How does the HN front page work?

How difficult is it to get invited to join Lobsters?

I recently learned Bear blog (a small blogging platform, posts on which often appear on HN) has a “discover” section with a front page style ranking. Their algorithm is on the page

  This page is ranked according to the following algorithm:
  Score = log10(U) + (S / (B * 86,400))

  Where,
  U = Upvotes of a post
  S = Seconds since Jan 1st, 2020
  B = Buoyancy modifier (currently at 14)

See https://bearblog.dev/discover/

This is a good exploration of the algorithm. In my experience, Lobsters has much more active moderator involvement in a more opinionated way than HN. Much of what’s referred to as moderation here is user-driven via flagging and votes, whereas on Lobsters the moderators are injecting more of an opinionated style into the site. For example, requiring the “vibecoding” tag on all stories about AI even though very few of them are about vibecoding.

In theory the Lobsters moderation log is also public, but in practice when someone gets banned if you try to find the post that triggered the banned it will have been edited away by the mods and replaced with their opinion of what was said in a follow up comment. I stopped visiting as much after watching someone get banned for a rather benign comment which the mods edited away and then claimed it said something egregious about a culture war topic, which it did not.

The site also puts up a banner at the top of your page if you receive enough negative votes. The banner invites you to delete your account as the last sentence (or it did in the past). In practice, if you comment something that isn’t the popular and accepted opinion on the site, no matter how diplomatically, you could end up with the banner stuck on your page views for a while. There have been some high profile and valuable contributors to the site who abandoned it after getting stuck with this banner for posting informative content that nevertheless triggered some downvotes.

It’s an interesting site, but in my experience the algorithms are only a small part of it. The experience there is more heavily aligned toward groupthink and the “right” opinions than even HN and differing opinions are much less welcomed.