[roryokane]

> 1. The mods there can "steal" your post and any credit for it, reassigning its authorship to one of their friends. This happens more often than you would think.

Really? As a Lobsters reader, I occasionally review the first page of the Lobsters Moderation Log, which is public for transparency’s sake: https://lobste.rs/moderations. And I’ve never seen any log about a story’s authorship being reassigned, whether for a good reason or a bad one.

According to my reading of the source code of Lobsters (https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/96cf0b32ee81bb1bd7...), such a change would be described in the Moderation Log as “changed user from the_original_user to another_user”. I just searched all moderation logs of story changes in the last two years (39 pages of logs), and no log contains the string “changed user from”. So whether “stealing” of posts ever happened, I don’t think Lobsters users have to worry about that happening now.

Or are you also accusing the mods of hiding those specific changes from the Moderation Log somehow?

[OutOfHere]

It happened to me within the past year, but I imagine it happened in a different way than the one you analyzed. The mods allow the link to be reposted under a different author who is their friend, then hide the original post, and group the original post under the new post. The new post is then promoted and gets all the credit for the link.