Thanks for the writeup. Moderation–particularly around a hot-button issue as contentious as this–is not easy, so kudos for keeping a level head and thank you for all the work you and the team have put into keeping the site clean and for updating us on the new policy.

My gut reaction is that I’m worried about seeing more and more low-effort and generative AI-centric content flooding the zone. One of the things I like about lobsters over sites like Hacker News is that I can get some peace from the incredibly boring onslaught of people doing things with LLMs. I don’t find this interesting, personally, and the vibecoding tag did a reasonably good job at keeping the feed human-only. We’ll see over time how well the new system works overall, I suppose.

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It’s almost certainly just me, but there is a psychological difference between tools like Signal and tools like email. Email is a fire-and-forget medium to many. I feel comfortable sending an email to someone telling them I appreciate their work, and never receiving a response. It’s going to go into a box, maybe be read, and that’s the end of it.

Apps like Signal feel more immediate. You don’t send a single message, you start a persistent correspondence thread. Now, the user on the other end can just disregard and delete as usual, but the feeling is very different to me. I now have an ignored “chat” on my Signal interface. It’s more intimate and personal than email, so it feels much worse suited to this specific task.

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