding" for softcore user experience entries. Lots of people mute the latter. This, and the fact that the site refers to their blog posts as lowly vibecoding irks some of submitters.
  - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
    Their disdain goes far beyond routing out grift and hype. That is simply pretext
    - varjag 11mo ago
      Even if they were anti-AI (which I don't think is true), it's not a big deal. There isn't exactly a shortage of write ups about GenAI on the Internet. There are film photography forums where digital photography is off-topic. There is at least one machinist forum where the topics of drone-making and 3D printing are explicitly banned. This is fine, these are niche places for like minded people who don't want to be drowned out by the masses promoting whatever is hot.
      - staticassertion 11mo ago
        > Even if they were anti-AI (which I don't think is true) The entire site is constantly talking about how AI sucks and how it's not worth taking seriously. The AI tag was exclusively "vibecoding" despite it being extremely annoying for anyone who wanted to talk about it. Posts about AI being bad are upvoted far more, despite being very obviously low content/ uninteresting. Sentiment is very obviously anti-AI on lobsters. I don't even think this should be contentious. The site is very openly anti-AI. When discussions about this have come up in meta posts it is overwhelmingly the case that users say "yes, we are anti AI, that's fine". > it's not a big deal. It stopped me from posting on there and I deleted my account because the conversations were so stupid. It comes up frequently that users want to be able to filter out "AI fluff" separately from "interesting discussion of AI". You can have a post about the internal algorithms and optimizations of an LLM and it will still be labeled "vibecoding" on the site - if that doesn't blatantly indicate a site-wide anti-AI bias I don't know how.
Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
Unfortunately Lobsters might claim to be non political but is actually quite political. Because the moderators and increasingly the remaining community identifies with American progressive left values, a pretty common thing to see on the site is political posts along those lines getting upvoted and other political philosophies being flagged as political. It's probably the most deeply unpleasant part about the site IMO. I don't think there's anything wrong with moderators all sharing certain politics. On Lobsters though, there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture where the political ingroup can break rules while the outgroup can't but it's never explicitly acknowledged by the moderators or the community.
- karlgkk 11mo ago
  They do not claim to be non political. They just try to keep explicitly political material from being posted on their site - from any point of view. > there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out. Running communities is difficult and sometimes it’s just easier to build a community of people you want to be around. They’ve never been running it as a public service or a free speech platform. And that’s okay.
  - Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
    > They just try to keep explicitly political material from being posted on their site - from any point of view. Right that is what they claim in their guidelines but in practice this is very untrue. American left progressive material generally does fine on the site, both from the rule moderation perspective and community sentiment. > Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out. It's funny, in your attempt to sarcastically sneer in your comment you just tried to build a strawman of my political opinions in your head. Regardless the easiest way for them to settle this would to say it explicitly. "We strongly believe in left social justice values and that informs our moderation and the content we allow on the site." That's all the guidelines would need to make it clear to everyone what's going on. Instead they do this gaslighting dance where they never explicitly say their political position but instead enforce it by enforcing the rules more harshly on those they politically disagree with. They could instead point to this guideline to moderate or flag content they politically disagree with. It's upfront and clear. The Internet as it is is subject to a huge amount of context collapse. Moreover tech people are more likely than the average person to have lower EQ. Using unrelated moderation rules to fight political battles is a fairly negative thing in my opinion. Being clear about what you allow and disallow does everyone a service and level sets expectations.
hitekker 11mo ago
I think the difference is honesty, in moderation. dang strikes me as a more honest moderator than pushcx. I haven't seen dang play games with history, or worse, his own memory. Even if I disagree with his opinions, or question his judgement, I have a sense that dang tries to be honest. Which is not by the "transparency" of a gigantic wall-of-text or countless rules, tools and nuance. dang stays on topic and is focused on HN's mission; he doesn't comment as he likes. Whereas your average discord & reddit moderator freely delivers strong, half-true opinions or announces lofty standards. They then forget what they say, do different from what they say, try to justify what they did or didn't do, and become, unknowingly, less than honest. I don't mean to give a panegyric here. Half my trust is because dang is paid to moderate. He's a professional. The money makes dang's motivation more straightforward, whereas other moderators don't get paid so they look for part of their wage in the control they exert over others. It's natural, if perverted, motivation that conflicts directly with their self-story, which the moderator resolves by with even more story-telling.
- DANmode 11mo ago
  Saving me all sorts of time in this thread, great comments.

by chao- 11mo ago

wahnfrieden 11mo ago

They are also aggressively anti-AI edit: If you are downvoting because you are also anti-AI, my comment is not about whether supporting AI is good. I'm only remarking that they are aggressively negative about the topic. The aggression is obnoxious and less tolerated with other topics.

kaycebasques 11mo ago
The proposal to rename the vibecoding tag to something else provides a pretty good sense of the overall sentiment among the site's members: https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms
Aurornis 11mo ago
HN comment sections are full of anti-AI remarks, but there’s enough volume of contents that you can still find some quality info here. On Lobsters it feels like the angry anti-LLM mindset is woven into the site’s culture, like you’re breaking some unspoken rule if you accidentally say something non-derogatory about AI.
- Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
  As you wrote earlier it's a culture war thing. Lobsters is very big about being on one side of the culture wars there and the American social justice side is anti-AI, so the culture on the site has adopted the same view.
varjag 11mo ago
Lobsters is in general very anti grift and marketing. A huge portion of daily hype submissions are low signal fluff. As it happens AI the the hype of the day. Yes it is useful but also it attracts the same insufferable people who were pushing NFTs 4 years ago. So Lobsters have separate AI tag for technical pieces to do with actual development of AI systems and "vibecoding" for softcore user experience entries. Lots of people mute the latter. This, and the fact that the site refers to their blog posts as lowly vibecoding irks some of submitters.
- wahnfrieden 11mo ago
  Their disdain goes far beyond routing out grift and hype. That is simply pretext
  - varjag 11mo ago
    Even if they were anti-AI (which I don't think is true), it's not a big deal. There isn't exactly a shortage of write ups about GenAI on the Internet. There are film photography forums where digital photography is off-topic. There is at least one machinist forum where the topics of drone-making and 3D printing are explicitly banned. This is fine, these are niche places for like minded people who don't want to be drowned out by the masses promoting whatever is hot.
    - staticassertion 11mo ago
      > Even if they were anti-AI (which I don't think is true) The entire site is constantly talking about how AI sucks and how it's not worth taking seriously. The AI tag was exclusively "vibecoding" despite it being extremely annoying for anyone who wanted to talk about it. Posts about AI being bad are upvoted far more, despite being very obviously low content/ uninteresting. Sentiment is very obviously anti-AI on lobsters. I don't even think this should be contentious. The site is very openly anti-AI. When discussions about this have come up in meta posts it is overwhelmingly the case that users say "yes, we are anti AI, that's fine". > it's not a big deal. It stopped me from posting on there and I deleted my account because the conversations were so stupid. It comes up frequently that users want to be able to filter out "AI fluff" separately from "interesting discussion of AI". You can have a post about the internal algorithms and optimizations of an LLM and it will still be labeled "vibecoding" on the site - if that doesn't blatantly indicate a site-wide anti-AI bias I don't know how.

Karrot_Kream 11mo ago

Unfortunately Lobsters might claim to be non political but is actually quite political. Because the moderators and increasingly the remaining community identifies with American progressive left values, a pretty common thing to see on the site is political posts along those lines getting upvoted and other political philosophies being flagged as political. It's probably the most deeply unpleasant part about the site IMO. I don't think there's anything wrong with moderators all sharing certain politics. On Lobsters though, there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture where the political ingroup can break rules while the outgroup can't but it's never explicitly acknowledged by the moderators or the community.

karlgkk 11mo ago
They do not claim to be non political. They just try to keep explicitly political material from being posted on their site - from any point of view. > there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out. Running communities is difficult and sometimes it’s just easier to build a community of people you want to be around. They’ve never been running it as a public service or a free speech platform. And that’s okay.
- Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
  > They just try to keep explicitly political material from being posted on their site - from any point of view. Right that is what they claim in their guidelines but in practice this is very untrue. American left progressive material generally does fine on the site, both from the rule moderation perspective and community sentiment. > Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out. It's funny, in your attempt to sarcastically sneer in your comment you just tried to build a strawman of my political opinions in your head. Regardless the easiest way for them to settle this would to say it explicitly. "We strongly believe in left social justice values and that informs our moderation and the content we allow on the site." That's all the guidelines would need to make it clear to everyone what's going on. Instead they do this gaslighting dance where they never explicitly say their political position but instead enforce it by enforcing the rules more harshly on those they politically disagree with. They could instead point to this guideline to moderate or flag content they politically disagree with. It's upfront and clear. The Internet as it is is subject to a huge amount of context collapse. Moreover tech people are more likely than the average person to have lower EQ. Using unrelated moderation rules to fight political battles is a fairly negative thing in my opinion. Being clear about what you allow and disallow does everyone a service and level sets expectations.

hitekker 11mo ago

I think the difference is honesty, in moderation. dang strikes me as a more honest moderator than pushcx. I haven't seen dang play games with history, or worse, his own memory. Even if I disagree with his opinions, or question his judgement, I have a sense that dang tries to be honest. Which is not by the "transparency" of a gigantic wall-of-text or countless rules, tools and nuance. dang stays on topic and is focused on HN's mission; he doesn't comment as he likes. Whereas your average discord & reddit moderator freely delivers strong, half-true opinions or announces lofty standards. They then forget what they say, do different from what they say, try to justify what they did or didn't do, and become, unknowingly, less than honest. I don't mean to give a panegyric here. Half my trust is because dang is paid to moderate. He's a professional. The money makes dang's motivation more straightforward, whereas other moderators don't get paid so they look for part of their wage in the control they exert over others. It's natural, if perverted, motivation that conflicts directly with their self-story, which the moderator resolves by with even more story-telling.

DANmode 11mo ago
Saving me all sorts of time in this thread, great comments.