Hey folks,
Lobsters launched 10 years ago today.
In that time our community of 15,013 users have submitted 87,530 stories, written 381,460 comments, and cast 2,536,117 votes. There are some nice graphs over at /stats.
Previously: 2013 2016 2017 2019 2020 2021
For the occasion you might look back at the top stories of the year or decade, or review the comments and stories you’ve upvoted. What were your favorites?
Thank you, Lobste.rs! 🦞 It remains my favorite single site on the internet, many years running. (I joined 8 years ago.)
Looking back across all my submissions, there was some lovely “crusty” discussion on this article, “On the use of a life”, penned by cpercival.
https://lobste.rs/s/d8wxhi/on_use_life
Although the submission suffered from a few “barnacles”, too. (That is, a few off-topic downvotes.)
I am relatively new user, but kudos to the moderators for keeping such a “peaceful” place, and to the users for generating quality material, and avoiding flame wars and toxicity.
🦞 Here’s to another decade! 🦞
Cheers to @pushcx and @Irene for the awesome moderation work!
And of course, thanks to @jcs for starting the whole thing!
I wonder why growth is trending down (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing).
I’ve made some good friends on here, and when I post my own content, I’ve always had great interactions/feedback too!
I love lobste.rs and have been a member for 8 years. The comments ahead are just my personal experience but maybe there are others who feel the same way. At some point (I think about 2 years ago) topics about tech culture and society started to be removed by moderators and I started to participate less and less. Which is insane since the reason lobste.rs started was HN banned the creator and HN was doing some funny moderation. (fun history: https://jcs.org/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452384). One reason I loved lobste.rs was it’s careful use of moderation, instead relying on having a solid group of users vetted by others in the community.
So, this stronger moderation against topics related to culture and society that intersect with tech made me lose interest. Given all the crazy things happening in the world today, to believe that tech is isolated from the world is naive and ultimately creates a bubble culture. What’s the point of loving technology if it can’t be applied to real world problems? So over time I started to lose some interest in content on lobste.rs as it seemed less relevant to my life. Maybe the content is changing again? I don’t know as I haven’t really participated as much.
The community here is strong and I hope for another strong 10 years. I just hope people learn that tech is useless independent of helping people. Code that doesn’t run, that doesn’t solve problems, is just a statue. Beautiful to look at and appreciate, but not much else.
I feel the opposite. The American culture wars are exhausting.
I am glad this place is peaceful.
I find the culture war exhausting too, but I also feel it’s mostly fake. That it’s mostly manufactured by the media and big voices on social media. Notice I didn’t say anything about any culture war but that’s where you went. Isn’t that weird? Something is wrong with our discourse. I’m talking about software solving the real problems we have in society (hungry, homeless, global warming, ecological collapse, energy, prison system, education, war, inequality, gun violence). The culture war is manufactured, in my opinion (puts on tin foil hat), to distract us from the real problems.
Computers are literally man’s greatest invention. They can save us from meaningless labor and enhance our minds. They aren’t a bicycle for the mind, but a rocket ship. My worry is we are wasting it. We shouldn’t take computers for granted. It won’t take much to forget how to make them.
Do we need software to fix any of those problems? Aside from global warming / ecological collapse at least? We (as a society) have the wealth to fix these issues, it is mostly the lack of consensus / political will to do so. And the main thing standing in the way are certain wealthy actors and interest groups. They are interested in their own profits first and foremost, and control of society via marginalization or outright oppression of minorities and destruction of democratic systems and discourse.
We can use software on the margins to try to educate people, and show how they are being manipulated. But it doesn’t seem like enough.
Like a virus, computers are now in everything. You eat today? Computers were involved. It’s not so much that they can fix any of those problems (I would argue they accelerate some like global warming. Google is proud they increases waste and energy use through all of society https://economicimpact.google.com/), it’s that if they aren’t part of the solution, then they are part of the problem. So we either fix it, or get rid of their usage. Since they are such a powerful tool for productivity, it seems to me we can use them to accelerate solutions vs accelerate problems.
Then all the more reason for having a place where we can discuss the science, art and craft of technology away from the divisiveness that’s tearing our society apart makes sense in my view.
I’m not suggesting that this is a monastery, but monasteries existed to keep the barbarians out and knowledge in when the dark ages fell. I see communities like this serving a similar purpose.
Except it was in the monasteries where truth died. The “dark ages” were nothing like you described. I suggest reading Debt the first 5000 years by David Graeber. Eratothsenes figured out the circumference of the earth and over a 1000 years later we had Christopher Columbus who thought the world was much smaller. Yajnavalkya postulated the earth revolved around the sun yet the Monasteries promoted a earth as the center vision.
We need a functioning civilization to keep knowledge being passed through one generation to the next. Now that we are facing threats to organized human life at an unprecedented scale, there will be no ‘safe place’ to teach people how to build computers without civilization wide support. Computers are just too complex.
Also imagine the rest of society thinking “Wow, we have these amazing tools called computers that can solve our problems, but the folks who design and build them, the elite who use these tools, want nothing to do with our problems. Want to ignore them because they are too disturbing and annoying to the experts”.
Good on you for fighting the good fight. I’ll just be over here hacking around with old computers and trying to stay healthy long enough to retire and enjoy life a bit :)
You evoke an interesting thought and bring up a good point. There are millions of programmers. But most programmers have little say in what they actually build as they work for large companies. That’s because, while programmers are paid well relative to the rest of society, they often own very little of their work.
The responsibility I am talking about falls on those that do have a say in what is built. Many of the leaders are former programmers themselves. But even among programmers there is a class divide. Those that don’t have a say in what is built don’t have the responsibility I speak of. Maybe we need more people owning their work.
The culture war is manufactured. It is also a real, serious problem. One of the reasons there are so many wars is that they can be started unilaterally.
To the point at hand, though, do you think discussion about “culture and society” on lobste.rs solves any of those problems? I associate these kinds of topic with lobste.rs’ turning into a little hackernews, in which the same handful of political arguments are rehashed and people are generally horrible to each other. I don’t think the tech industry at large is going to discover, for instance, the concept of professional ethics through comment threads here.
I think the reason we can be civilised here is that we find technology neat; it’s a thing we have in common, and the reddit-style discussions work reasonably well for that. When we debate bigger things the medium shows its weaknesses. For one thing, while a lot of the strictly computery posts exist in some sort of niche, articles about society have much more direct political implications, and tend to elicit some sort of opinion for pretty much everyone. It’s also much harder to stay calm when discussing something that matters.
I’ve argued, often and animatedly, that political content shouldn’t be on lobste.rs. I have several reasons for this, and I hope I’ve explained one of them, but just as important is… politics. I think being exposed to the sort of environment I see on political threads here makes people worse, or at least marginalises those who are most inclined to be nice. In theory diversity of opinion might expose people to new ideas, but in practice people pretty much always go home thinking exactly what they thought yesterday, only more so. I’d be all in favour of your position if I’d ever seen any evidence that lobste.rs debating important things leads to people becoming more conscientious about those things.
I appreciate this is a bit of a ramble, but one last thing: why would we expect anything else? You say that believing tech is isolated from the world creates a bubble culture. But lobste.rs is a bubble in its purest form already. Most tech workers and enthusiasts, especially in America, exist in a relatively narrow social stratum; it’s hard to find a demographic distinction in which the field doesn’t exhibit strong bias. I have my doubts about the comment section free-for-all as a vehicle for social change, but even if it could work, we’d need to be more connected to the rest of society in order to have any chance of deciding what technology’s place in it ought to be.
You raise a lot of good issues here. But I feel maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I don’t want random discussions about culture and politics. Twitter already exists. I care about the intersection of technology and society. I think those discussions are important to have and Lobsters used to have them. Then those seemed to have gone away and I lost some interest.
We know that people in technology are usually horrible at social issues, partly because we get people who prefer certainty. The certainty of the machine. I was one of those people. We have great comfort talking about frameworks, programming languages, and reverse engineering old hardware. We like our safe space.
I don’t have this view of lobsters as a vehicle for social change. It’s not. Social change will come either way and we can talk about how technology is involved, or we can ignore and treat lobsters as a sort of comfort food. That’s totally acceptable. It’s just less interesting for me and that’s why I responded to ‘why has growth stalled’ comment.
Seems very telling to me and makes the user come off as a troll. Somehow having concern = culture war? Or caring about a topic = virtue signaling? There’s no authenticity to users like that. They can’t imagine a world where people are caring or concerned about things bigger than themselves.
I had to filter out the
culturetag for the sake of my sanity.As much as I love reading this site, there’s something about the influx of certain topics and the style of conversation etc that - for the lack of a better word - triggers me. I have to restrain myself from getting involved, yet I know nothing good can follow from participating.
Few of us are in a position to really affect change, and online discussion (esp. heated) is a net-negative substitute.
This is probably still true for
culturestories, but I don’t wanna go look in that dark corner.Everything else I love, thank you and keep it up for many decades!
I too find the forever culture war exhausting, and treat tech and, by extension lobsters, as a kind of haven where I can think about fun, inspiring things I might want to build or ideas I can grow from.
There is a time and a place for everything, and there are a bazillion fora for discussing that stuff. IMO it doesn’t need to be here.
As someone who also subscribes to the (glibly described as) “everything is politics” philosophy, I am still for removing a lot of the “culture” articles. The main reason is that these discussions are already happening elsewhere (for example HN). Society existing everywhere doesn’t mean that we have to discuss society everywhere.
The secondary reason is that there is a general idea for what is on topic, and that is “can this make you a better programmer”. I think that makes some stuff about community management (like CoC discussions for prog languages) on topic, but loads of things that end up getting removed fall far from this goal.
A tertiary reason (something that happens in
rant-tagged articles as well): when those articles don’t get pulled down, we end up with the same 5 people yelling at each other saying the exact same things over and over again. There is a clear vibe from some people to want to pull discussions into the same stump speech.I do think that when there isn’t a forced segue, discussion about society still happens in the comments section. And it stays reasoned. But at least personally, I don’t need every social space to turn into debate club. Lobsters isn’t the only place on the internet.
I’m a relative newcomer but I appreciate the fact that lobste.rs discussions tend to be limited to things that have some form of objective evaluation criteria. When someone presents a technical project, I can evaluate it against my requirements. I can have a discussion about why my requirements are different from yours and whether my requirements are not actually solving my underlying problem. I almost certainly have a load of biases around why my requirements ended up being that shape but they’re generally not things that I have particularly strong beliefs about and, if I do, those beliefs are very unlikely to be core to my self image.
When we discuss politics or culture then you and I may have very different ideas about an ideal society looks like and have very strong beliefs derived from things that are at the core of our self identity about that shape. If those happen to line up, then we can have a rational discussion about whether a particular policy advances our society towards that goal (though, often, we don’t really have enough data to make a good assessment). If we have conflicting goals for society then discussing how to reconcile them in a public forum is hard and maintaining an inclusive culture when those discussions are happening is even harder.
I enjoy discussing politics, even with folks that disagree with me, but I don’t enjoy doing it on the Internet because it’s incredibly easy for things to be quoted out of context or misinterpreted. I’m glad that this is a place where we can put those discussions on one side and engage on other issues.
I am torn on this matter, not the least because the one time when I broke my “no politics here” it quickly went sideways and not all in a good way, and it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, mostly because, justified or not, I really didn’t want to have a flamewar in an otherwise really civil place.
So on the one hand I think it’s useful, but also healthy and important for a community to be able to discuss things that its members consider important, even if they’re not exactly the reason why we’re all here.
This is probably a holdover of mine from the old days, when any forum, no matter what its primary topic was, also had a “General Discussion” section. A good chunk of it was flamewar but to me, a non-native English speaker at the end of the world, technologically speaking, those things were eye-opening in many ways. Even the things I actively disagreed with. They were useful for me in tech, not just in general. Without them, I’d be largely ignorant to the social, political and economical trends that shape the tech world of tomorrow, and I’d be entirely lost in this sea of information. I also think they were healthy: in my experience, tech communities that do not engage in these exercises and cannot vent on non-technical topics will eventually vent on technical topics, and will eventually cluster around narrow niches with categorical and harsh adepts who produce a lot of judgement but don’t really move the boundary of technology any further. Once they devolve into that, communities aren’t too fun to hang out in anymore, and get an expiration date, too.
Usefulness and healthiness aside, I really wish I could talk about a whole bunch of non-tech things with many of you here. There are people here whose work I admire and I’m sure the original approaches that makes their software so good has also produced a lot of other ideas worth hearing.
But on the other hand the single-section, tag-based, up/down-vote structure is really inadequate for this. Even if the front-page doesn’t promote controversy, the sheer volume of material that can be tagged
cultureis overwhelming, it’s a category that’s ripe for self-promotion, and it’s a field that’s really inviting for bike shedding while waiting for shit to compile. Unless it’s confined to a separate section, it tends to push out technical content which, in turn, tends to push out technical people.The section-less structure also means that these things inevitably make it to the front page. On old phpBB boards you could often have civil discussions in the Linux section while also shitposting in the General Discussion section, as long as general awfulness was dealt with via the ban hammer. But on lobster.rs these aren’t separate sections and shitposting inevitably spreads.
It’s also a very wide umbrella.
cultureis equally well applied to an article about the political views of early demosceners – which, even though it’s technically politics, I’d really be super curious to read about – and to an employer branding piece about how a company contributes to Rust projects which, after years of exposure to corporate hiring machines, makes me want to puke halfway through the title.Honestly, the only tag I really dislike is
practices, probably because I got a bad case of burnout from over-practice-ising a while back and eww. Ultimately, I leftcultureunfiltered, but I don’t think we need more of it.I wonder why this was put into place if the discussions were fine. (I only joined a little over a year ago, so I can’t really speak much on this except that I’m curious as to why these posts started being removed.)
It’s still a great community. I wouldn’t have buyer’s remorse. It just changed over time to something less interesting to me. Part of it is the new moderation that came with new management. They wanted to narrow the focus of the site. I can’t say that’s why growth started trending downwards, but that downward trend coincides with what I felt. So take it with a grain of salt. I was just highlighting something that might have had an impact.
Where else do you get your dose of interesting discussions?
100% I feel the same way too but it’s only made me take time off to reconsider my approach to the website. At the end of the day you either decide to work with it or not.
I’ve begun to vet my posts via lobsters IRC first. Maybe lobsters needs an initial “post filter”? i.e. if a post is thumbs-uped by a member of certain activity and age, it gets listed?
It’s strange but I am finding the best conversations I have are with individuals in private settings. Nice to know the IRC is active. Maybe I should try to hop in. Thanks!
It absolutely did for me. I stopped posting after my last submission was removed for “not being technical.”
That alone would have been OK, but the criteria for “technical” were (and remain) vague. And then, when I posted an honest question asking to understand them and the culture tag, titled “what is the culture tag for?”, the moderator proceeded to rename it to “why was my post removed?.”
Moderating’s a thankless job, but all the same, that felt disingenuous to me. So, I don’t submit things here anymore. It’s a bummer because for years, I feel like this place used to support the readership you mentioned:
The discussions were emphatically not fine, hence the purging efforts by both moderators and the community.
Popcorn tech.
You know what’s sad. I tried submitting topics that were incredibly technical. Bleeding edge tech. Nothing, no traction. For example, topics dealing with quantum computing, cryptography, etc.
It’s almost like people don’t want to talk about technology specifically. They want pop-technology. or popcorn tech. Compare the level of technical discussion here to say, lambda-the-ultimate (is that still around?).
But it’s better here than HN and reddit! So that’s a win.
I think people want to talk about things that they can meaningfully engage with. I’m interested in reading about quantum computing, for example, but I have literally nothing useful to contribute on the subject. You seem to have invited quite a few folks to join, perhaps if you reached out to some physicists then you’d find the audience contained more people who were able to meaningfully contribute on those subjects.
I’m happy to engage on a range of deeply technical topics here (language design, compiler internals, OS / hypervisor internals, CPU architecture and microarchitecture, capability systems, and so on), and I will on most of those subjects. Quite a few of them have very few comments because there are not very many folks here that share that interest. That doesn’t mean that they’re shallow, it just means that they’re experts in different things to me. I’ve had a few comments where I’ve either been the only person commenting or one of a small set, yet had some very high moderation totals (so other members are happy that I posted, even if they don’t feel that they have anything to add), or where other folks have let me know that they’re grateful for the explanation (often folks who are not members here, but still read the site). Similarly, there have been other threads where I’ve read everything, clicked the up-vote button on some fantastic explanations and clarification, and yet had nothing worthwhile to add myself.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your clear comments regarding the dark recesses of C/C++. Even though it is far from my area of expertise you usually manage to make me feel I understand them better.
Agree wholeheartedly with these conclusions. Also, your posts are reliably interesting, always extremely informed, carefully considered and well worth reading. Thanks!
Ah, the parent made it seem like the discussions were fine (or didn’t really have a stance on that, I guess I was assuming that).
I did propose a while back that such posts be on topic with their own tag. The few responses to the proposal were overwhelmingly negative. I think it’s fair to say there is not a pent up hunger for that sort of thing to be on topic here.
I think the quality is going down. Many submissions are borderline spam, or yet another basic howto on something, that if you were interested could find on your favorite search engine in seconds. The comment sections are more and more frequently covered by “me too” style comments (including “I love this”, “Great Work!” which is nice of them, but also just doesn’t add anything, you could have just upvoted), or disagreements, with little to no merit and I more often read comments from people that didn’t go beyond the headline. And on the technical side there’s quite a bit of objectively wrong information in both articles and comments.
And then with more people I think there simply ends up a lot more bikeshedding, which I assume is pretty natural as websites grow. And with Lobste.rs/reddit/HN style sites in particular the most visible things will be meritless “motherhood statements” that people can easily agree with and are hard to criticize.
Don’t get me wrong, luckily none of these is really dominant, it’s just that it seems to be increasing and can be off-putting when there’s randomly multiple cases of this.
Comparing it to HN I actually switched to lobste.rs, because that was a bit of a problem, but comparing it nowadays, they are on equal footing, even though groups of people, interests, etc. are somewhat different.
I also wonder how Drew DeVault’s and ban of links to his blog affected things, but I don’t want to open that topic.
Anyways, with that said I am really happy about the “Saves” I’ve collected over the years. A lot of them also for the comment sections. So thanks to everyone for that! :)
I broadly agree with your concerns. Some observations (from my viewpoint):
metatag) seems to have dropped off. I think that is the true existential threat to Lobsters right now.A back-of-the-envelope sketch of a solution to that issue would be an increasing time limit imposed on replying to a comment, based on its depth in a thread.
Tweaks are needed, maybe if you’re a first time commenter in a thread you don’t get a time limit on the first reply.
I think this would address the case where 2 people just really really want to be right and keep replying to each other.
I vehemently disagree.
This is a listing of the top scored and commented submissions so far this year, from HN, lobste.rs and /r/programming on Reddit.
https://gerikson.com/hnlo/topscore.html
I count 8 submissions from the 25 top scored submissions on HN that are on topic for lobste.rs. The rest are (US) political or business news. From the 25 top commented, none are on topic for this site.
Not having to daily wade through that dreck (especially without the help of tags) is what makes this place so much better than HN.
As mentioned that is why I switched to HN. I don’t mean to make this a competition though. It’s just something I’ve noticed and wanted to share these things as a form of constructive criticism. I think Lobste.rs does really good, good enough for me to spend time writing comments after all. ;)
I assume it also very much depends on the time (weekend, weekdays, American, European daytime, …), as well as how you use the websites.
Also I am not sure if overall top scores are the best measurements. I go there on a regular basis and care more about what I see then rather then the highest overall scores over the course of many months. Getting very high scores is a mixture of topics being low entry level enough, posting them at the right time, and various other factors.
Also my view obviously is very subjective in that I remembered HN worse when I opened it up a couple of times lately, when I just was a bit disappointed on the front page of lobste.rs. So there’s obviously a bit of bias there.
Looking at the top ones I think actually gives all these sites less reputation than they deserve, with lobste.rs clearly winning though.
I agree that tags help. However I am a bit paranoid about filtering sometime, because for most of them I could imagine there’s stuff I find interesting. However it’s certainly a big plus.
If by “growth” you mean a heuristic capturing overall combined site activity of existing and new users, I would postulate a causal relationship from the re-opening of alternative activities otherwise prevented during pandemic conditions (prior to general vaccine availability) and the lagging consequences from the unwinding of pandemic-related isolation trauma.
I have made no attempt at scientific rigor in this assessment; this is chart eyeballing & back-of-napkin thinking.
It seems to follow the covid development ? Would make sense if people started using lobsters more at the start, but over time became bored of all the digital stuff when they can’t do IRL things.
I have joined in the last year. I haven’t invited anyone else yet that I (a) knew well enough, and (b) thought would be a good fit for this site.
I think maybe there was a turning point where people started vetting their invites a bit more carefully.
This is all anecdotal but I remember a bunch of strife around people mis-using flags and downvotes when we had it, and there was some discussion around some folks who were seen as not participating in a way many of us found benefited the community.
(Yes I know such distinctions are a VERY slippery slope. Community is a delicate flower. I’m super grateful ours continues to thrive.)
V.v.V
Thanks for letting me in here, this is by far the nicest place to talk about tech stuff on internet. :) I am also glad that most political stuff is not allowed, there are billions of places for those. Easier to find interesting stuff from here.
Is it possible to get a data dump of all of Lobsters comments/links/threads? Would be interesting to do some data science on it.
No, but @pushcx will run queries for you: https://lobste.rs/about#transparency
Out of curiosity, what is the reasoning behind keeping this data private instead of publicly open to all?
Does Google get to fully index lobsters?
Users haven’t agreed to their comments being reused.
The 800 pound gorilla indexes whatever it would like to. We’ve also been indexed by ArchiveTeam, Archive.org, and many hobbyists. There’s some mild rate-limiting in place, and we have trivially predictable URLs with
.jsonendpoints on many.Gotcha, this is a considerate policy that I can certainly appreciate. Thank you kindly for explaining.
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Thank you pushcx for keeping the lights on and making sure this little marvel on the internet continues to exist.
here is to the next 10 years!
Happy birthday 🦞!
Thanks to the community and the admins for keeping this site interesting after all those years
love u lobstas
Thanks again, everyone, for your feedback about Dark Mode. It ended up much better than the first merge.
I’ve found so many great authors via Lobste.rs. A really good variety of different thinkers. But, my favorite part of this website is the ability for the community to have thoughtful discussions and even disagreements without devolution of social skills.
Honestly, I feel I read the comments more than the content. There is a lot of amplifying knowledge provided that I get a lot of benefit from!
Thanks for the invite two years ago @pushcx, and thanks for keeping the site running well!
Cheers to Lobsters, and cheers to nickpsecurity, I miss him here.
Big thanks to lobsters maintainer and community! having fun here!
I’m a new user (joined 5 months ago) and thank you for the great moderation and community here! This is one of my favourite parts of the Internet and it’s so refreshing to have a break from culture wars and focus solely on tech.
I’ve lurked the place for years, and was really happy to finally get an invite - the curation and moderation is great!
In the spirit of the question, one of my favorite stories this year was Installing a Payphone in My House.
Not only was it a masterful hack, but it exhibited the playfulness and sense of fun that I think is finally coming back into computing after years of going dormant, and I for one am TOTALLY here for that!
Founder/startup/yada culture is great if your goals are aligned with that world, but when I first got into computers in the 80s I came for the fun, and recapturing that fun has for me been an incredible tool to push back against burn out.
One of the many things I love about this community is that I see many others who share that same zeitgeist.
Thank you one and all for being here. I appreciate you!
🦞 Happy birthday! 🦞
Thank you Lobste.rs, love this community!
V.v.V
Happy 10th birthday lobste.rs! I joined this site just under a year ago after receiving an invite from someone on IRC. This site is now my go-to for nightly reading, I enjoy the submitted content and a site that is clean and works well.
Here’s to another 10+ years!
Yay us!
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Happy birthday! This is my first read of the day most days – and I love it. Thanks to everyone involved.
My small contribution to Lobsters history: https://lobste.rs/s/p6asvq/more_tags#c_opligw
I should really post more.