How has Lobste.rs fared compared to HN in this regard? Lobste.rs is very similar to HN, but has an invite-only membership system.

These days, I've noticed that lobsters feels a lot more genuine to me, like hn was a few years ago. These days it feels like hn is bland and homogeneous, which I suspect is due to LLM-written comments.

In my experience every English-language online forum not rooted in some project or community external to the forum (e.g. an open source project's forum or a local club's forum) devolves into anger, cynicism, and American political partisanship. I suspect that the people who like discussing these feelings are more numerous than the spaces that want to discuss them and so any open forum fills up with their posts. Lobste.rs's unique rules and moderation culture results in a particular manifestation of symptoms but the disease is the same.

I picked up lobsters last month, and I started to appreciate it much more because of the lack of generated comments. It has a anti-LLM slant, and they have their own moderation challenge (everything is getting tagged as vibecoding - which makes the tag lose meaning). But the comments are noticeable not-slop.