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.
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.
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.
I agree. I like Lobsters but the political brigading is unfortunate and the moderation seems to favor one side over the other. That almost sours the whole experience, but I've learned to hide low quality drama posts and move on.
Having participated in both sites for over a decade, I disagree.
Lobste.rs was pitched as having more open moderation with a public moderation log, but in practice it's mostly one moderator running the show and deleting comments they don't like. There have been some notable incidents over the years where relatively benign comments were used as justification to ban people, the original comments deleted, and then the moderators come in to provide an alternate story of what happened. If you step out of line and question that narrative, you could find yourself silenced as well. Long term users know how and where to toe the line, as well as which topics to avoid completely unless you want to get that famous pop-up that shames you for having your comments downvoted and ends with an invitation to delete your account.
The moderators on Lobste.rs also weave their narrative into the fabric of the site in unavoidable ways. For example, you can't post anything related to LLMs without tagging it "vibecoding". Most of the articles are not about vibecoding, but they've decided that everything related to LLMs is "vibecoding" and therefore that tag is your only option. Don't think you can tag those stories as "AI" because that's wrong and they'll change it to "vibecoding". It's a silly decision that users have been carefully complaining about for a long time but the message from on top is that LLMs are to be sneered at as "vibecoding" and therefore that's the only permissible narrative. You don't see anything like that coming out of HN, for all it's imperfections.
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.
> Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out.
This mindset where the culture war lines have been drawn and anyone who doesn’t get perfectly in line is “vibe checked” out is highly political, even if the claim is that political content is excluded.
The snarky and derisive way it’s presented as “fun fact” and you’ve jumped to the conclusion that the commenter is on the wrong side of the culture war, and therefore a fair target for derision, is actually why I never “vibed” into that site for very long.
People are allowed to build a community that they want to be a part of, and certain rules and base lines for how they expect other people to engage. It’s called “freedom of association”.
What really offends me is the consumer entitlement that people have that make them think that they should be allowed to participate in any community however they see fit.
I’m also all for being able to call out when a community is being excessively political while also trying to claim to be a no-politics zone.
I was a big fan of Lobsters in the early days, but it became apparent that even for apolitical topics you had to walk a very fine line with your comments and avoid anything that might be misinterpreted as wrongspeak.
The site has a long history of finding obscure reasons to ban people. The moderation log is public, but if you try to read the comments that caused the ban they’re all [Removed by moderator] in a very non-public way. The moderators then respond with their own interpretation of events after the account is no longer able to dispute it. It’s another example of double speak where the moderation actions are supposedly public but you’re also not allowed to see the comments that led to the ban.
> What really offends me is the consumer entitlement that people have that make them think that they should be allowed to participate in any community however they see fit.
No entitlement here. My Lobsters account is in good standing since the start. However I believe we’re all entitled to explain our opinions about the moderators, even if it offends you that other people have opinions that disagree with your own.
Anyway, this entire comment thread where you derisively deliver “fun fact” snark and declare other people’s opinions “ridiculous” while ignoring the argument they’re trying to make is ironically a prime example of why Lobste.rs feels so exhausting. If you feel like you’re on the right side of the culture war you feel empowered to be snarky, dismissive, and rude because you think the rules of civil discourse only apply to people on the other side of the dividing lines.
The core of the argument is that they say the rules are X but the actually mean they are Y. That has nothing to do "freedom of association" but simply with being two faced liars. Which people often dislike. And the thing called "freedom of speech" lets me say those last bits. :)
Ironically, if the mods here thought your comment was over the line, it would be removed. I don’t think you understand what freedom of speech actually means lol
And that's fine, this site has rules and the mods follow those rules. I am free to say things but I am not guaranteed a platform to say them on. My usage of the term is just as inaccurate as your usage of "freedom of association." The difference is that I am aware of that and was seeing if you'd bite which you did. Accuracy clearly only matters to you as a way to discredit others but not as a pillar of your own arguments.
Bizarre to see these militant anti-HN commenters seething with anger. It tracks that it comes from accounts with random characters for usernames, and in this case a newly created account that already has net negative comment score.
> 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.
There are some very smart people on that site that only contribute there(although some are old slashdotters from back in the day) so it is a shame.
I get the impression by watching the community that interacting with them is basically impossible as a normal person.
Someone gets an invite, has productive technical discussions, eventually says something that doesn't align exactly with their religion(and we're talking really obscure stuff here) and he gets swiftly and permanently banned possibly bringing the person who invited him down with him as well.
It's easy to state this, almost as easy as to find a specific entry in the modlog proving it. If you want, I can do the grunt work if you cite a specific username.
It has already been mentioned that banned users' "ban-worthy" comments are censored.
I'd have to run an operation on lobste.rs in order to make a point and then maybe the non-representative examples I do capture are of people actually going crazy.
HN hides "dead" comments for unregistered users but at least registration is open.
This way I can know that some user was unknowingly making ill-informed claims about the extent of the contributions of the author of the linked project to certain products as opposed to any of the worst-case assumptions one could make from the replies.
> [censored]. Oh, you know who also [censored]? [censored]? Exactly!
I'm a member of the site since 2017, read almost every comment (it's not that much), and have a habit of saving "spicy" threads before mods arrive. So there's a pretty good chance I can recover more background than what's available now.
I don’t know your particular political affiliations. But it also doesn’t matter. Being asked to leave is not being gaslit. Being asked to leave is not abusive. This Weaponized therapy speak is exhausting.
It’s called “freedom of association”. Again, they built a community for themselves. They don’t need to cater to people like you or me if they don’t want to.
And they’re not.
You’re not owed or entitled to some sort of clear moderation guideline. You’re not owed or entitled to having a good experience on that website.
You're so pugnacious in your replies that I'm not sure it's worth replying to you, but I'll do so anyway. My guess is if you respond you'll sneer at me again but let's see.
If the site said "The rules are: pushcx's homies get gas and haters get ass" then I'd have no expectations of fairness or clear guidelines. But that's not the site. It has a set of guidelines. It has flagging capabilities along with categories you can use to indicate why the content you flag is flag worthy. It has a mod log where moderator actions are performed publicly. This gives the impression to many users that the site cares about a semblance of fairness and tries to separate rules from mere passions. The reason why I find Lobsters so annoying is because of that disconnect. The site gives this impression of rules, guidelines, and moderation philosophy. But in effect it's just the sounding board of the admin and some mods. Obviously as you so caustically try to reiterate they are free to associate like this (and I'm freely speaking about how much I dislike it while freely associating on another site), but that doesn't stop people from disliking it.
Thing is, I’m not being “pugnacious”. I think I’m being very straightforward and just telling you that your assumptions about your relationship to them are fundamentally wrong!
Of course you’re allowed to dislike it!
I think your criticism has a point of validity to it, but also a serious level of entitlement that you expect some sort of “customer service” from them - such as a menu of expectations or norms that you were expected to follow.
I’m not sneering at you because you’re being excluded, I’m sneering at your assumption that you have some sort of relationship with these moderators or the community such that they have to respect or cater to you.
Frankly, as someone who has run a community, it’s a lot of work and there’s a lot of people who just de facto expect you to give them a level of service that they have come to expect from social media _companies_, that frankly, they’re not entitled to.
Fun fact: telling the guy saying it's gaslighting that it's not, with your reframe of reality words like "fun fact" are gaslighting.
I've found gaslight-positive people who go on "vibes" are indeed still gaslighters. Abuse is abuse. You can justify it with "vibe check" and "they don't want you around" all you want - does my not wanting you around and treating you poorly make it any less undignified and abusive?
Being told to leave is not abuse. Being told to leave is not gaslighting. Being told it's vibes based moderation is not gaslighting. Using weaponized therapy speak is annoying, by the way.
Anyways, they are very much saying to you, I don’t like you and now I would like you to leave.
And to answer your second question, if you ran such a community, I probably wouldn’t participate! Easy!
not sure what you mean by answering my second question, maybe it applied to another comment I made elsewhere.
My belief stands clearly as, if it's "the improper or harmful use or treatment of another person, often to gain power or control... manifesting in many forms" its abuse. Abuse can be clear and in the open. I can tell you I'll abuse you, and treat you undignified and in an abusive manner, and it is still abuse. Saying I'm abusing you and it's not abuse, does not make it any less abuse. It makes it gaslighting.
> They’ve never been running it as a public service or a free speech platform.
I largely agree with this but it doesn't shield them from criticism.
> vibe checked
> fun fact
> And that’s okay.
If you want people to agree with or understand your viewpoint I'd suggest conveying them in a way that doesn't immediately harken back to BuzzFeed and pop journalism.
I see you’re attacking the way I delivered my message.
Yes, you can criticize them. But at the end of the day, it’s their community. And if you’re not fitting in there, there are many others.
At some point in the last decade or so, people have begun to think that they’re entitled to participate or be welcome in every community the way that they want to.
At the end of the day, a community like lobsters is run by people who want to hang out with other people they find interesting or on the same plane as them
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.