Happy 7th Anniversary, Lobsters

40

dsschnau 4 years ago | link

I’m really thankful for lobste.rs as an alternative to the echo-chamber of hacker news. Great community, great moderation, productive and healthy conversations: that’s a lot to ask for from an internet community and you can find it here.

32

qqbear 4 years ago | link

I’m glad to have a place to talk about programming and computers without necessarily bringing in the “tech industry” part.
1. 5
  
  friendlysock 4 years ago | link
  
  This is made possible by vigilant flagging! :)
  1. 3
    
    nickpsecurity 4 years ago | link
    
    I can confirm since I see it in Recent regularly. There’s about a handful of you hard at work at that for years. Usually get to it before I even see it. Appreciate your efforts.
2. 2
  
  sjamaan 4 years ago | link
  
  A thousand times this!

24

binarymax 4 years ago | link

At last, adulthood! Downside, we’re now at legal harvesting age. https://mlcalliance.org/all-about-lobster/lobster-101-reproduction-and-life-cycle/

13

friendlysock 4 years ago | link

V.v.V

13

inactive-user 4 years ago | link

🦞

11

Irene 4 years ago | link

Wooooo! Seven years - amazing! Thank you all for being here, I really enjoy this community. It is currently the only place on the open internet where I can get into technical discussion and actually feel safe doing so.

4

sjamaan 4 years ago | link

Wow, that’s great about lobste.rs, but at the same time pretty damning about the rest of the internet.

8

animesh 4 years ago | link

Congratulations to the real hacker news! Thanks for keeping it small and focused. Also, I love that there is no mobile app and I prefer it stays that way.

6

kuijsten 4 years ago | link

One statistic I’m interested in is the number of submitted stories authored by ppl from the community. I think this is a strong differentiator of Lobste.rs compared to other link aggregation sites.

3

nickpsecurity 4 years ago | link

There appears to be an increase in them recently, too.

3

pushcx Sysop 4 years ago | link

I had a spot of insomnia and got curious, so I wrote the query. (Reminder I’m happy to run queries, see /about.) The user_is_author boolean was added to stories on 2019-07-30.

> select extract(year from created_at) as y, extract(month from created_at) as m, sum(user_is_author) as authored, count(*) as "all", round(sum(user_is_author)/count(*)*100) as p
 from stories where created_at >= '2015-07-01' group by 1, 2;
+------+------+----------+------+------+
| y    | m    | authored | all  | p    |
+------+------+----------+------+------+
| 2015 |    7 |        2 |  608 |    0 |
| 2015 |    8 |       88 |  541 |   16 |
| 2015 |    9 |      106 |  549 |   19 |
| 2015 |   10 |      117 |  737 |   16 |
| 2015 |   11 |      109 |  791 |   14 |
| 2015 |   12 |      124 |  761 |   16 |
| 2016 |    1 |      116 |  972 |   12 |
| 2016 |    2 |      117 |  849 |   14 |
| 2016 |    3 |      131 |  736 |   18 |
| 2016 |    4 |      131 |  739 |   18 |
| 2016 |    5 |      132 |  786 |   17 |         
| 2016 |    6 |      157 |  798 |   20 |         
| 2016 |    7 |      129 |  812 |   16 |                                                          
| 2016 |    8 |      124 |  797 |   16 |
| 2016 |    9 |      110 |  731 |   15 |                                                          
| 2016 |   10 |      115 |  779 |   15 |         
| 2016 |   11 |      116 |  835 |   14 |  
| 2016 |   12 |      119 |  852 |   14 |                                                          
| 2017 |    1 |      152 | 1037 |   15 |       
| 2017 |    2 |      139 | 1068 |   13 |
| 2017 |    3 |      182 | 1194 |   15 |  
| 2017 |    4 |      147 |  947 |   16 |         
| 2017 |    5 |      160 |  979 |   16 |
| 2017 |    6 |      175 |  941 |   19 |                                                          
| 2017 |    7 |      206 | 1109 |   19 |
| 2017 |    8 |      170 | 1111 |   15 |
| 2017 |    9 |      202 |  974 |   21 |                                                                                                                                                            
| 2017 |   10 |      223 |  985 |   23 |                                                          
| 2017 |   11 |      180 |  924 |   19 |                                                          
| 2017 |   12 |      165 |  922 |   18 |         
| 2018 |    1 |      227 |  961 |   24 |                                                          
| 2018 |    2 |      181 |  846 |   21 |
| 2018 |    3 |      212 | 1058 |   20 |                                                          
| 2018 |    4 |      213 |  983 |   22 |         
| 2018 |    5 |      200 |  982 |   20 |                                                          
| 2018 |    6 |      188 |  886 |   21 |         
| 2018 |    7 |      198 | 1017 |   19 |                                                          
| 2018 |    8 |      207 |  985 |   21 |         
| 2018 |    9 |      212 |  869 |   24 |                                                                                                                                                            
| 2018 |   10 |      207 |  918 |   23 |                                                          
| 2018 |   11 |      221 |  924 |   24 |
| 2018 |   12 |      225 |  905 |   25 |
| 2019 |    1 |      218 | 1058 |   21 |
| 2019 |    2 |      207 |  924 |   22 |
| 2019 |    3 |      246 |  978 |   25 |
| 2019 |    4 |      271 |  967 |   28 |
| 2019 |    5 |      229 |  954 |   24 |
| 2019 |    6 |      260 |  925 |   28 |
| 2019 |    7 |       62 |  187 |   33 |
+------+------+----------+------+------+
49 rows in set (0.97 sec)

We’ve had rumblings in #lobsters that there’s been too much self-promotion/content marketing recently, and there’s certainly more author-submitted posts the last four months (as @nickpsecurity observed). Maybe someone would like to write queries to get at this?

3

nickpsecurity 4 years ago | link

Appreciate the data. It confirms that authored by’s went up with it being steadily over 200 since 08/2018. Our curators are pretty good at flagging away, countering or just dropping self promotion with no content. I’m not too worried about it. I probably need to get back to messaging these people about what kinds of content Lobsters prefer. I used to do it sometimes for people whose submissions got no reaction or a negative one.

4

xfbs 4 years ago | link

Thank you for being an awesome community.

3

pgl edited 4 years ago | link

Happy Birthday, Lobsters! And to all the venerable crustaceans who share the day.

I don’t have any particular favourites from this year that I can recall, but overall posts and comments are the highest quality of any site I know for topics relevant to Lobsters.

3

freddyb 4 years ago | link

Thanks pushcx! Do you think you could make it so that the list of upvoted stories doesn’t include one’s own submissions?

11

pushcx 4 years ago | link

Done.

3

utahshex 4 years ago | link

To celebrate, I’ve added a page listing your upvoted comments alongside the page for your upvoted stories.

These are very useful - is there a way to navigate to them from somewhere? I didn’t know that upvoted stores existed.

2

josm 4 years ago | link

7 years? god damn

2

roryokane 4 years ago | link

Speaking of pages that list comments, is there any existing page that shows all of one’s own comments? I would like to be able to save all of my comments to my computer, and to search within my comments to find one I remember making about a certain topic.

Your Threads contains one’s comments inline with other comments, but the page ends with threads from a few months ago. Comments contains all comments, paginated, but I don’t see a way to filter it to a specific user’s comments.

1

pushcx 4 years ago | link

No, there’s currently no page for all comments by a user.

2

shawn edited 4 years ago | link

I’m sad political discussion isn’t allowed. I don’t mean hardcore politics. I just mean, occasionally, talking about some high-profile issues that affect us all. (For example, this raises many questions, and I’ve been hoping to somehow talk about it. But it’s mostly politics rather than tech, and hence not a fit for lobsters.)

But I understand the reasons.

Happy anniversary. :) I like how nice everyone is, even during heated debates.

10

Irene 4 years ago | link

Yeah, I share your sadness, but I really do think it’s for the best. It’s not like we don’t have discussion of high-profile issues, it gets in there in various ways. It just isn’t the main driver of those conversations, and I really don’t think this would be a pleasant site if it were.

(I wouldn’t be able to talk about that article, anyway, as I’m too close to the events. Oh well. Being responsible sucks, I wanna talk irresponsibly. :/)
1. 1
  
  gerikson 4 years ago | link
  
  Bad analogy time!
  
  Snuffing out overtly political discussion runs the risk of dousing light, but it also prevents the formation of dense smoke and the risk of a raging wildfire burning all before it.

1

jackklika 4 years ago | link

I’m surprised by the continuous quality posting and commenting on here after a long seven years. Happy birthday!

1

gerikson edited 4 years ago | link

~~Born on the 4th of July, huh~~. EDIT I cannot tell dates

Also, congrats!

Thanks for the new feature, and for all the hard work keeping the site up and running!

(Edit replaced link with a better one)

6

pushcx 4 years ago | link

There’s been a bit of confusion about this in the past, too: the first anniversary post was on July 1 and there is a story or two posted then, but the 5th post was on the third and references a tweet on July 3rd. I think the site was deployed on the first and then announced on the third, so I went with the latter.