Agreed, but on the other hand, I think you over-estimate how much quality thought provoking content is produced per day. Personally, I think it needs to be moderate mix. Workflow is just as important to being a professional as is design philosophy or approach discipline. Either way, the up-vote system should weed out truly useless content.

I've noticed that there is a lot of duplicate content, so that the same tool may show up in my twitter feed via the bot several times in a row.

I agree that there should be more discussion, but on the other hand, many [most?] of the articles that have been posted that inspire discussion or controversial thinking have their own active comment feed. Iits useful to keep comments in one place so they can be answered by or directed to everyone reading the article, most of whom don't yet have access to DN. As the user base expands, hopefully DN will naturally evolve to be a surrogate to those discussions.

Above all else, I want the content to be good. It doesn't matter much to me if it's theoretical or more practical. I agree that a lot of low quality "cookie cutter tools" and "beginner's guides" have emerged lately, and they're not good. But I still am interested in practical knowledge.

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." – Picasso

totes. lots of old links too. i found i've stopped coming here because the links simply aren't new/interesting anymore

This is so right.

If we need help with something, Google it. I think Designer News should be strictly for news, thoughts and ideas, rather than tips.

I think the userbase is still too small to have meaningful discussions. HN also gets tons of posts with libraries and tools, but have enough users to create discussions around these tools. I've already seen a lot of deeper blog posts being posted here.

I think that there could be an elegant way to filter certain types of content in and out of the homepage.

Im with you on having more design insights here, will definitely keep that in mind when posting in future, however I have found some excellent resources here , would be a shame to see those go away, I think a better balance would be a good way forward.

A lot of this might have to do with the algorithm we are using. We will need to make some refinements.

Essentially, we value the time something is posted too heavily. This means that submitting a story guarantees is will be on the first page immediately. We may tone down the weight of dates to encourage the best things to rise to the top.

We're not too worried about spam at the moment, so this is why we haven't tweaked things sooner. I am in full agreement that content on the site should center around discussions, new products/updates, and discussions around truly great blog posts.

Also, DN turns 2 weeks old today!

While I agree with you in principle, there's always going to be a balance between the two types of postings you mention.

I agree that we don't really need more of 'top 50 ways to organize your photoshop brushes'

However, I'd still like to see really ground-breaking tools posted here, that advance the state of the art of web design.

Maybe it's because so many of us are always looking to perfect their workflows? New tools give you something actionable, something to try out, and (hopefully) improve, while thought provoking might make you much better person/designer in the long run, we are people afterall… And people like 'instant' results.

Agree with you Justin.