I would have to "out" certain individuals to share the evidence, and I do not feel comfortable doing it. It goes like this though:
1. New Lobster user starts posting links to valid new non-bs AI related open-source projects.
2. Established users feel threatened that their world is being turned upside down. They start posting hateful bs comments, and escalate it to outright lies about the projects. These lies are nothing but FUD that allow them to dismiss the projects out of hand. As we know, the first stage of acceptance is denial. It is obvious that the established users are not into AI, and will never be. Because these are users are well-known, their lies gather a lot of upvotes from sympathizers who don't care about fact-checking anything. New user's account is now at permanent risk due to the downvotes. For the sake of argument, the links posted were to GitHub projects with 100+ or even 500+ stars.
3. New user calls out the lies, but only gets deeper into trouble with the mods and admins taking the side of the established user despite their obvious lies. After reporting, the new user gets banned for calling out the lies. Moreover, his corrections of the lies get deleted. Nobody cares for the fact that the established user had stopped posting links long ago, and the new user could've continued to post many more relevant links if things had gone his way.
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Whether you believe this report or not, surely you can appreciate that groupthink is undesirable for any community, and new blood providing new ideas are a must for a community to continue to prosper. In stark contrast, Lobsters' constrained registration system which allows only referred users to register is one that maximizes groupthink.
> might just as well be "growth hacker/spammer hate".
This is utter nonsense since projects in question were in no way affiliated with the submitter. There was never any growth hacking or spam as such. No commercial service was even submitted, so there is nothing to grow.
Another crazy thing that the admin is known to do is to steal credit from a submitter, replacing the story with another story that gets submitted later.
AI aside, the central theme there is that submitters are hated, not valued.
