Lobsters Interview
susam.net73 points by blenderob 9 hours ago
73 points by blenderob 9 hours ago
Thank you for sharing this! I currently have 4 more interviews which need a little editing before "publishing"; I condense phrasing, rearrange questions or explanations etc. to try to improve the reading flow.
Based on this interview, it seems Lobsters community there is pretty interesting for the tech crowd? Perhaps one should take a look there.
Unfortunately, Lobsters (previously?) blocked Brave browser and I don't feel like switching browsers just to visit a site.
Lobsters feels a lot like the HN of a decade ago, when the community was more technical than business, and the topics were technical instead of tech business culture.
HN was originally called "Startup News". It was founded by tech business people and originally its userbase was largely startup tech people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
I've been here 12 years and I don't remember HN focusing solely on technical topics, unless the word "technical" has widened to mean "anything one engineer finds intellectually stimulating".
HN was never only technical, but at least it felt like the discussion was from people who build, which naturally segued into technical discussion. It felt like the majority back then were tinkerers and builders.
Nowadays it feels more like sales, marketing, management, and investor interests, and topics they find interesting which has far more popularity than anything at the implementation level.
Granted, HN probably better matches what matters these days to launch a successful company. But we're all older now and working for companies that became what we once tried to disrupt, and it shows.
I have the same impression. If anything, it’s become more “generic technical” topics and less “insider founder” ones. There seems to be a lot more institutional representation here than circa 2010-2015, probably because many of the new founders then are now running establishment companies.
There used to be a lot more “hustle culture” and “growth hacking” stuff on here (10+ years ago) most of which I find disgusting, so I’m glad for that shift.
I wonder if there is some sort of bias depending on the timezone people visit because i've been visiting HN for more than a decade and for me HN always had a lot of technical discussions and topics - in fact i see it as one of the most technically oriented forums i know. In fact if it was all (or mostly) business stuff i wouldn't stick around as long i have as i do not find those topics interesting.
> Lobsters (previously?) blocked Brave browser
Yah, I deleted my 10+ yo account there over that. I won't have a site tell me what browser I should or should not use.
The funny thing is that make a big deal about blocking Brave on "ethical" grounds, but don't e tend the logic to Chrome, Edge or Safari. Talk about punching down/virtue signaling.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Their disdain goes far beyond routing out grift and hype. That is simply pretext
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.
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.
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.
Culture war? Lines drawn? Ridiculous.
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 all for freedom of association.
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. :)
>and the thing called "freedom of speech" lets me say those last bits. :)
I mean, sure. If you don't know what freedom of speech actually means
> 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.
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.
It sounds like it’s not for you, and that’s OK
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.
> 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
The moderators are not required to cater to you
> The moderators are not required to cater to you
RE: I largely agree with this but it doesn't shield them from criticism.
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!
It's a strong, active community. Much more focused on computing. I'm happy to invite anyone who wants to join. You can find a way to contact me on https://technicalwriting.dev. Please also link me to your website, LinkedIn, etc.
My main gripe with lobsters vs hn is that lobsters has a lot of specific in the weeds tech articles, like about some functionality of a specific python library. It's way too specific, I find the mix of articles on hn much better from a generalist perspective
Conversely, hn gets a lot of content which simply isn't intellectually stimulating. Like on the front page atm is pocketbase—a git repo which currently has 53k stars which I've known of for many years, and a surface level article on RAG titled 'So you wanna build a local RAG?' ~~which seems to mostly just exist so the author can plug their company in the first line.~~ which doesn't really contribute much niche knowledge you can't obtain anywhere else. As a blogger myself I can't claim superiority—I've done this plenty, but this content just doesn't seem to do as well on lobste.rs as compared to really niche content which is directly relevant to very few people, but as a result required a great deal of research and time and very possibly is of great utility to a rare few.
Edit: though to be clear this is a spectrum with heavy overlap. Just general biases I've observed. Like on Lobste.rs there is an article titled 'Electron vs. Tauri' atm.
Personally I enjoy that content a lot. My guess is that HN is read by tech interested people these days not just programmers. The risk of being more generalist is losing your distinguishing lens. If I wanted generic news with a techie take there's sites like Ars and The Verge that already do this. If HN becomes those sites it's only a losing game.
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A lot of good contributors to Lobsters have been banned for poltical reasons. Lobsters (laudably) has a moderation log that shows the reasons for user bans among other moderator decisions, but typically when when a good contributor is banned for poltical reasons (as opposed to e.g. a spammer), the actual posts that made the moderators decide to ban have been removed and replaced with a moderator message pithily asserting that the post was offensive; so it's hard for someone to see exactly what the last straw posts were and decide how reasonable the moderator was being.
And the moderators and most of the remaining userbase of Lobsters are American political left-progressives, and this dramatically informs how they choose to moderate.
Can you really not see the irony in posting this comment? Have you no self-awareness whatsoever?
Peak HN, absolutely hilarious!
The hottest discussion on the first page is how big of a meanie Andrew Kelley is. Yeah the sites a vibe for sure.
I would like to try Lobsters, but they don’t have open registration and I don’t know anyone already there.
Ask on the IRC channel for an invite (and probably link your HN profile to prove you aren't crazy)
If you lurk, they eventually will do an invite party. Or join their chats and ask there.
I definitely like the discussion around the importance of defining a vocabulary for your solution. I can almost hear my co-workers' eyes rolling when I try to tackle that.
> Thinking about the vocabulary also ensures that we are thinking about the data, concepts and notions we are working with in a deliberate manner and that kind of thinking also helps when we design the architecture of software.
Lobste.rs would be far more interesting to me if by default it did not have the same posts as HN.
As it stands, when I want more tech news I go to lobsters and there is the same stuff.
At least two bots automatically repost everything from there to here to farm karma, so it isn't really possible.
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