The website itself is just fine. The problem is that it's been bombarded with self-promoters and spammers who most likely use several accounts to boost their posts to the top. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with self-promotion. But when people post their ecommerce agency's website for shameless self-promotion, that's when it becomes spam.

They tried to solve for that but introducing a downvote button, but the haters and trolls ruined that.

I'd like to see what ideas the community has other than complaining and hitting the upvote button to give themselves a virtual pat on the back.

Still questioning why i'm going to this site, think it's just a habit. Make DN great again!

bows

"Upboated"

As for DN actually improving anything ... LOL

DN jumped the shark when they took away the invite system and monetized the site.

I'm stumbling in here from Hacker News via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21812442 which was posted supposedly 3 hours ago at the time of me posting here, but I swear I saw it pop up yesterday.

A few observations from my point of view relating to myself viewing DN less, while my reading of HN continued:

• The move from news.layervault.com to designernews.co was symbolic to me in that a new era of ownership began. I have no judgements about the ownership of the site, but the simple change of the URL was, yes, jarring to me. Small things matter.

• Notable members of the design community either left (Visual Idiot, et al.) or stopped posting quality content. It's been enough years that I've even forgotten a few giants' names, but would recognize them if I saw them again.

• My velocity in design work for several years, after 2015 up to now, dropped. I peaked in output after becoming a member of Awwwards and getting featured in a few places, and I'm trying to get myself off the ground again. Has the same thing happened to many other designers since then?

Do we rely heavily on each other and the zeitgeist of the design world? Not much has changed in the last few years, I've noticed. Maybe I'm out of touch. I would bet heavily on this.

"crickets" speaks volumes. this site was left to rot.

I used to be a very active member of this community. Just checked my profile and saw "over 6 years ago". Probably I'm the oldest member in this thread. Back then, community grew just by referrals so that made quality to be stable and under-control. It was small community, maybe 100-200 members, but it was sincere. It was like a small town, everyone knows each other.

They inevitably removed invites because it was growing slowly. We saw many spams after that. Some people posted backlinks to make their SEO "better". These are all normal when a product is open to public but the thing is, this product used to have a different url news.layervault.com. People from layervault was quite proactive and made important improvements. Also, the old url reminds me news.ycombinator.com. It's like a twin sister of it so I liked the old one better.

I still visit almost everyday this site. Needless to say, I couldn't find the old spirit. I think it all happened when layervault said goodbye.

Make DN Great Again!

Reminds me of great design forums back in the day (who remembers talk freelance?)

Loyal posters eventually stop posting for one reason or another, and the users who just like to read (like me) don't step in and post, instead we wait for others to do the posting and create the discussions.

DN will get great again, when people start posting what they want to talk about The site isn't broken, we're just lazy & or busy actually working.

I'm not expecting anything from a company that has dribbble in their portfolio. They don't improve the site because they haven't found a way to monetize it more effectively.