Hey folks,
Here’s the yearly stats (2016, 2017) for Lobsters.
In 2017 we gained 2,227 new friends, up from 1,345 last year.
There were 12,191 stories submitted, a 25% increase from last year’s 9,686. The top tags were:
- programming on 1,477 stories
- security on 1,315 stories
- practices on 940 stories
- web on 810 stories
- javascript on 668 stories
The most frequent (non-moderator) story submitters were:
- calvin with 1,338, up one position from 569 last year
- av with 521, up one position from 398 last year
- flyingfisch with 370, up two positions from 302 last year
- friendlysock with 321, same position from 313 last year
- nickpsecurity with 250, joining the board
The most-upvoted (non-meta) story was Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber with a score of 154.
The most prolific (non-moderator) commenters were:
- nickpsecurity with 1,906
- friendlysock with 967
- tedu with 964
- apy with 489
- feoh with 459
The most-upvoted (non-moderator/meta) comment was this by mattgreenrocks with a score of 86.
There were 208 git commits to the Lobsters repo. The lobsters-ansible repo was created and got 37 commits. The site changed servers and sysops and received many wonderful contributions from alynpost, talklittle, 355e3b, jstoja, and Yuki Izumi (whose email on commits doesn’t match a Lobsters or GitHub username or I’d link them).
Enjoy your new year!
Thanks for keeping this place going! Really love the community here. It’s my favorite source of tech news. Can’t handle the Hacker News supersonic firehose :)
Hopefully it’s not tech news and more just “interesting learnings in tech”. News is the mindkiller.
You’re right. What I really meant to say is I find this place tremendously useful for gathering new inputs that inspire and edify.
Oh, thanks! Yuki was me, I changed my name. o7
I want to know about the people who don’t follow everybody else, like sheep. Who were the most down voted?
I don’t actually think this means what you think it means, at least if people are using down votes the way I’d like to see them used.
For me, a down vote means “This has no place here”.
At least on HN and TrueReddit, which I think share your (and my) preference for how downvotes should be used, downvotes seem to be abused to reflect disagreement maybe 2/3rds of the time. It’s a shame, but seems inevitable.
Exactly. Sometimes I also think people view downvoting as their way of saying “feh” to someone whose ideas they somehow disapprove of or deem unworthy.
IMO such a disagree/disapprove downvote is a major cop out. Either reply and explain yourself or upvote someone who’s already done so that you disagree with.
If people can up-vote without having to post a reason, what is wrong with down-voting without posting a reason?
There are lots of reasons for down-voting, including “This has no place here”.
Arguably we should have the mechanism to document reason for upvotes.
But, downvotes without reasons are a malfeature. That mechanisms encourage the level of discourse one finds at HN and Reddit.
We at least attempt to do better.
Because in my view, the system here is designed to measure merit.
If I think an article is interesting or useful, I upvote it. If I don’t, I simply leave that article alone. No negative action is required.
We DO need a mechanism for keeping what’s posted here in line with the kind of thing the community wants to see, and that’s where I see down votes coming in.
Think of Lobsters as a bar graph, with the most voted for articles bubbling to the top and generating the longest bar.
People can disagree on what things constitute that which has no place here
What’s that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/
(Don’t use it myself.)
I deliver niche content, thank you! I’d have piles of funding by VC’s and on Kickstarter if I stayed on popular topics in popular places. I imagine some others, too. Most of us are here on this specific forum for stuff better for the brain, though. ;)
Far as most downvoted, it’s gotta be that libertarian fellow: I’m often expanding their comments to see exactly what was said. Usually just some ideological repetition but every now and then a good counterpoint.
How about having a count of our yearly total up/down votes, with an option to make them public?
I’d almost rather limit the number of downvotes that people can cast in a given time period to remind people that a downvote is more censure than disagreement.
I think a limit on both up/down would be good. It would certainly make me spend more time considering whether a link really was worth an up-vote.
I dunno. I think upvotes should be easy, downvotes should require due consideration.
Nice work all
Great work!
I’m really quite surprised that Javascript came in last and that we didn’t see Rust or one of the newer more fringe languages represented. I get the vibe from a long of people here that mainstream languages that many work-a-day programmers build in like Java or Python are so 5 minutes ago and beneath people’s interest :)
Regardless of your main language, if you build for the web you’re going to have to know some javascript.
I suspect that’s what drives interest - JS is so broadly useful.
The list is not weighted by votes, filters, hidden stories, comments, or anything else. This is the simplest thing, raw numbers of stories submitted with that tag.
Yeah! thanks guys for keep doing all this great work on lobsters!!
Hooray I’m useful!
Zoidberg is the best :) “By the way, I took the liberty of fertilizing your caviar.”