I've been a member of Forrst for a while and my enthusiasm has taken a nose dive in a past couple of months. The main problem is not the site design. It is the fact that Forrst is overrun with kids. "I am an aspiring 13 old designer, and here is something I did in a couple of hours because I was bored". That's not to say that are no gems in the feed, but these are typically cross-posts from Dribbble. Trying to build the designer and the developer community that is also friendly and helpful to the beginners is a noble undertaking. But it does not work. It is an utopia as it has very little appeal for professional designers and developers. Noobs wooting noobs on mediocre designs is not exactly a fostering environment. Still might work as an ad platform and a promotion vehicle of course.
I've always felt that the real good people don't have time for these secretive communities, they'd rather be doing shit so you'll always have the middle ground between mediocre and amazing. I'm sure the "best" (with regards to what they do) hackernews members rarely (if ever) comment because they're too busy being the best, you don't get to the top by talking about it.
This is sometimes true, sometimes not. I know a few amazing designers that are on Dribble all the time, because it's an outlet for fun things they're making that have nothing to do with client work.
By the same token, if you check out /leaders, lots of people at the top _are_ killing it. There are obviously tons of successful people that aren't on HN, but "commenting on HN means you're unsuccessful," is trivially disproven.
> but "commenting on HN means you're unsuccessful," is trivially disproven.
but I didn't even say that, you just pulled that quote out of thin air. Of course posting here doesn't make you unsuccessful, but if you are successful you're less likely to be posting here. I at no point claimed the former...
I know a few amazing designers that are on Dribble all the time, because it's an outlet for fun things they're making that have nothing to do with client work.
This is also true of GitHub. But both GitHub and Dribbble are places where you show off evidence of your work. HN is more a talking shop.
I disagree that it has very little appeal, though it certainly has a more narrow focus in terms of to whom it does appeal. The type of post you mention is something we have been concerned about and working towards resolving. At the end of the day, I think Forrst can and does provide real value to professional designers and developers, but perhaps that is not able to shine through as much when such posts exist.
You are over-generalizing, and more to the point - you are clearly neither a Forrst or Dribbble user. The difference in the quality of the content is very noticeable. To put it into a more sensible coordinate system, Dribble is a moderated mailing list, and Forrst is an unmoderated one. Or, better analogy perhaps would be hackers vs. script kiddies - do you know of many hangouts of former that tolerate (leave alone embrace) latter? Me neither.
I think the community is just getting started. People are figuring out what they want to use it for, and what it is best for, as the culture takes shape. Give it some time.
There's some great energy behind forrst - I have a lot of respect for Kyle, based on his mature stewardship, consistently friendly, positive attitude, and the care he has taken with the site.
I will agree with this on some level. Teenagers are a known community cancer. Left unchecked, they will turn any board into 4chan.
I don't think there is an uncontrollable flow of noobs on Forrst though. For the most part its follow-based anyhow, you don't like someone you unfollow them.
However I have noticed posts where highschool kids are specifically encouraged to participate, and while a really noble gesture to foster education amongst a new generation (and cheap labor pool), its a dangerous move. More kids = lower quality and more moderation.
Hah, excellent. I never even applied for membership as I didn't have any examples of what I have done online but always assumed this would be a somewhat stricter than "I made this in Photoshop". Not as excited about applying now.
yeah, I've been there a few times and every time I search for topics of my interest I see people bragging about stuff I don't even note in the commit message. meh. I mean, there are probably lots of professionals, but the environment and kiddie community encourages posting lots of minor stuff.
I really like Forrst. It's got a good mix of code and design for a generalist like me. I think I get something out of it. Perhaps that speaks to my level of competency but I find it useful since I am a jack of all trades. If I have a really hard coding problem, StackOverflow is going to be where I go. For a stream of new stuff or latest techniques I may not be aware of, Forrst is for me.
Also I think Kyle has done a great job as developer/designer. I was impressed. If someone doesn't like it, they are welcome to create a better version.
As for the monetization, I have to agree w/ steveklabnik that designer/developers are a hard bunch to squeeze money out of since they aren't used to paying for these sort of services. I could be wrong.
I feel very selfish or insulated using Forrst. I only see it as a venue to get help and flaunt my work - which is fine to me. In some cases, I think you could liken it a StackExchange of design.
But it doesn't feel like a community. The dashboard makes it feel more like Twitter or Tumblr than DeviantArt and Dribbble.
If I may ask for 1 feature request (programmer specific):
Really good GitHub and BitBucket and Google Code integration. In particular, newsfeed-like thing that keep track of:
* Who is working on what...
* New comments on issue tracker...
* pull requests from github or bitbucket or others...
My biggest need when it comes to programming community is keeping up (communication-wise or code-wise) with all the OSS libraries I use. GitHub does much better job than the others, but they do only git.
I tried "@faketwitter" as the twitter user name and it complained about it. I'm not too familiar with twitter user names but I thought that should work.
I looked at applying long ago, but the 'URL of something you've made' made me turn around and leave. I don't think it said anything about 'developers' at the time, though, just 'designers'. Oddly, I had a website that I designed (and that I used this time) but I didn't think to submit it.
Yeah, I don't really use twitter either. Don't need another time vampire.
I see from the owner's comment on here that its not required, please update the site to reflect this. Maybe put a space for "other profile url" so I could perhaps link to my presence here for example.
I'm interested to see how buying acorns works. It's sort of like a combination of virtual goods and advertising... I see programmers as being a hard crowd to sell to, (for example, see the second paragraph of this recent comment by patio11: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018880) but maybe I'm wrong...
Very interesting. I think you may be right, but on the flip side, I'm eager to see if we can change that. We actually sold a bunch at a discount over the weekend (~500), so I'll be interested to see how much of that is pricing psychology vs. actual need. Either way, there are about 5 or 6 posts promoted actively, so people are using them. Can't wait to see how this plays out when there's much, much more data to look at.
I'm not sure what the motivation is to pay to promote the types of content you can post on Forrst, other than job ads. I guess I'll have to watch and see what people are using it for.
For me it's about promoting my site when it's ready for the next beta phase. The stream is great, but you don't get that much exposure as normal posts are pushed down fast.
