I've been saying it since forever and it is still true:

Designers use platforms exclusively to promote themselves or their business.

That is the big problem. If you make Platforms that evolve around attention, which increase its exposure with increasing attention to it, you will always attract a crowd that mostly sees this as an opportunity to milk the audience.

Also, many designers do not care about this stuff. And the designers who do are busy working. Look at this "10k Website Process". They are literally trying to milk designers who don't know better. We have let this happen forever. People who praise this behaviour are contributing just as much.

Our Design "Community" is driven by ego, money, and reinventing the same job title over and over again, just exclude someone else.

I agree with your suggestions completely and I think they would really improve the community, but, and its a big but, it will interfere with monetization of this website. This website relies on sponsored content, ads. Nothing more. The more exposure, the more impressions. It feeds itself, because as more people come to consume the content here, so will people who intend to milk this by posting some nonsense about their mediocre icon library, 200€ Sketch Plugin and clickbait titles about shaming you who is using anything other but whatever is currently popular.

I think you are trying to solve an issue that cannot be solved. Designernews going down is just a side effect of this issue.

If you really wanna improve the community, designers need to stop:

• using twitter as their main source of news
• start making their own platforms, making their own sites instead of relying on big companies
• find solutions themselves instead of relying on cookie cutter solutions
• never, ever again go on dribbble or behance
• stop stardoming people who are not actually contributing. Someone who makes something pretty is not worth it. We are all capable of making something nice to look at.