I enjoy HN as much as the next guy but it's easy to get high comment counts when you count archive.is links (and the ensuing 4 levels nested argument about why they don't work with Cloudflare DNS and who's in the right on that), complaints about CSS/scroll hijacking, and general pedantry. You can find many cases where interesting but pretty specific kind of technical stuff sort of languishes at the bottom of the front page whereas flamebait type articles that tap into the vague libertarian anti-surveillance sentiment that is popular here get hundreds of comments. Not that I don't generally agree with it, just that I've heard all the arguments a million times and I'd rather learn about how to use AVX2 instructions. I think the algorithm should have some sort of subject based ranking, where highly repetitive topics are penalized. Or maybe it already does and the sheer popularity of the stuff makes it show up regardless.
That being said, I haven't seen that many interesting things on Lobsters that weren't also on HN. Only one that comes to mind is the Go 1.22 inlining overhaul but I just googled it and apparently that was also on HN, I just missed it.
I made no comparison to HN, nor would I want to. I try to avoid having an "us vs them" mindset because it makes for boring conversation. I don't dislike lobste.rs in any way, I just prefer a wider variety of opinions to go with my tech news so I only really pop by when I'm reminded it exists.
For the record my preferred variety of opinions does not include spam and the other repetitive guff you mention haha, I'll be the first on the downvote and/or flag train for those comments. Absolute yawn fests the lot of them.
Anyway I mentioned numbers because they didn't seem to have changed, I'm not saying more numbers = better forum. That would be daft. More varied and therefore more interesting (to me)? Sure, aye. Better or worse? Nah.
I have never thought of it that way, and I'm still not sure I understand the idea. For some people the point of visiting a site is related to the number of votes or comments?
Well no the numbers aren't going to be a thing anyone directly cares about. Of course not, haha. Looking at my previous comments I'm not sure I even said anything that would imply that?
What the numbers represent (how active the community is) is the bit folks would care about.
In any case I used the numbers as a measure of how much the site is growing or not growing in response to the comment I responded to. The numbers seem the same as they've always been, hence it does not look like they are growing as the comment I responded to was claiming.
Thanks for clarification. I thought you were suggesting size or growth as a value themselves.
I agree people want some activity on discussion forums, otherwise what's the point. Another hand I think a lot of people think volume is inversely related to Quality once you get past a certain threshold
When things grow, they change, often becoming worse from their “old” users point of view. So, why would you want it to grow, as opposed to staying the way you like it?
This seems to make a few assumptions I'm not sure I agree with.
Growth is worse. Growing too fast can make things worse, aye. Not necessarily because there's more people in general but because the community changes as a result of them joining. The new users don't adapt to the existing culture quick enough, and because there's so many of them in a short amount of time the culture is disrupted and pushes out the existing userbase, locking in the new culture. This is one of the reasons lobsters has the invite system going by their about page so they seem to be actively trying to prevent this effect. Maybe there's a better way to do it, maybe this is the only way, that one's not really for me to say. Even if it was for me to say I don't have any better suggestions.
I want it to grow. I don't really have an opinion on lobsters in that respect. If it works for them and their users, that's great! Some sites just ain't for me, no worries.
It is currently the way I like it. I like a wider variety of comments, so in its current form lobsters isn't the way I like it. There's plenty of other places on the internet for me to get my fill though, we're on one of 'em now! I wouldn't want them to change on my behalf. If it works for what they're after - again that's great!
While the site isn't my cup of tea I can absolutely see why they run it like they do. If Reddit shut down tomorrow and all the more memey tech users migrated here in one go, this place would become terrible (as always, in my opinion) - I can see why they do what they do, even if I don't personally enjoy the end result. No problem though, it's one less source of easy dopamine. Lord knows I don't need any more of those :)
