There might be people wondering what differentiates Lobsters from Hacker News. We are a diverse crowd with different preferences. We also did a mass invite not long ago that changed things up a bit. That said, I think friendlysock's post on What Lobsters Is and Isn't was the best summary of what the site is really about. Since it was in a debate, I've snipped the parts that matter here into a Pastebin for yall:

https://pastebin.com/mLfFRUG4

The last part disses on HN and Reddit. Some of the Lobsters don't like HN. It was actually started after a dispute between its founder Joshua Stein and Paul Graham over moderation. It's not really anti-HN, though, given many of us are active on both sites. There's also a new admin, Peter "pushcx" Harkins, who runs the bootstrapping site Barnacl.es. We have lots of new members and new admin. We're doing new things. I think I speak for Lobsters that are neutral to or like HN (hell, I love it!) in saying they're just different styles of link aggregators and communities. We even cross-post stories and comments on occasion, esp if same article. I love looking at Hacker News and Lobsters comments for same article. I'll sometimes find something golden on one that's not on other and vice versa. And as a differentiator, you'll find the Lobsters comments to be hands-on building stuff more often. And we do lots of CompSci papers or deep dives with many of mine on potentially-useful stuff in formal methods since they get little attention. Some submitters there also do those kinds of things for a living.

I should say something on moderation. Since I have showdead on, I know HN moderation does a good job mostly. Almost all of them are trollish or garbage comments. I've also seen comments disappear in political arguments that weren't mean or anything but unpopular to... majority, vocal minority, or what? I don't know since I lack the data. People on the other side were sometimes more vicious or low-info with their posts without removal by moderators. So, I'm personally convinced there's a filter bubble reflecting the bias of the community, more active downvoters, the moderators, or some combination. That might have started in community's votes with mods going with them to keep them happy, making their own decision... I don't know. It's a black box that predictably favors some stuff, penalizes others, sometimes adapts to new patterns on those, and is sometimes random.

Although political scuffles happen periodically, I rarely ask these questions on Lobsters since we don't censor political or technical disagreement if it's civil. I have good understanding of about everyone's position. The moderators will sometimes ask people to back out of an argument that became a cesspool or just cool off. They do that here, too, with warnings and temporary rate limits. On Lobsters, we go further to support transparent moderation with a moderation log that tracks what happened. The votes on stories and comments were also visible to everyone. Downvotes require an explanation which shows up in divisive situations: +4 up -3 disagree -1 troll -1 spam is an example. All that gives a more accurate picture of what's going on. They did make votes invisible on comments for a few days to hypothetically reduce their influence on arguments. I don't know if it's effective. Only a few unrelenting trolls and spam rings have been banned that I can recall. It's also an invite-only system which helped early on. I think that has less effect these days since many people are happy to offer invites. Probably reduces spam and moderator workload, though. Having showdead on is why I know that's work for mods on a popular, open-to-join site like HN. The community, too, for those flagging the stuff.

So, there it is. It's a site with a strong focus on deep content, building more often than usual, low noise, and transparent moderation. It is mostly programming related vs the huge variety of topics on HN. Front page changes more slowly with less comments per article than HN. Sometimes none even on a story they like (surprises new submitters). You will see people on there drop deep or just useful comments you won't see somewhere else since they only do them there. They have high ratio of CompSci or deep dives since it's a focus area. These are all the things people on HN may like or dislike about Lobsters depending on their preferences. Just watch it for a few weeks to decide for yourself if you want to add it to your list of sites to enjoy. Again, it's not either/or: I love the good things in both sites and communities. :)

Note: I'm not currently doing invites. You don't need them to read the site. Many members have contact info in profile, too. If you want to post or comment, get on #lobsters in Freenode and ask for an invite.

EDIT: I didn't realize Peter had an account here. He's the "Harkins" in this thread. He's "pushcx" on Lobsters.