It wasn't Metalab, it was the founder of it, Andrew, as part of a holding company called Tiny Boards.

They bought it for the job board. As long as DN gets more users and more views, they will continue to make more money.

DN is one of many that they've bought: http://tinyboards.co

Hi Andrew!

Thanks for taking the time to address the concerns within the community. I have a few thoughts I'd like to share—of which, others will hopefully reply and iterate. Here we go...

1. Downvoting

The lack of downvoting, as others have mentioned, doesn't provide any means of letting the community self-regulate. With the current up-vote only system, the only way to get low-value posts off the front page is to wait until they decay out. This—I would assume—creates a negative feedback loop with users who want good content: they come, there's nothing good, they can't easily help get rid of the bad content, they leave feeling hopeless. This breaks the habit of coming back over time and erodes the "quality users" that the community originally built around. It's a downward spiral.

Solution — Add a downvote button and sort the front page based on volume of postive upvotes with a slight decay over time function. Posts with a "-X" voting are automatically deleted or archived. There's a lot of opinions in design, so let's say something around -25, with nothing below -5 being on the homepage.

2. Posting Rights

In an effort to cut down on bots/spam while keeping the community open, the posting rights should be more strict. Currently, you only need to have an account active for ~1 weeks time before you're allowed to post (if I'm remembering correctly).

Solution — Prevent users with <50 karma make new topics/posts. To earn karma, users can comment on thread and have their comments upvoted there to reach the threshold. I would hope this stimulates quality engagement as well.

3. Discovery

This may be more of a fault of the community, but I'd be willing to argue a very small fraction of the community is actively digging through the "New" page and upvoting content so that it will reach the homepage. God bless those people, but this siloing of discovery can't be good for content curation. It's also probably why it only takes ~5 upvotes to get near the top of the homepage. Simply not enough people are digging through the new stuff!

Solution — To be honest, I'm really not sure how to solve this. Perhaps make the "Popular/New" difference more prominent and forward? Half the time, you barely even notice those tabs. Hoping others will have more feedback here.

That in mind, there's some other things that I'm just kind of confused about:

1. DN Podcast – It hasn't been added to in over a year. Could it be spun up again? Could it be archived in a less prominent place on the site if not?

2. Color Awards – This is a super fun and enganging element of DN that I fell in love with. Unfortunately, the prospect isn't huge. For new users (who won't get the beta colors, etc.), you pretty much can only earn these colors via karma benchmarks. Then—when you do—they are pretty much just greys. Maybe more colors/means of earning them?

3. Post Badges – These are helpful, but I think they could be more specific or have a broader variety? Looking at the homepage right now, it's more or less a sea of "SHOW DN"; what's the point if there's not really any differentiation?

Ok—so that's a lot to unpack, but those are the three biggest issue I see personally. I'm sure others have more ideas on how to polish these solutions, too, so hopefully we can get this community back on track together! :) Thanks again for listening!

@Andrew:

In my opinion, it's not a technology problem, as there's no need to create new features to fix it. The kind of content is what needs to change.

When Kelly and Allan were around taking care of that, I feel like they worried more about the quality of the content, not only by applying moderation but also by leading the community with efforts to have better content (AMAs, giveaways, etc). Feel to me like they really cared about the content in here. And so the community cared.

Don't get me wrong, most of the improvements that Arix suggested are great and probably could help the site, but the real change that I'd like to see in here is for you and those 30 people that you mentioned to contribute in here as if you really care about the quality and outcome of your baby. I know you adopted it, but it's still your baby.

Andrew, FWIW I really like the state of DN today. Is the content always awesome? No, but the content upvoting gives me a look into what other designers are endorsing. More importantly, I'm always free to choose what I want to read and ignore. It's a great site to get the pulse of other designers and see what everyone's talking about (i.e. this thread).

Anyway, I think it's cool that a lot of passionate designers have strong opinions about DN (it would be much worse for you if no one cared any more). I respect you for responding to a few of them.

Thanks for keeping DN running!

If DN is awesome and there is a such a big staff, why is it so difficult to fix things like the dingus that used to alert someone when a link has already been posted? Judging by the duplication of content and from member comments, it's seems like that has been broken for a long time. Also, why does it often take days to remove spam? A mod had commented a while back that they don't have control over that and it's up to the devs to remove spam. That seems crazy. That's part of a mod's responsibility.

Yeah, I think the blame on you is a bit misplaced — the community quality was already declining before your acquisition, and with Layer Vault tapping out it seems much more to me like you saved this place as an investment in the design community as a whole, or maybe a statement about your commitment to it.

Obviously, there is more that could be done to keep DN alive / revitalize it, but what is a community for if not taking grassroots ownership over its own fate and character.

The Tiny Boards site is kind of damning. It's like "We buy job boards, look at our job boards... Job board, job board, job board... news site? :)"

I get that from a business perspective this may be a job board with a content marketing play, but that only works if it isn't transparent and your commitment to the content marketing part (the community itself) is serious.

I was just about to take your side on this before you reminded us you also own dribbble. I respect MetaLab and like the work you guys do, but the communities you run are, in their current state and in my humble opinion, more harmful to our industry than they are beneficial.

About dribbble

You may have tripled dribbble's team size, but how exactly has that translated into benefits for the designer community? Aside from that time you gated off some features behind a paywall, there weren't any substantial change since Tiny took over. When dribbble first started, it was minor site intended for people to publish small snippets of their work and cool design experiments they thought of, so its structure of one 300x400 image + some text made sense. Today however it has evolved into the second largest community for designers and in my opinion (and primarily because of the way it is structured and the sort of content it encourages) it has helped create the wrong idea about design in the eyes of both designers starting out and clients/bosses/colleagues. I for one have chosen to no longer take part - it's not like I got anything out of dribbble anyway.

I've said it a million times and I'll say it again, what we need is a community built to support healthy conversations around how we each solve problems in our organisations. Not a 300x400 shot of a nike shoe, but a ton of details about what the goal of a project was, who the intended audience is, what the process was and what options were tested, how well the design performed, and then ways to incentives the community to join in and discuss the merits of the design, possible alternatives, etc. That way designers just starting out will have a much easier time learning (and learning the right things), and people outside the industry will do less assuming all we do is make pretty shit in PS all day.

About DN

I think DN is equally poorly designed for how big it has become today. Its structure may have served it well back when it was invite only, but now that everyone is welcome, it needs to change. See my comment below about it, or any of the previous conversations on the topic. Or this.

So what I'd be curios to know, is how do you understand Tiny's role in the design community and what specific plans do you have for the future?

It was funny and the link was interesting, TIL. Also the irony of creating worthless content in order to complain about the lack of "valuable content" is wonderful.

Still feeling the same kind of tone. Which in a way, validates my initial sentence, because if you, one of the beacons of this community (at least to me), can only contribute with this kind of content, then it's probably time to reconsider what the hell is happening.

Regarding your link, I'm familiar with the concept, it doesn't only apply to online communities. That's why I tried to explain with facts my reasoning to ask the rest of the community.

Oh, and I did not talk about cool kids, that's something that came up from your own imagination. I asked for those positive and willing to share designers that used to contribute with real valuable content in here, in order to inspire people like me to keep learning. Big difference if you ask me.

Thanks for trying to explain yourself, Sacha. I still think you could have done a better job, but it's a free world, so no worries.