The differences are well summarized on their /about page. I find both HN and Lobsters valuable for different reasons, but and the differences that stand out to me are:

- Tries to be more purely technical. Generic political or business links are flagged or removed.

- Aggressive marketing/self-promotion is moderated: If you join, post three links to your own blog, and nothing else, expect someone to call out if you post a fourth. I know HN does this to some extent, but it is very explicit on Lobsters.

- Not "news", not necessarily about recent things. Project/language releases even have a "release" tag so you can hide them systematically. A ten-year-old article explaining some library internals is just as likely to come up.

- Instead of "downvotes" there are "flags", which requires choosing a reason. Ideally encourages people to pause and think, instead of scrolling and clicking a down arrow 20 times in a thread.

- Weekly community threads of "What are you working on this week?" and "What are you doing this weekend?" which is nice for a smaller community.

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Karrot_Kream 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately Lobsters might claim to be non political but is actually quite political. Because the moderators and increasingly the remaining community identifies with American progressive left values, a pretty common thing to see on the site is political posts along those lines getting upvoted and other political philosophies being flagged as political.

It's probably the most deeply unpleasant part about the site IMO. I don't think there's anything wrong with moderators all sharing certain politics. On Lobsters though, there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture where the political ingroup can break rules while the outgroup can't but it's never explicitly acknowledged by the moderators or the community.

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karlgkk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They do not claim to be non political. They just try to keep explicitly political material from being posted on their site - from any point of view.

> there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture

Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out. Running communities is difficult and sometimes it’s just easier to build a community of people you want to be around. They’ve never been running it as a public service or a free speech platform. And that’s okay.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out.

This mindset where the culture war lines have been drawn and anyone who doesn’t get perfectly in line is “vibe checked” out is highly political, even if the claim is that political content is excluded.

The snarky and derisive way it’s presented as “fun fact” and you’ve jumped to the conclusion that the commenter is on the wrong side of the culture war, and therefore a fair target for derision, is actually why I never “vibed” into that site for very long.

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Karrot_Kream an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They just try to keep explicitly political material from being posted on their site - from any point of view.

Right that is what they claim in their guidelines but in practice this is very untrue. American left progressive material generally does fine on the site, both from the rule moderation perspective and community sentiment.

> Fun fact: that’s called “they don’t want you around”. You’re being vibe checked out.

It's funny, in your attempt to sarcastically sneer in your comment you just tried to build a strawman of my political opinions in your head.

Regardless the easiest way for them to settle this would to say it explicitly. "We strongly believe in left social justice values and that informs our moderation and the content we allow on the site." That's all the guidelines would need to make it clear to everyone what's going on. Instead they do this gaslighting dance where they never explicitly say their political position but instead enforce it by enforcing the rules more harshly on those they politically disagree with. They could instead point to this guideline to moderate or flag content they politically disagree with. It's upfront and clear.

The Internet as it is is subject to a huge amount of context collapse. Moreover tech people are more likely than the average person to have lower EQ. Using unrelated moderation rules to fight political battles is a fairly negative thing in my opinion. Being clear about what you allow and disallow does everyone a service and level sets expectations.

	▲	avadodin 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There are some very smart people on that site that only contribute there(although some are old slashdotters from back in the day) so it is a shame. I get the impression by watching the community that interacting with them is basically impossible as a normal person. Someone gets an invite, has productive technical discussions, eventually says something that doesn't align exactly with their religion(and we're talking really obscure stuff here) and he gets swiftly and permanently banned possibly bringing the person who invited him down with him as well.

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mannanj 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Fun fact: telling the guy saying it's gaslighting that it's not, with your reframe of reality words like "fun fact" are gaslighting.

I've found gaslight-positive people who go on "vibes" are indeed still gaslighters. Abuse is abuse. You can justify it with "vibe check" and "they don't want you around" all you want - does my not wanting you around and treating you poorly make it any less undignified and abusive?

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wahnfrieden 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are also aggressively anti-AI

edit: If you are downvoting because you are also anti-AI, my comment is not about whether supporting AI is good. I'm only remarking that they are aggressively negative about the topic. The aggression is obnoxious and less tolerated with other topics.

	▲	kaycebasques 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The proposal to rename the vibecoding tag to something else provides a pretty good sense of the overall sentiment among the site's members: https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms
	▲	Aurornis an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		HN comment sections are full of anti-AI remarks, but there’s enough volume of contents that you can still find some quality info here. On Lobsters it feels like the angry anti-LLM mindset is woven into the site’s culture, like you’re breaking some unspoken rule if you accidentally say something non-derogatory about AI.