Short answer: Hacker News is the place for reach. Anyone can sign up, and a good Show HN can put your product in front of a very large technical audience in a day. Lobsters is the place for depth. It is invite-only, smaller and organized by tags, so it suits detailed technical discussion far better than launches.
Lobsters vs Hacker News at a glance
| Hacker News | Lobsters | |
|---|---|---|
| URL | news.ycombinator.com | lobste.rs |
| Run by | Y Combinator | Volunteer community, open-source codebase |
| Who can post | Anyone with an account | Invited members only |
| Topics | Anything "gratifying to intellectual curiosity" | Computing, tagged by topic |
| Organizing system | Front page, plus Show HN and Ask HN | Required tags you can filter on |
| Moderation | Paid moderators, user flags | Volunteer moderators, flags with stated reasons, public moderation log |
| Accountability | Karma | Public invitation tree: everyone sees who invited you |
| Launch fit | Strong (Show HN) | Weak, launch posts rarely land well |
| Research fit | Broad category language at scale | Deep, specific technical debate |
Both sites change their rules over time. Read the HN guidelines and the Lobsters about page before you post.
What is Lobsters (lobste.rs)?
Lobsters is a link aggregator for people who work in or care about computing. It launched in 2012 as a smaller, more focused alternative to Hacker News and has stayed deliberately small.
A few things make it different from most forums:
- Invite-only. You can read everything without an account, but you need an invitation from an existing member to post or comment.
- Invitation tree. Every profile shows who invited that person. If someone you invited spams the site, it reflects on you, so members are careful about who they bring in.
- Required tags. Every story carries at least one tag, such as
rust,securityordatabases. Readers filter tags in and out, and moderators retag submissions that are labelled wrongly. - Flags instead of downvotes. When people object to a story or comment, they flag it with a reason such as off-topic or spam.
- Transparency. The site's source code is public on GitHub, and the moderation log lists actions moderators have taken.
- Self-promotion limits. You can submit your own work, but the community expects most of your activity to be about other people's work, and you should mark stories you wrote as authored by you.
If someone searches "lobsters forum" expecting a general chat board, this is the gap: Lobsters is a curated link site with discussion threads, not a forum with open subforums.
How Hacker News works
Hacker News is Y Combinator's news site. It is open to anyone, so it gets far more traffic and a wider mix of readers. Stories rise and fall on the front page through votes, flags and moderation.
Two formats matter most to founders:
- Show HN for something people can try right now. See our Show HN guide for what to post and how to handle comments.
- Ask HN for questions to the community.
Feedback on HN tends to be fast and blunt. On a popular thread you will get many comments within hours, and some of them will challenge your technical claims directly.
Flagging and moderation culture
Hacker News: user flags can push a story off the front page, and moderators step into threads publicly to restate the guidelines. Expect direct criticism of technical claims and of anything that reads like marketing.
Lobsters: the invite model and tags shape who sees a post. Off-topic or low-effort submissions get flagged or retagged quickly, and repeat self-promotion is noticed. Moderation actions are visible in the public log.
For research: lurk on both for a week or two before commenting. It is the cheapest way to learn what each community considers normal.
Cross-posting etiquette
| Do | Don't |
|---|---|
| Adapt the title to each community | Copy-paste marketing language |
| Stay in the comments for hours after posting | Drop a link and leave |
| Say you're the author when you are | Post the same promo link to both in the same hour |
When to prioritize which
| Your audience | Start here |
|---|---|
| Dev tools / infrastructure | HN for reach, Lobsters tags (for example devops, databases) for depth |
| Prosumer SaaS | HN plus Reddit, Lobsters is rarely a fit |
| Security products | Lobsters security tag plus specialist subreddits |
A simple research workflow
- Search your category on HN (through hn.algolia.com) and on Lobsters (built-in search or tag pages).
- Write down 10 phrases people use to describe the problem on each site.
- Compare the lists. Phrases that show up on both are strong positioning candidates.
- While you're still learning the norms, reply to one thread per week at most.
Needle searches both in one workflow through multi-platform search. Lobsters is included on eligible Search plans, and the Lobsters platform page covers what we index.