I got banned from Lobsters for writing like an LLM | Andros Fenollosa

A Lobsters user was banned after fellow members flagged his comments as AI-generated, despite his denials, in a dispute that escalated from a blocked domain to a spam-flagged thread. Andros Fenollosa, a several-year Lobsters contributor and author of the site's Emacs client, first found his personal domain blocked for self-promotion around Christmas 2025; a moderator email went unanswered and the block remained a year later. He returned via a workaround for what appeared to be a bug, and his post on building a modern BBS reached the front page at 8 points before users began accusing his replies of being LLM-written, citing an external detector that scored one response as 100% AI-generated. The episode highlights the growing friction over AI-detection tools, which offer probabilistic scores that users often treat as definitive proof, and the reputational cost for writers whose prose reads as too polished. What to watch next is whether Lobsters and similar aggregators such as Hacker News and Lemmy clarify their policies on AI-assisted writing and how much weight they give to third-party detectors.