Lobsters manages an okay community (caveat: from what I've seen), but their lack of particularly strong rules or guidelines (just as with HN) don't give me a ton of confidence in their ability to handle value conflict. Following, they don't really state their community values anyway, which is something I find increasingly important.

Also with respect to the feedback cycles from hiding progressive comments that has been posed; I see a similar thing happening with these invite-only platforms. You are less likely to have diverse opinions and viewpoints from a userbase that largely grows only from the people in the same degree as existing users.

I've written about that last part before, and I'd like to stress that's as neutral an appraisal I can proffer; I think for some communities that is an ideal model, but for many others it would be smothering.