tilde.news/app/views/home/about.html.erb

<div class="box wide">
  <h1>About</h1>

  <%- raise "Site owner: You need to delete app/views/home/about.html.erb and write your own about page" if Rails.env.production? and Rails.application.name != 'Lobsters' -%>

  <div class="story_text">
  <p>
  Lobsters is a computing-focused community centered around link aggregation
  and discussion, launched on July 3rd, 2012.
  The administrator is <a href="/u/pushcx">Peter Bhat Harkins</a> ("pushcx"), contact him with any support issues.
  Lobsters was created by <a href="/u/jcs">joshua stein</a>
  with some specific design goals in mind to avoid problems faced by
  other link aggregation sites:
  </p>

  <ul>
    <li>a <a href="#tagging">tagging</a> system to categorize and filter submissions,</li>
    <li>a user <a href="#invitations">invitation tree</a> to combat spam,</li>
    <li><a href="#downvotes">downvote explanations</a> to curb reflexive downvoting,</li>
    <li>a strong commitment to <a href="#transparency">transparency</a>,</li>
    <li>and <a href="#features">many other features</a> that have been added over the years.</li>
  </ul>

  <h2 id="tagging">Tagging</h2>
  <p>
  When links/stories are submitted, they must be tagged by the submitter from a list of predefined <a href="/tags">tags</a>.
  Users can choose to <a href="/filters">filter</a> out or
  subscribe to all submissions with particular tags (example: <a href="https://lobste.rs/t/programming.rss">programming.rss</a>)
  or combinations of tags (example: <a href="https://lobste.rs/t/programming,audio.rss">programming,audio.rss</a>).
  All users see all stories by default.
  The tagging system works this way for three reasons:
  </p>

  <ul>
  <li><p>
  It keeps the site on-topic by only allowing a predefined list of tags.
  These tags represent what most of the users of the site want to read, so
  content that does not fit into any of those categories should not be
  submitted.  It also keeps stories organized and more easily searchable.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  It promotes discussion.  On a site with separate forums, a Ruby programmer
  would probably subscribe to a Ruby forum, but not a Python one.  When a link
  is posted to the Python forum, that Ruby programmer would probably never see
  it, even though they may have something useful to say about it (perhaps the
  link is about a Python library which does the same thing as a Ruby library
  which that Ruby programmer created).  On this site, the link would get posted
  with a <a href="/t/python" class="tag">python</a> tag and shown to everyone,
  encouraging the Ruby programmer to read and comment on it (unless that Ruby
  programmer disliked Python enough to <a href="/filters">filter</a> it out).
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  It keeps the conversation centralized.  Often stories contain discussion
  about more than one topic, yet on other sites they are confined to a single
  category/forum, limiting the exposure.  The link could be submitted to more
  than one forum, but then each conversation would remain separate and users
  would rarely interact with users from other forums.  On this site, the story
  would simply be tagged with multiple tags and all users would see all
  discussion about the story in a single location.
  </p></li>
  </ul>

  <p>
  Creating new tags and retiring old tags is done by the community by submitting, discussing, and voting on <a href="/t/meta" class="tag">meta</a>-tagged requests about them,
  and these events are <a href="https://lobste.rs/moderations?utf8=✓&moderator=(All)&what[tags]=tags">logged</a> (since 2018-04).
  To propose a tag, post a <a href="/t/meta">meta</a> thread with the name and description.
  Explain the scope, list existing stories that should have been tagged, make a case for why people would want to specifically filter it out, and justify the increased complexity for submitters and mods.
  </p>

  <h2 id="invitations">Invitation Tree</h2>
  <p>
  New users must be invited by a current user, though there is no formal vetting process.
  Invitations are used as a mechanism for spam-control,
  to slow registrations to a pace <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September">we can acculturate</a>
  and to encourage users to be nice, not to make the Lobsters userbase an elite club.
  The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you
  recognize from the site or
  <% if Rails.application.allow_invitation_requests? %>
    <a href="/invitations/request">request one publicly</a>.
  <% else %>
    request one in <a href="/chat">chat</a>.
  <% end %>
  If you wrote a link that was posted, definitely contact someone for an invite, we'd love to have you in the discussion.
  </p>

  <p>
  The full <a href="/u">user tree</a> is made public and each user's profile
  shows who invited them.  This provides some degree of accountability and
  helps identify voting rings.
  </p>

  <p>
  There's no limit on how many invitations a user can send (though that might be prompted by scaling problems in the future).
  When accounts are banned for spam, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)">sockpuppeting</a>, or other abuse,
  moderators will look up the invitation tree to consider disabling their inviter's ability to send invitations or, rarely, also banning.
  </p>

  <h2 id="downvotes">Downvote Explanations</h2>
  <p>
  Often on other sites, a user would have their comment downvoted without
  explanation and then edit their comment to ask why they were downvoted.  On
  this site, voters must choose a reason before downvoting comments and those
  votes are tallied and shown to the original commenter. Users may downvote
  stories and comments after their account has
  <%= User::MIN_KARMA_TO_DOWNVOTE %> karma.
  </p>
  <p>
  For submitted stories, downvoting is done through flagging (also requiring a
  valid reason) and these flag summaries are shown to all users.
  </p>

  <h2 id="transparency">Transparency Policy</h2>
  <p>
  All <a href="/moderations">moderator actions</a> on this site are visible to
  everyone and the identities of those moderators are <a
  href="/u?moderators=1">made public</a>.  While the individual actions of a
  moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about if an action happened or who is responsible.
  </p>

  <p>
  All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and
  does not <a
  href="http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html"
  rel="nofollow">penalize</a> or prioritize specific users or domains.
  Per-tag <a href="/filters">hotness modifiers</a> do affect all stories with
  those tags, but these modifiers (and <a href="https://lobste.rs/moderations?utf8=%E2%9C%93&moderator=(All)&what[tags]=tags">changes</a> to them) are made public.
  Domains used for tracking are banned and tracking parameters are removed from links
  (look for <tt>TRACKING_DOMAINS</tt> and <tt>utm_</tt> in
  <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/master/app/models/story.rb">story.rb</a>).
  </p>

  <p>
  If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned
  absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile
  will indicate which moderator banned them and why.
  There will be no <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning">shadow banning</a> or other secret moderation actions.
  </p>

  <p>
  The <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters">source code to this site</a> and
  its <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible">provisioning and deployment</a> are
  made available under a 3-clause BSD license for viewing, auditing, forking, or contributing to.
  The codebase is used to run a dozen or so sister sites (that we know of) and we <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/wiki">keep a list</a>;
  please get in touch if you've launched one.
  </p>

  <p id="queries">
  The Lobsters community is in a sweet spot that it's large enough to be worth asking questions about and small enough the answers make sense.
  We have <a href="/stats">some basic stats</a> available,
  and Peter is happy to run queries against the <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/master/db/schema.rb">database</a> and Rails/MySQL/nginx logs (but not write them for you),
  as long as they don't reveal personal info like IPs, browsing, and voting or create “worst-of” leaderboards celebrating most-downvoted users/comments/stories.
  If you're an academic researcher, please <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/cqnzl5/lobste_rs_access_pattern_statistics_for">be like MIT</a>, not like <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/517">UChicago</a> secretly experimenting on maintainers without IRB review.
  </p>

  <p>
  If you dislike the content or moderation policies here, you may prefer
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com">Y Combinator News</a>,
  <a href="https://reddit.com/r/programming">r/programming</a>,
  <a href="https://slashdot.org">Slashdot</a>,
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy">comp.*</a>, or
  <a href="http://boards.4chan.org/g/">/g/</a>.
  </p>

  <h2 id="features">Other Technical Features</h2>

  <ul>
  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="/s/jg3eet">Mailing list mode</a></strong> can be enabled
  per-user to receive all new stories (including their plain-text content as
  fetched and extracted by <a href="http://diffbot.com/">Diffbot</a>) and user
  comments as e-mails, mirroring discussion threads offline.  This makes it
  easy and efficient to read new stories as well as keep track of new comments
  on old threads or stories, just like technical mailing lists or Usenet of
  yore.  Each user is assigned a private mailing list address at this domain
  which allows them to reply to stories or comments directly in their e-mail
  client.  These e-mails are then converted and submitted to the website as
  comments, just as if the comment was posted through a web browser.
  <%- raise "Don't just delete that error message. You didn't set up mailing list mode, right? This really isn't your about page, write one from scratch." if Rails.env.production? and Rails.application.name != 'Lobsters' -%>
  </p>

  <li><p>
  <strong>Private messaging</strong> enables users to communicate privately
  without having to publicly disclose an e-mail address, and users can receive
  e-mail and <a href="https://pushover.net/">Pushover</a> notifications of new
  private messages.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong>Responsive design</strong> enhances functionality on smaller screens
  such as phones and tablets without having to use a separate URL, 3rd party
  (often read-only) websites, or proprietary mobile applications.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="/search">Integrated search engine</a></strong> covers all
  submitted stories and comments, including full-text caches of all submitted
  story contents.  Searching for a keyword will often bring up relevant stories
  that don't even mention that keyword in the URL or title.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
    <strong><a href="/s/cqq0kg/story_merging">Story merging</a></strong> collects comments on a topic that would otherwise fragment across multiple stories.
    This keeps the front page from being overwhelmed by a single topic and the discussion together for those interested (or so disinterested they'd prefer to hide it).
    Moderators merge stories on the same topic submitted within a week.
    Here's a <a href="/s/klkmey">small</a> and <a href="/s/zknzmj">large</a> example.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong>Fuzzy-matching of submitted story URLs</strong> to avoid duplicate
  submissions of similar URLs that differ only in <tt>http</tt> vs.
  <tt>https</tt>, trailing slashes, useless analytics parameters, etc.  When
  using the story submission bookmarklet, story URLs are automatically
  converted to use the page's canonical URL (if available) to present the best
  URL to represent the story, as defined by the story's author or publisher.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="/s/z2dczs">User-suggested titles and tags</a></strong> can
  be automatically applied to a story when a quorum of users agrees on a new
  title (such as removing a site's name, or appending the story's year of
  publication) or set of tags, without any moderator action required.
  (<a href="https://lobste.rs/moderations?utf8=%E2%9C%93&moderator=(Users)">Log</a>)
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="/hats">Hats</a></strong> are a more formal process of
  allowing users to post comments while "wearing <em>such and such</em> hat" to
  give their words more authority (such as an employee speaking for the
  company, or an open source developer speaking for the project).
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="/rss">Per-tag, multi-tag and site-wide RSS feeds</a></strong> are
  available to the public and logged-in users have private RSS feeds that
  filter out each user's <a href="/filters">filtered tags</a>.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/lobsters">Official Twitter
  mirror</a></strong> posts all stories that have reached the front page to
  the <a href="https://twitter.com/lobsters">@lobsters</a> account on Twitter
  for easy following, retweeting/sharing, or archiving.
  </p></li>

  <% if false %>
  <li><p>
  <strong><a href="http://lobsters3ik6yqwj.onion/">Tor onion/hidden
  service</a></strong> for anonymous access to the site.
  </p></li>
  <% end %>

  <li><p>
  <strong>Stickers</strong> will be available again when someone finds a service that will print and ship 2" square vinyl stickers
  with a bleed &lt;= 1/16" (preferably full-bleed) directly to people who want them.
  </p></li>
  </ul>

  <h2 id="trivia">Trivia</h2>

  <ul>
  <li><p>
  Lobsters' hosting is donated by <a href="https://prgmr.com">Prgmr.com</a> (thanks, <a href="/u/alynpost">alynpost</a>).
  Our domain name is registered with <a href="https://cridomains.rs/en">CRI Domains</a>, who donated our first year of registration.
  DNS is provided by <a href="https://dnsimple.com/">DNSimple</a> and
  we use <a href="https://www.tarsnap.com">Tarsnap</a> for backups, both of which pushcx pays for.
  </p></li>

  <li id="emoji" style="list-style: none; position: relative; left: -1em;">
  <span style="float: left; line-height: 1.5em;">🦞</span>
  <p style="padding-left: 1em;">
  <a href="https://unicode.org/consortium/adopted-characters.html#s1f99E">Sponsor of the lobster emoji</a>:
  In February 2018, Lobsters <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/pnysdr/lobsters_emoji_adoption">held a fundraiser</a>
  to officially adopt the new lobster emoji in support of the Unicode Foundation.
  </p></li>

  <li id="michaelbolton"><p>
  The name "Lobste.rs" is a cute <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack">domain hack</a>
  without any deeper meaning.
  <%- require 'digest/md5'; instance_variable_set("@#{controller_name}#{action_name}", Digest::MD5.hexdigest(Rails.env) == 'fd89784e59c72499525556f80289b2c7' && Digest::MD5.hexdigest(Rails.application.name) != '4e7c4ddc593da2e7a1cc8c6dc2d38eba') -%>
  It <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADgS_vMGgzY">has nothing to do</a>
  with self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose fans started to
  <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html">call themselves "lobsters"</a>
  about six years after we started.
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
    If you prefer to read Lobsters on a dark background instead of a light one, there are a few options. You could install the
    <a href="https://darkreader.org/">Dark Reader extension</a>;
    or an extension to add your own CSS to sites like <a href="https://add0n.com/stylus.html">Stylus</a> or <a href="https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/wiki/Usercss">UserCSS</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylish#Privacy_issues">never Stylish</a>). Themes:
    <a href="https://openusercss.org/theme/5cc5ad28ad27da0c0016cf3c">1</a>
    <a href="https://openusercss.org/theme/5cc5ab1ead27da0c0016cf3a">2</a>
    <a href="https://openusercss.org/theme/5cc5aeb3ad27da0c0016cf3d">3</a>
    <a href="https://openusercss.org/theme/5cc5ac10ad27da0c0016cf3b">4</a>.
    Discussion:
    <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/404">1</a>
    <a href="https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/637">2</a>
    <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/om839j/dark_light_mode">3</a>
    <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/iaajwb/dark_theme_for_lobsters">4</a>
  </p></li>

  <li><p>
    If you prefer the article links or comment links to open a new tab instead of navigating in your current tab you can add
    <a href="https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/392307-lobste-rs-open-in-new-tab">a client-side script</a> to do so.
    (<a href="https://lobste.rs/s/0g48hl/open_links_articles_new_tab">Discussion</a>)
  </p></li>

  </ul>
  </div>
</div>