I found Lobsters some time ago through my blog analytics when one of my posts got some traffic from there. Reached out to my (limited) personal network in the tech sphere to see if I could land an invite, but nobody had ever heard of it. Didn't feel comfortable messaging random users for one, so I gave up. If anyone is monitoring this thread and sending invites, I'd love to have one.
Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but 4 people beat you to it by private email, 3 within 30 minutes....
When I've peeked in on e.g. the lisp subforum, it looked to be quite good, although that was a while ago, too frustrating to contemplate engaging without being able to be part of the conversation (which, I again emphasize, is an entirely legitimate method to avoid a variety of problems).
The community is mostly technical people with a large focus on programming, operations, and hackery. Fewer people comment on articles but the comments are lower noise on average. In a discussion on community standards, one of the veterans explained what the site should and shouldn't be about. I think the post represents what I've seen on the page & in the comments pretty well. Also, we have invitation trees instead of throwaways to encourage people to play nice. Been a few cesspools but not many.
It also illustrates there's a huge difference in priorities and culture between Hacker News and Lobsters. Not to mention who is participating. So, I like to read and comment on both sites as they each give me something different. People also often repost HN articles on Lobsters, too, with the Lobsters comments sometimes raising points I didn't see over here or vice versa. These two are my favorite sites for technical discussion for now.
On business side, you might like the Lobsters spinoff called Barnacles. It's open invitation right now. They're like HN for bootstrappers instead of VC-funded startups. High signal to noise ratio with good stuff on marketing & case studies of interesting business. Clifford's series right now is a good reality check for people that think doing a SaaS startup will let them focus on being paid to write code. Great opening pic, too. ;)
I suspected they might; but figured I'd make the offer as others might also like to try it out (and it seemed they did, I had a bucket of emails and sent invites out!).
I've posted a couple of things on there and although there seems to be a lot less traffic than HN/Reddit (at least for the posts that were to my blog) there quality of discussion seemed to be much better :-)
Two others in my office read the front page, but quite none of us have yet found invites (not that we've looked hard), but the idea of an invite only community sites feels counter productive
