It's definitely not a ghost town. It's just not a treadmill. It's hard to have a conversation on hacker news because (1) articles cycle through quickly and (2) you don't get reply notifications. Lobsters is a bit more human scale IMO.

To get automated email notifications of replies to your comments see http://www.hnreplies.com/

It's made the site a lot more useful for me, but I discovered too late that it does not track submissions, including AskHN, only comments.

I actually do like it that HN doesn't have reply notifications.

I don't feel compelled to read/reply to every message, there's zero sense of urgency, and this is perfect for something you do in your free/idle time.

More importantly, every now and then something you write blows up and gets a disproportionate amount of attention from others. On websites with notifications, or on mailing lists, this gets distracting and disturbing. On HN, I'm happy to find out I've had my 5 minutes of fame the next day.

I post on there most days. It's not really a ghost town, and there's a lot less noise than HN with only a bit less signal.

They discuss under "invitation tree" how it's possible to get an invite if you want one.

https://lobste.rs/about

I don't have an account although a couple things I wrote got posted there, if I'd realized it at the time that apparently qualifies me.

Overall I don't know if the quality is better than HN, even if the SNR is higher, there is just so much less total that the sum of good stuff is lower. It's almost completely free of politics, gossip, non-tech stuff though which is nice. For example I don't think any of the OpenAI drama was covered there.

Otoh the links posted there are essentially a subset of what's posted on HN.

If you want an invite, ask your friends if anyone has an account.

Will you be my friend?

A good samaritan on the other Blue site gave me one but I haven't had good comments to make since.

Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice!

I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.

From my experience in invite-only forums, it can only assure some bottom line (mainly, fewer troll posts), but it doesn't help at all on the quality of comments.

The only thing I saw that ever significantly improved the quality of comments is vote-based comment system when it firstly started to emerge (I'm thinking Reddit in its first few years). But unfortunately it nowadays has been gamed to death, probably even worse than old public forums.

Except you don't see those 2 really insightful comments there.

Invite doesn't always guarantee insightful comments.

> 300

Exaggerating doesn't make reflect well on your argument.

HN doesn't have a notable problem with self-promotion.

I read HN for the links, because of the quantity, and lobste.rs for the comments, because of the quality.

If you request an invitation here, I’m sure someone will happily invite you.

I wouldn’t recommend the recommended IRC route, I’ve tried doing that multiple times and it was never fruitful, it’s kinda dead.

With that said: I do find Tildes’s approach much better (though probably quite hard on the admin), where you can just message the admin with a short “motivational letter” and get a registration link.

It's not a ghost town, it's just not as noisy as HN. It's quite active.

I mean, compared to Hacker News in comment velocity and overall homepage change rate yeah it's a lot slower. Microscopically slow in comparison. Some people that are used to the fast-paced change of feeds like you have on bigger social media websites get used to the rapid pace of how things change. It can feel really weird when things _don't_ change that fast (such as how people bounce off of Mastodon because they don't know how to curate their feed anymore). I kinda like it, but I've been trying to break the addiction cycles of things like Twitter, so for each their own.

I think I would prefer a slower comment velocity. By the time I get around to replying on HN, everybody has moved on. But I really like how articles aren't limited to technology on HN.