17
votes
~tildes versus lobste.rs
I'm curious what people think of lobste.rs. There seems to be a lot of overlap in goals, although lobste.rs is explicitly technology focused.
I'm curious what people think of lobste.rs. There seems to be a lot of overlap in goals, although lobste.rs is explicitly technology focused.
I guess another aspect of lobste.rs that's worth emphasizing is that it's open source and that there are a number of sister sites. The invite tree is also cool.
You can see more background about lobste.rs on the about page.
@deimos can we get an invite tree like that?
I second that a million times.
I would also suggest that the invite tree would be an integral part of the trust system. As much as it might be a pain for folks to join, we would limit new accounts to the site by having current users "vouch" for new ones. The benefit of this is twofold: users who are a source of consistently inviting troublesome accounts could be held responsible and more the people you invite would have some effect on your reputation as well so you would be more careful with who you invite.
Yes this would stifle growth but I feel the negatives will be significantly overshadowed by the very positive aspects of this system.
There are definitely benefits, but the main downside (and reason I don't want to be invite-only forever) is that it means nobody can ever really just come to Tildes as an independent site. Everyone basically has to "prove themselves" somewhere else for someone to be comfortable inviting them, so it means that you're basically dependent on other sites for finding your users.
You also can't get those neat interactions that happen a lot of times where someone very relevant to the subject of a thread just kind of shows up because they found it or someone sent them the link. They'd have to hunt around for an invite first, and they just won't bother in a lot of cases.
Lobsters allows an easy path to get an invite - "Hop into the IRC for a few minutes and hang so we can tell you aren't a bot/toxic. Thanks."
There's a very narrow group of people for which "hop into IRC" is an easy path. For Lobsters's target users that's probably fine, but wouldn't work for a more general site.
There're a tonne of webIRC clients which are pretty much just "Hey give a username and then you're on," which is more what I had in mind.
Invites are hugely valuable to Lobsters. To quote our about page:
I (current sysop of Lobsters) added the bit about not being an elite club because it's a common misunderstanding.
Spammers are the obvious reason: posting spam is cheap and has positive ROI, spambots are now trivially customized to sites so that amortize the cost even lower. Open invites puts you in an arms race with spammers, and the worst part is that they're fighting to make money and you're fighting to lose as little time as possible. You cannot win, just lose more slowly.
The less obvious reason is community-related. Invites add a cost to creating an account and mean there's more value in maintaining a good reputation with your account. Aside from seeing less abuse and trolling, we don't see drive-by accounts registered by regulars or randos to post abuse from.
You make a point lower in this thread that "just drop into IRC" is non-trivial, and I agree. I'd be less happy with this if Lobsters wasn't computing-focused. We do allow folks to auth their Twitter accounts (the @Lobsters bot will link your username on your stories), I'm considering a tool to allow new users to auth + see which of their followers are already auth'd to Lobsters.
Still not perfect, but it keeps a human in the loop, and that keeps a cost to accounts, some spammer filtering, and some knock-on effects like rate-limiting when we get substantial press somewhere.
Fleshed out my idea a little more here that hopefully addresses some of those downsides.
Another benefit of staying invite-only is the number of spammers and trolls is relatively low compared to e.g. reddit.
I’d assume anyone who is both a subject matter expert and is sent a link to the material would also be sent an invitation code to join, since he person who sent it to them would presumably be a member.
Not necessarily, once the site is publicly visible (but still invite-only to register).
I don't see how this can be squared with the desire I frequently see expressed here to escape bubbles (also privacy concerns if the tree is public). I have a strong hunch that the demographics here are very skewed in most respects. You encourage that with a personal invite system.
Definitely very valid concerns that will unfortunately plague such a system. I really believe in the idea that regardless of how "bubble-less" you try to make a system it is inevitable that it will still occur, and the ultimate responsibilty falls on each person to reach outside of it.
So in spite of the fact that this will not mititgate these problems I feel like it will still alleviate a lot of others.
I hope not. Having who invited who posted alone seems a bad idea, but is maybe okay during an initial period.
I've been an active member of a closed Usenet hierarchy for circa 20 years. There is a steep technical threshold to participate AND you can't just sign up. There is zero spam, zero trolling, zero abuse, and very rare heated arguments. In that sense, it works.
There used to be very active leak checking to ensure good privacy, too. No mean feat in a copy-and-forward distribution scheme like Usenet.
BUT the new blood is basically non-existent, say five people a year, and the people who drop off to just go somewhere more open (or just drop off due to death) is larger.
Absent open enrollment, that is the fate of all communities eventually. The technical documentation for Tildes sold me on a vision that includes untrusted people becoming trusted through their actions over time. Invites (and publishing who invited whom) asks us to ignore that and consider instead the reputation of other unrelated people.
I like reading the posts, but the discussion is usually lacking compared to sites like HN.
I think the discussion there is pretty good quality when it shows up anyway. The problem is the userbase mostly comments on controversial stuff, so more mundane posts rarely have substantial discussion.
I like some of the stuff lobste.rs does and have even suggested straight ripping them off on the hats concept. ;) But as you said, it's very tech focused, much like Hacker News, and it's kind of a ghost town so there is not much to see there, unfortunately.
What's this about hats?
https://lobste.rs/hats
It's a verified flair that users on lobste.rs can apply to themselves on relevant comments. It's similar to the flairs used in /r/science and /r/askhistorians that show their area of expertise so other users can tell they are likely to be more well informed on a subject when they make a comment related to it.
It's got at least the same activity as here (in terms of submissions and upvotes). Is Tildes a ghost town too?
Similar Submission & Vote numbers, sure... maybe... but the important part is Comments and in the last 24 hours on lobste.rs:
no comments, 1 comment, no comments, no comments, 5 comments, 1 comment, no comments, 1 comment, no comments, no comments, no comments, 2 comments, 1 comment, 1 comment, 1 comment, no comments, no comments, and an admin sticky with 16 comments.
That's a ghost town IMO.
Or a community that prefers to share links over generating lots of discussion?
Preference for links is one thing... 0 comments on everything being the norm is a bit much, don't you think? Ideally it should be a good mix of both, IMO.
Usually most of the discussion is concentrated in one or two links (at least from what I've seen). There's also an irc channel on freenode where people hang out.
Here's two histograms of the number of votes (not score) and number of comments per story on all Lobsters stories, if it helps.
Lobsters doesn't have sticking as a feature for stories or comments, so I'm really puzzled what you're referring to here.
(context: I'm the sysop of Lobsters)
That's my bad, I had assumed when I made that comment that the top post with the 16 comments by the user with the highlighted green username was an admin sticky. And I apologize for labeling it a ghost town... that was rude of me. :(
As I said before though, I do admire a lot of what you're doing on lobste.rs but it's a bit disheartening to visit the site and generally see so few comments on everything. However perhaps that's just a misconception of mine developed from not being familiar enough with the site to recognize overall activity levels.
No offense taken, I know how big Lobsters isn't. :)
A green username indicates the user is less than a week old.
Ah ok. Thanks for explaining it. I am so used to the reddit color scheme that I see green and assume mod + sticky. ;)
I'm a big fan of lobste.rs. I don't post very often, but like reading the front page once a day.
I like the fact that it's low volume, high in technical depth.
Same here. HN and lobste.rs are a couple of tech focused sites that I read regularly for the articles that are posted and comments that are made.
I'm seconding that: low volume and signal-to-noise ratio ( for me ) is considerably higher than HN's default RSS feed.
I love the content of the site but the site itself is not user friendly
What do you find not user friendly about it?
to name a few, the text is very small, things are hard to find quickly, and the site could use a bit of flair.
ctrl + mousewheel up if you're on a desktop. The site is responsively designed so it will scale properly.
search is coming and you can browse by group and change the sort
It's an alpha and very bare bones right now. If you mean flair "look" wise. You can change the theme in your settings and users have already developed custom themes for the place using extensions like Stylish.
As someone with limited interest in tech, I'd never even heard of lobste.rs before this thread. I had a quick glance and I'm just gonna not go there again... I didn't understand like 9/10 of the titles of the posts there. So yeah, I think it's not for me. There are a lot of posts here on tildes that I don't get either, but at least it's not a lot lol
It didn't get mention here, but the Lobsters moderation log has been an important feature. It lists the edits, deletions, and bans by moderators, and story edits from user suggestions. I think it's invaluable for building trust in the moderators and minimizing meta discussion around what happened when.
I like it there a lot. Lots of good information and the community there is a bit slow but everyone there is well educated. Seconding cfabbro in loving the hats concept.
I've been liking it so far. Not a lot of content, which is understandable given how new and how few users there are.