I see lots of meta discussion, but very little discussion about news items on lobste.rs. All these meta issues strike me as Maserati Problems. The core value proposition of Lobste.rs is a better place to have discussions but no one seems to be discussing….
Whatdaya say, how about some more discussions?
That is exactly why I hid the meta tag by default. I wanted to focus more on the reason why most people are here (the stories being posted and discussion about them) rather than discussing the site itself.
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I can tell you this: since lobsters has a muh more strictly software focus, I tend to not post more complex articles here. My complex, in-depth thoughts have been only tangentially related to software as of late. So my quick blog posts about Ruby end up here, but my 3k word posts on philosophy do not.
I think I’d rather see your complex posts here.
One thing that’s put me off HN a bit is the number of cliquish posts, such as announcements of some pending release of Rails n.n.who-really-gives-a-shit. They kind of thing that people what interest in that level of topic minutia are going to know about anyway.
I’d much rather be exposed to topics of broader value, and if it’s software related one where I don’t have to be user of some particular language to gain value from the post.
These are also the kinds of posts that encourage more participation as well.
Yeah, well, there’s no tag for philosophy, so…
There is now, submit away
Thank you! :D
“I see lots of meta discussion, but very little discussion about news items on lobste.rs.”
This is pretty much the question I asked here, in this other meta discussion: https://lobste.rs/s/5yyhdi/where_are_the_comments
Seems people are far more inclined to post a story than to comment on one.
It also seems that people are less likely to make a first comment on a post than to add to an existing discussion.
I’ve thought of trying to go and add comments to some as-yet comment-free posts, but as dws alludes to else where on this page the items people have been posting are often hard to say much about.
I think I spoke too soon. After thinking about it some more I think there’s more meta discussion and less non-meta discussion simply because people tend to be interested in only a subset of topics (which is why I’ve only posted a few comments), yet most people are interested in the meta aspects (we’re all early adopters).
But still, what can we do to increase news discussions?
What about changing the Lobsters “economy” a bit to promote the type of community we want?