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Hey folks,

Lobsters launched nine years ago today. (The tweet I usually link to is gone and wayback didn’t grab it.)

In that time our community of 14,173 users have submitted 78,788 stories, written 330,972 comments, and cast 2,193,357 votes. There are some nice graphs over at /stats.

Previously: 2013 2016 2017 2019 2020

For the occasion you might look back at the top stories of the year, or review the comments and stories you’ve upvoted.

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    Thanks for all the work you and many others have done over the years! This is a much better online community than many others and much of that is due to the often invisible work all y’all do!

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      Agreed! Thank you to @pushcx! (Next to Christine I haven’t seen any new mods, yet?)

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      Lobsters was launched on (Franz) Kafka’s birthday!

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        Well to be fair, it is a site for discussing bugs.

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        Thanks @pushcx + other mods + contributors! This is one of my favorite message boards on the internet :)

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          Bravo! Thanks and congrats!

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            Congrats! 🎉

            And thank you very much.

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              Wooooooo! That is awesome. Can’t believe it’s been so long already.

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                If anyone would like to share, I’ll ask: how and when did you end up joining the site?

                I first found Lobsters in 2014, when someone mentioned it on HN as a more pleasant community. There were fewer comments then and the point totals were much lower, but I remember enjoying every post I read. I think a huge factor was how memorable the domain name was, I knew it without googling after seeing it once. I was a poor undergrad taking a leave of absence, and my phone and laptop were broken at the time, so I would read posts on workstations at my dad’s office while helping him with IT stuff. Honestly this site means a lot to me for that; at a real personal low, it reminded me that CS wasn’t just my experience with school.

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                  I’ve seen a mention on reddit and applied, somehow got in.

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                    2014 for me too. I had been thinking of leaving HN after the ridiculous pending comments scheme had been announced. Somewhere during the discussion of it back in those days, I saw Lobsters mentioned as an alternative. I took a look, liked what I saw, and asked in the queue for an invite.

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                      I’ve had the pleasure of knowing @pushcx for close to two decades at this point. He mentored me in programming fundamentals over that time and I found myself watching on of the Lobste.rs live programming streams for fun one evening. While discussing the stream he sent me an invite and I have thoroughly enjoyed having a sane source of news ever since.

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                        I was a lurker for a while before I actually got an invite.

                        I came across @jcs’s blog after getting into OpenBSD (it was probably around 2019, so fairly recent). On there I found an old post complaining about the state of the orange site’s moderation. There’s a tiny link at the bottom of the post to a website…

                        After finding Lobsters on that blog post I lurked here, reading stories, never bothering to get an invite until one day I came across someone (on Discord, funnily enough) who said they had an invite for someone who wanted it.

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                        Happy Birthday!

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                          Congratulations! Thank you @pushcx and other contributors for the incredible effort put in to maintaining and growing the lobsters community over the years.

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                            I would like to thank Lobsters not only for the amazing community that it is, but also for the amazing software that it has.

                            We deployed the software on Khosenk (hy. Let’s Talk) to build an Armenian tech community and the Lobsters software is a core part of it.

                            This is the best place of the internet :) <3

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                              Not gonna lie, that domain name scared me a bit. I know that you can encode Unicode characters in URL these days, but I didn’t know that was true for the TLD as well. Awesome stuff tho!

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                              Thanks to all the people running this site!

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                                Wow, has it been that long? I signed up 8 years ago, and come here almost daily.

                                Thank you all for making it such an awesome place. One thing I can say about my 8 years here… it hasn’t changed for the worse. It hasn’t gone downhill, developed a bad culture or become over-commercialized.

                                I don’t have to tell you all how incredibly rare is, and says a lot about the leadership. Thank you all!

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                                  Thanks to you and the others for all of the work put into making this a great online community!

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                                    Thanks to one and all who have made this an enjoyable community to be a part of!

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                                      This is a great place on the internet, and I’m happy to have been here for a while. Good on @pushcx and the mods and everyone here who works to keeping it a healthy place. Here’s to another nine years.

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                                        Thank you all for making Lobs one of my favorite places on the web.

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                                          Happy late birthday Lobste.rs!