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Is it just me or did DN use to be more interesting?

6 years ago from Cristian Moisei, http://meet-cristian.com

  • Sam SolomonSam Solomon, 6 years ago

    Hacker News caters to a much wider audience outside of engineers. Often the most interesting articles are those about art, health and society—things you wouldn't expect on an engineering site. A better comparison would be to Lobsters, which is purely engineering.

    I think that, perhaps, there is a mixture of a few things happening here:

    • There's a limited amount of design content. Other than actual design work, it seems like few designers write.
    • The active community is still comparatively small. Perhaps, we should try and broaden to topics outside of tech and design?
    • There is a ton of marketing posts here. A self-promotional article every now and then is fine, but post other things. I called out the guy from Repick last week. The only thing he's posted for the last six months were links to the company blog.

    Edit: As a side note, I'm not a huge fan of letting people choose a badge for their post. There are a ton of mis-categorized posts.

    10 points
    • Laurens SpangenbergLaurens Spangenberg, 6 years ago

      I really like the idea of broadening up the scope of things. One thing I enjoy about Hacker News articles unrelated to engineering is the discussion that comes from it. Ideally, I would love to see articles that are less related to design and see a discussion from it that discusses it from the perspective of designers.

      3 points
    • Sean LesterSean Lester, 6 years ago

      I don't come to DN to be entertained, though. I came here and come here because it was at least at one point a fairly professional site with quality information, studies, advice for learning how to be excellent in the field of design. I attribute my success in my career to the voracious learning I did as a result of having access to this place and people like Sam Hulick. DN also used to have a membership that included designers and product people from top tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Etsy etc. You could trust a lot of the information here because the userbase was serious.

      Seriously, I'm reading in this thread that "we're all visual designers" and "everyone here is just a Dribbble user" but it used to be the case that you couldn't escape the think pieces whining about what Dribbble has done to design and how it isn't a real design site because it's so superficial.

      The idea that it's a PROBLEM that Designer News has FOCUS is absurd. Go to Reddit or something, go to the rest of the internet. There's plenty of the kind of content you're looking for. Designer News is what it is (or was what it was) BECAUSE it had focus, identity, because it was a serious site for design professionals.

      2 points