I recently learned Bear blog (a small blogging platform, posts on which often appear on HN) has a “discover” section with a front page style ranking. Their algorithm is on the page
This page is ranked according to the following algorithm:
Score = log10(U) + (S / (B * 86,400))
Where,
U = Upvotes of a post
S = Seconds since Jan 1st, 2020
B = Buoyancy modifier (currently at 14)
This is a good exploration of the algorithm. In my experience, Lobsters has much more active moderator involvement in a more opinionated way than HN. Much of what’s referred to as moderation here is user-driven via flagging and votes, whereas on Lobsters the moderators are injecting more of an opinionated style into the site. For example, requiring the “vibecoding” tag on all stories about AI even though very few of them are about vibecoding.
In theory the Lobsters moderation log is also public, but in practice when someone gets banned if you try to find the post that triggered the banned it will have been edited away by the mods and replaced with their opinion of what was said in a follow up comment. I stopped visiting as much after watching someone get banned for a rather benign comment which the mods edited away and then claimed it said something egregious about a culture war topic, which it did not.
The site also puts up a banner at the top of your page if you receive enough negative votes. The banner invites you to delete your account as the last sentence (or it did in the past). In practice, if you comment something that isn’t the popular and accepted opinion on the site, no matter how diplomatically, you could end up with the banner stuck on your page views for a while. There have been some high profile and valuable contributors to the site who abandoned it after getting stuck with this banner for posting informative content that nevertheless triggered some downvotes.
It’s an interesting site, but in my experience the algorithms are only a small part of it. The experience there is more heavily aligned toward groupthink and the “right” opinions than even HN and differing opinions are much less welcomed.
I was a pretty active member in the comments for a long time and left a few years ago after getting chastised by a moderator and accused of spamming for sharing a link to a blog post I had written, even though the content was purely technical, not promoting any product, and does not contain ads or monetize content in any way.
My impression is that the site was actively looking for any possible reason to remove people from the platform. It’s their site to moderate as they wish, but that’s not a community I want to continue participating in.
You did not share a link to a blog post. The title was "Effective Haskell is a hands-on practical book way to learn Haskell. No math or formal CS needed" and it linked to the site advertising your book for sale. I removed it because we don't get good discussions out of ads.
I shared the story as I remember it. Memory is imperfect. It's been years since I deleted my account, and I don't have the luxury of access to server or moderation logs.
What I do remember unambiguously is being an active member of the site, contributing regularly and in good faith, being accused of spamming, and the general feeling of hostility that I got from the site.
You got a DM and email with the title and URL when your story was removed. This would've been 2023-08-03 with the subject "Your story has been edited by a moderator", if you want to look back: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/86e1d0b6ac6bac5210...
But you're correct on the second part, there isn't a level of activity that entitles anyone to post a sales page with nothing to discuss on it. Your activity was taken into account, though. Typically if a new user's first activity is to post an ad I'll also ban the site or user. I understand the rules aren't as permissive as you wanted, but ads don't start good discussions.
I experienced this with lobsters and deleted my account there. They describe it as a garden party, which is accurate. And it’s very easy to ruffle the feathers of those at the garden party if you dare question the politics.
> Thanks for resolving my internal dialog about returning to Lobsters.
I still load it from time to time, but the value of going there seems to diminish year over year. Every story that gets traction on Lobsters is already posted to HN now.
Many of the commenters I valued on Lobsters have given up on the site and left.
I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting it because I’m worried about going too much against the acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
>I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting it because I’m worried about going too much against the acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
but it's exactly the same here. hell, even reddit is less bad - even a thousand other people can't silence you there. how many terminally online powerusers does it take to get a comment [dead] and/or [flagged], three? five? and there are dozens of them in every controversial thread, where the approved opinions are expressed with as much low quality vitriol and snark as they please, while the wrong opinions get shut down no matter how civil and/or factual they might be, silently downvoted or flagged out of existence. I could find a hundred examples from my numerous throwaways, but without being as vague as this, I know I'll just get flagged.
now I often find myself doing the same thing you do - not bothering - and I hate what that means.
It’s not the same here at all. I get downvoted into negatives some times but there are enough people who appreciate differing opinions that as long as my comments are well intentioned and contain accurate information they usually go positive again.
On Lobsters, if you say the wrong thing, even as a well-written and researched comment, you could get slapped with a banner at the top of every page inviting you to delete your account.
> I could find a hundred examples from my numerous throwaways,
I’m sorry, but if you have collected a hundred examples and had to generate that many throwaway accounts I have a hard time believing the comments were actually civil or well researched. I can believe that from time to time an angry comment section will downvote a good comment until it’s dead, but if one person is collecting a hundred examples across countless accounts then I think there are deeper problems with the commenting style that need to be evaluated.
>if one person is collecting a hundred examples across countless accounts then I think there are deeper problems with the commenting style that need to be evaluated.
no, no, I didn't mean they were all mine - like I said, I don't bother making high effort comments when I know for sure they'll get [flagged][dead]. what I meant was that I could find such comments in any controversial thread I ever saw, which I could locate from my throwaways' histories.
>as my comments are well intentioned and contain accurate information they usually go positive again.
flagged comments don't, and there are no consequences for using the flag button to express disagreement.
I should have said “all stories about AI usage” which is exactly what your link says. If you post anything related to using or exploring AI, it’s forced to use the vibecoding tag. It doesn’t matter if it’s about vibecoding or coding at all.
The top voted comments on that thread get to the meat of the issue. Vibecoding was embraced as a derogatory term and applied broadly to every LLM related topic, even when vibecoding wasn’t involved.
> The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site. If you wrote a link that was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you join the community. Finally, if you can't find anyone you know in the invitation tree and didn't author something posted to the site, consider getting to know the community in the chat room.
Not very difficult if you have an online presence somewhere you can use as proof that you will act in good-faith. Having a hacker news account for instance can make joining as easy as sending someone an e-mail (as I did) and asking. It is a website much more built upon trust, and so if you invite someone and they get banned for something, you are directly connected to that.
I recently learned Bear blog (a small blogging platform, posts on which often appear on HN) has a “discover” section with a front page style ranking. Their algorithm is on the page
See https://bearblog.dev/discover/This is a good exploration of the algorithm. In my experience, Lobsters has much more active moderator involvement in a more opinionated way than HN. Much of what’s referred to as moderation here is user-driven via flagging and votes, whereas on Lobsters the moderators are injecting more of an opinionated style into the site. For example, requiring the “vibecoding” tag on all stories about AI even though very few of them are about vibecoding.
In theory the Lobsters moderation log is also public, but in practice when someone gets banned if you try to find the post that triggered the banned it will have been edited away by the mods and replaced with their opinion of what was said in a follow up comment. I stopped visiting as much after watching someone get banned for a rather benign comment which the mods edited away and then claimed it said something egregious about a culture war topic, which it did not.
The site also puts up a banner at the top of your page if you receive enough negative votes. The banner invites you to delete your account as the last sentence (or it did in the past). In practice, if you comment something that isn’t the popular and accepted opinion on the site, no matter how diplomatically, you could end up with the banner stuck on your page views for a while. There have been some high profile and valuable contributors to the site who abandoned it after getting stuck with this banner for posting informative content that nevertheless triggered some downvotes.
It’s an interesting site, but in my experience the algorithms are only a small part of it. The experience there is more heavily aligned toward groupthink and the “right” opinions than even HN and differing opinions are much less welcomed.
I was a pretty active member in the comments for a long time and left a few years ago after getting chastised by a moderator and accused of spamming for sharing a link to a blog post I had written, even though the content was purely technical, not promoting any product, and does not contain ads or monetize content in any way.
My impression is that the site was actively looking for any possible reason to remove people from the platform. It’s their site to moderate as they wish, but that’s not a community I want to continue participating in.
You did not share a link to a blog post. The title was "Effective Haskell is a hands-on practical book way to learn Haskell. No math or formal CS needed" and it linked to the site advertising your book for sale. I removed it because we don't get good discussions out of ads.
I shared the story as I remember it. Memory is imperfect. It's been years since I deleted my account, and I don't have the luxury of access to server or moderation logs.
What I do remember unambiguously is being an active member of the site, contributing regularly and in good faith, being accused of spamming, and the general feeling of hostility that I got from the site.
You got a DM and email with the title and URL when your story was removed. This would've been 2023-08-03 with the subject "Your story has been edited by a moderator", if you want to look back: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/86e1d0b6ac6bac5210...
But you're correct on the second part, there isn't a level of activity that entitles anyone to post a sales page with nothing to discuss on it. Your activity was taken into account, though. Typically if a new user's first activity is to post an ad I'll also ban the site or user. I understand the rules aren't as permissive as you wanted, but ads don't start good discussions.
The vanity of internet moderators never cease to amaze me.
This has also been my experience. I like that it's a small community but their toxicity is much more towards AI or anything to the right of RMS.
I experienced this with lobsters and deleted my account there. They describe it as a garden party, which is accurate. And it’s very easy to ruffle the feathers of those at the garden party if you dare question the politics.
Thanks for resolving my internal dialog about returning to Lobsters. I’ll just stick around here as always.
> Thanks for resolving my internal dialog about returning to Lobsters.
I still load it from time to time, but the value of going there seems to diminish year over year. Every story that gets traction on Lobsters is already posted to HN now.
Many of the commenters I valued on Lobsters have given up on the site and left.
I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting it because I’m worried about going too much against the acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
>I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting it because I’m worried about going too much against the acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
but it's exactly the same here. hell, even reddit is less bad - even a thousand other people can't silence you there. how many terminally online powerusers does it take to get a comment [dead] and/or [flagged], three? five? and there are dozens of them in every controversial thread, where the approved opinions are expressed with as much low quality vitriol and snark as they please, while the wrong opinions get shut down no matter how civil and/or factual they might be, silently downvoted or flagged out of existence. I could find a hundred examples from my numerous throwaways, but without being as vague as this, I know I'll just get flagged.
now I often find myself doing the same thing you do - not bothering - and I hate what that means.
It’s not the same here at all. I get downvoted into negatives some times but there are enough people who appreciate differing opinions that as long as my comments are well intentioned and contain accurate information they usually go positive again.
On Lobsters, if you say the wrong thing, even as a well-written and researched comment, you could get slapped with a banner at the top of every page inviting you to delete your account.
> I could find a hundred examples from my numerous throwaways,
I’m sorry, but if you have collected a hundred examples and had to generate that many throwaway accounts I have a hard time believing the comments were actually civil or well researched. I can believe that from time to time an angry comment section will downvote a good comment until it’s dead, but if one person is collecting a hundred examples across countless accounts then I think there are deeper problems with the commenting style that need to be evaluated.
>if one person is collecting a hundred examples across countless accounts then I think there are deeper problems with the commenting style that need to be evaluated.
no, no, I didn't mean they were all mine - like I said, I don't bother making high effort comments when I know for sure they'll get [flagged][dead]. what I meant was that I could find such comments in any controversial thread I ever saw, which I could locate from my throwaways' histories.
>as my comments are well intentioned and contain accurate information they usually go positive again.
flagged comments don't, and there are no consequences for using the flag button to express disagreement.
To my understanding there are also few consequences to having a comment get [flagged]
> For example, requiring the “vibecoding” tag on all stories about AI even though very few of them are about vibecoding.
No? You either use AI or vibecoding, like the tag page says:
https://lobste.rs/tags
I should have said “all stories about AI usage” which is exactly what your link says. If you post anything related to using or exploring AI, it’s forced to use the vibecoding tag. It doesn’t matter if it’s about vibecoding or coding at all.
Forcing the “vibecoding” tag on to stories that aren’t vibecoding related has been a debate on the site for a while: https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms
The top voted comments on that thread get to the meat of the issue. Vibecoding was embraced as a derogatory term and applied broadly to every LLM related topic, even when vibecoding wasn’t involved.
Dumb question. Why the negative modifier on hotness, when higher hotness could correspond to higher rank?
Apparently, to simplify sorting.
How does the HN front page work?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...
There are existing posts about this.
Yes but how do I get an account lol
https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
How difficult is it to get invited to join Lobsters?
Disregard sibling comment
From the about page
> The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site. If you wrote a link that was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you join the community. Finally, if you can't find anyone you know in the invitation tree and didn't author something posted to the site, consider getting to know the community in the chat room.
Chat: https://lobste.rs/chat
I used to be active in chat and invited many users but I'm not that active now.
Not very difficult if you have an online presence somewhere you can use as proof that you will act in good-faith. Having a hacker news account for instance can make joining as easy as sending someone an e-mail (as I did) and asking. It is a website much more built upon trust, and so if you invite someone and they get banned for something, you are directly connected to that.
For more see: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations and the user invite tree https://lobste.rs/users
Fork the repo, deal with an open issue and humbly ask if you could get an invite... seems like that could be the ticket.
Thanks! That's an interesting approach for filtering new joiners.