Hey folks,
Happy birthday! Lobsters launched on July 3, 2012, making the site 12 years old today.
Our community of 17,217 users have submitted 105,766 stories, written 505,196 comments, and cast 3,346,927 votes. Graphs and more numbers are available at /stats or by query.
Previously: 2013 2016 2017 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
Look back at the last year’s top stories, or review your upvoted comments and stories to share your favorites.
Since no one has commented yet, let me be the first to say: Thank you for creating this amazing space.
That goes to @jcs!
You’ve been running it for longer than I’ve been here, so thanks to both of you, @jcs for creating the space and you for ensuring that it continued and remained welcoming.
Then thank you for maintaining this amazing space, at least for as long as I’ve been here!
thank you @pushcx and @jcs and all current, past and future moderators! <3
We all owe you. Thank you for running this place, and for keeping it so free of excesses and gratuituous negativity.
Thank you both!
Looks like his bio says @jcs was the creator, but he’s been the admin since late 2017.
Regardless, thx for all your hard work!
Seconded.
TIL I share the birthday with lobsters. :)
Happy birthday to you as well!
You’re… 12?
I hope not, they would be banned per the privacy policy.
Happy birthday to you, and to lobsters!
Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!
This is an absolutely one-of-a-kind community on the internet. I’m not sure there’s any other online community I’m a part of where I take my conduct so seriously as I do here. Lobsters comments are often just as good as reading a whole technical blog post. Your moderation here has been unimpeachable. Thanks for making this place awesome for the better part of 12 years!
I really enjoy this site. It’s far better than the orange site, and reminds me of Slashdot in the early days, but with much higher quality comments.
Thank you to everyone who makes this site possible. Here’s to another twelve years!
I was on Slashdot back when it had gems like someone on Apple’s Quartz team giving a point-by-point breakdown of why they didn’t use X11 (each thing that they’d need to add as an extension and pointing out that the end result would have used almost nothing from the core protocol). Lobste.rs on a bad day is like Slashdot from that era with your filter set to +2.
I also have enough gray in my hair to remember that era. One of the things that sticks with me is that it displayed each user’s ID on all comments, so it automatically became a status symbol to have a lower number. Every discussion had snippy little meta threads about whether you should take someone seriously if they had a high ID, etc. I haven’t seen Malda write about it to know if it was a deliberate choice or a quirk of early web forum design, but either way it was a mistake to not delete it. I think a lot about how those small design touches influence culture.
It wasn’t the only thing. In the early days, the karma number was visible and people would try to get high karma. They eventually capped it as 50 and then stopped showing the number. It’s interesting to me the subtle difference here: karma is visible in the profile page but not on posts, which seems to be just enough of a difference to stop people chasing it.
Having karma that goes up with up-votes but no down-vote mechanism was one of the things that I always thought made places like Hacker News and Digg so unbearable. People would try to post things that would get upvotes by just posting a lot independent of content because the incentive was to get as many posts with high scores as possible, not to have a high proportion of your posts have high scores.
I think the lesson here is that the systems can influence culture but the people have a much bigger impact. In the last week, I saw you ban someone who just kept insulting people. I’ve seen you ban people for posting homophobic or transphobic things. I’ve also seen you and other mods ban people for treating lobste.rs as a marketing channel.
That isn’t something that comes from subtle UI things or algorithms, that’s something that comes from having people who values the community more than they value exponential growth or ad revenue running the site. So thank you again.
Not going to lie, being a 16 year old and typing “first” and getting lots of karma sure was a huge kick :)
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Maybe Malda thought of the IDs as similar to ICQ’s identifiers and not as status symbols as the site grew?
Every few years I’m reminded I have a 5 digit slashdot ID, logon to check what it is, then promptly forget it.
Do you happen to have a link to that comment from the Apple Quartz developer? Would love to read it.
Think I found it: https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612
Hah, yep. I remember that exact comment. It ended with something like “but at least your grandma will be able to run xterm” or something.
Thanks for creating a really good space that doesn’t have a lot of commercial announcements, is reasonably safe psychologically, and has some very interesting stories with a very high content, low noise environment.
My only regret is not finding this place sooner.
I love the community here. It is small enough and well moderated enough that it doesn’t suffer the large subreddit problem, which I think also applied to hackernews and other similar large forums. And the invite only system is a wonderful litmus test. It prevents just enough of a challenge to registration, that only those truly interested in contributing here are likely to go to the effort (or will organically be invited through knowing someone else here).
That same filter also seems to attract more seasoned and thoughtful commentors. Even when I stumble across something interesting and computing related on other sites, I am always excited to run on over to lobsters and see what I can learn from folks here.
Thanks @jcs for building this place, and thanks @pushcx for growing and maintaining it. What a wonderful piece of the internet.
V.v.V
Thanks for creating this space! I’ve been a quiet reader for the past few years / part of my daily morning routine, and finally decided this year to figure out how to get an invite & start contribution.
Long live lobste.rs! 🦞
That’s a lot of lobsters.
Happy birthday !
I like it here more than the orange site, because the community is more tight knit and more technical. Keep it up!
A very quick question: could the website name come from Charles Stross’ « Accelerando » novel? Where lobsters are the first simulated beings in hardware and develop some form of intelligence ? I always wondered..
Re the site name: https://lobste.rs/about#trivia
Thanks @pushcx and @jcs!
I’ve been here for ten years, and I check Lobste.rs so often I have it blocked in my hosts file. Lobste.rs is also what got me into BSD.
Thank you for making this and please keep it a bastion against however “AI” will impact communities in the future!
happy birthday lobster site :) thanks for maintaining it @pushcx
Same birthday as my own and my company’s :)
Congrats
Those dips correspond to the great layoffs don’t they?
I think that’s a reasonable guess. It’s fascinating to see that data. I wouldn’t have guessed that lobsters usage is correlated with software engineering employment but it makes sense. Honestly I would have guessed they’d be anti-correlated.
On an hourly basis Lobsters traffic is pretty highly correlated to US working hours. It makes sense that we are in the large scale as well!
It does. But I didn’t read it like this. I read it as “post-lock-downs”
After lock-downs, I was burned out by too much online activity, and too much movies/tv-series watching. I pulled back from these activities to recover, and go back to it after ~2 years. I associated these dips to a lot of people doing the same thing as me.
@phantomzorba I’d say depression combined with people spending a lot of time job searching instead of technical chitchat.
Happy birthday!!! This site is has been the highlight of many mornings for me. Here’s to many more.
I joined the community 10 years ago and it quickly became my favorite single site on the whole Weird Wide Web. Thank you to @pushcx, @jcs, and others for making it a truly special place.
Savour the milestone!
Here’s to the next twelve years! Very happy to be a part of this community.
Here’s to another twelve years of community.
i was pretty close!
thanks to both you and @jcs for making this into what it is.
Woo hoo
Congrats! Proud to be a 🦞
🦞
Happy birthday lobsters!
Happy birthday! That means my account here is exactly two years old now :) I thoroughly enjoy reading the stories and conversations here, as well as the IRC channel!
Thank you for everything
Congratulations Lobsters! And thanks to jcs and pushcx for making this such a great place!
Happy birthday! Out of curiosity, is there a blog post describing the infrastructure that the site runs on? Is it hosted on a cloud or a data center or your closet? How many hosts, what database(s), etc?
It’s in the Trivia section at the bottom of the about page. I bumped the memory on the DB VPS to 8 GB (cheaper than endlessly tuning queries), I’ll catch that up when I’m next at my desktop.
I vaguely remember this post mentioning using Prgmr for many years and moving to Digital Ocean: https://lobste.rs/s/udj6qf/hosting_update
🥳
Anecdotally, the orange site is now featured on MSN’s start page (or something similar like Windows start screen) at times.
Happy Birthday, very happy to be a part of this community :)
Congrats. It’s a nice community. You’ve done well.
Another great year! Here’s to all of you here, hosts and moderators in particular for making sure that this place remains comfortable and fun 🥂 Long live 🦞❤️
¡🦀🦀🦀happy birthday🦀🦀🦀! it’s rare for tech sites but this one is kinda enjoyable