Lobsters is a technology-focused link-aggregation site created by joshua stein, launching on July 3, 2012. It borrows some ideas from, while also attempting to fixing problems specific to, websites such as Hacker News, Reddit, and Slashdot.
Transparency Policy
Some other link aggregation sites are operated by corporate entities which
may have significant financial incentive to censor or artificially promote
the links and discussion that relate to those entities, their investments, or
their competitors. Some of these sites have had moderators of popular
sub-forums banned after it became known that they were being paid by 3rd
party companies seeking special treatment of their submitted stories.
All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about which moderator it was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions.
All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and does not artificially penalize or prioritize users or domains. Per-tag hotness modifiers do affect all stories with those tags, but these modifiers are made public and usually used to shorten the life of meta-discussions. If certain domains have to be banned from being submitted due to spam, the list will be made publicly available.
If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile will indicate which moderator banned them and why. There will be no hidden or childish "shadow banning" or "hellbanning" of users popular on some other sites.
The source code to this site is made available under a 3-clause BSD license for viewing, auditing, forking, or contributing to.
Public stats are available for site requests, comments submitted, stories submitted, and users created.
Tagging
When links/stories are submitted, they must be tagged by the submitter from a
list of predefined tags. Users can choose to filter out all submissions with particular tags, but
rather than use rigidly segmented sub-forums that users must each subscribe
to, all users see all tagged stories by default. The reason for this is
threefold:
It keeps the site on-topic by only allowing a predefined list of tags. These tags represent what most of the users of the site want to read, so content that does not fit into any of those categories should not be submitted. It also keeps stories organized and more easily searchable.
It promotes discussion. A Ruby programmer would probably subscribe to a Ruby sub-forum, but not a Python one. When a link is posted to the Python sub-forum, that Ruby programmer would probably never see it, even though they may have something useful to say about it (say the link is about a Python library which does the same thing as a Ruby library which that Ruby programmer created). On this site, the link would get posted with a "python" tag and shown to everyone and would encourage the Ruby programmer to read it and comment on it (unless that Ruby programmer hated Python enough to filter it out).
It keeps the conversation centralized. Often stories contain discussion about more than one topic, yet on other sites they are confined to a single category/sub-forum, limiting the exposure. A link can be submitted to more than one sub-forum, but then each conversation remains separate and users never interact with users from other sub-forums. On this site, the story would simply be tagged with multiple tags and all users would see all discussion about the story at once.
Creating new tags and retiring old tags is done by the community by voting on and discussing meta-tagged requests about them.
Invitation Tree
Invitations are used as a mechanism for spam-control and to encourage users
to "be nice". New users must be invited by a current user, though there is
no vetting process and invitations are not intended to promote exclusivity.
The most efficient way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you
recognize from the site or
request one in chat.
Invitations are unlimited unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new
accounts. If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that
invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed.
The full user tree is made public and each user's profile shows who invited them. This provides some degree of accountability and can act as a tool to help identify voting rings.
Downvote Explanations
Often on other sites, a user would have his or her comment downvoted without
explanation and then edit their comment to ask why they were downvoted. On
this site, voters must choose a reason before downvoting comments and those
votes are tallied and shown to the original commenter.
For submitted stories, downvoting is done through flagging (also requiring a valid reason) and these flag summaries are shown to all users.
Mailing List Mode
Users can enable a mailing list mode of the site
which e-mails all new stories (including their plain-text content as fetched
and extracted by Diffbot) and user comments
as threaded discussions. This makes it easy and efficient to read new
stories as well as keep track of new comments on old threads or stories, just
like technical mailing lists or Usenet of yore.
Each user has a private mailing list address at this domain which allows them to reply to stories or comments directly in their e-mail client. These e-mails are then converted and submitted to the website as comments, just as if the comment was posted through a web browser.
Other Features
Private Messaging: on other sites, users would often have no way to contact other users that didn't have an e-mail address listed in their public profile. Users here can send private messages to each other without having to publicly disclose an e-mail address, and can receive e-mail and Pushover notifications of new instant messages.
Integrated responsive design: enhances functionality on smaller screens such as phones and tablets without having to use a separate URL, 3rd party (often read-only) sites, or proprietary mobile applications.
Integrated search engine covering all submitted stories and comments, including full-text caches of all submitted story contents. As an example, a search for Theo de Raadt brings up many stories about OpenBSD despite his name not being present in the story title.
Story merging to combat the problem of multiple stories at different URLs being submitted in a short timeframe about the same news subject. Rather than have multiple stories on the front page with fragmented discussions, all similar stories can be merged into one. An example of a story having been merged into a previous one, combining all comments on one page.
Fuzzy-matching of submitted story URLs to avoid duplicate submissions of similar URLs that differ only in http vs. https, trailing slashes, useless analytics parameters, etc. When using the story submission bookmarklet, story URLs are automatically converted to use the page's canonical URL (if available) to present the best URL to represent the story.
Per-tag and site-wide RSS feeds are available to the public and logged-in users have private RSS feeds that filter out each user's filtered tags.
Hats: a more formal process of allowing users to post comments while "wearing X hat" to give their words more authority (such as an employee speaking for the company, or an open source developer speaking for the project).
Official Twitter mirror: all stories that have reached the front page are posted to the @lobsters account on Twitter for easy following, retweeting/sharing, or archiving.
Official Tor onion/hidden service.
Official stickers.