I used to visit Designer News daily, and became one of the mods. It was fun for a while, and surprisingly took more effort than I expected — I felt quite a lot of pressure to make the right decision when it came to downranking stories, banning users, etc.
Then, over time, it started to feel like the people higher up were less and less interested in the site, and no amount of moderation could fix some of the issues like the amount of spam.
I had a brief moment a couple of years ago where I went back to the site, cleaned up the spam and low quality posts I could find in the top few pages in the hope that it might kick off some kind of resurrection. It didn't, mainly because hardly anyone except spammers were posting to the site at that point.
It definitely seems like there needs to be a vested financial interest, where a larger and highly profitable organization like YCombinator and its portfolio of companies, are willing to fund operating costs.
I feel for dang sometimes here on HN, it's far too much workload for a single individual - even with the crowdsourced mechanisms (which I don't think are designed well) to help facilitate his work managing the moderation of HN.
I think YC could afford to drop more $ on forum moderation to improve efforts, however the organization seems fairly conservative in nature, and HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that, giving an overpowered weight to users to influence posts' and comment visibility who aren't necessary that critical in their thinking, are more reactive than responsive - and so I'm uncertain if or how many years it may take for the same concentration of higher quality conversations on the whole, relatively speaking from the past and now, to return.
> HN has changed a lot in the last 3-5 years from where it was before that; and it's frowned upon in the rules to even mention what I believe is one of the primary factors for that
Which rule? Pointing out suspected shills or complaints about bad use of down- and upvotes?
My understanding is that those rules are about specific complaints in the ongoing thread. Not a ban on discussing them in general?
Good question I suppose in need of clarification. Regardless I think not being able to comment or report an observation in a thread you're seeing a certain pattern on is problematic, and suppresses conversation of otherwise legitimate observations and concerns; where better to discuss an issue than where observations are being made?
I think the rule being put in place was because it was happening so much, which should be seen as a strong signal that there is a problem. But rather than fixing the problem or attempting to perhaps through experimentation, it's suppressed as much as possible so then the conservative status quo can continue at whatever externalized costs the people bringing it up have.
E.g. We should all know by now there are bad actors out there, even individual people, who maybe develop a grudge against a single user - and are more likely technically skilled enough to create and maintain a handful fo "real user" accounts on HN that would go undetected with whatever (if there are any) measures may be in place - who then may target one specific user; or industrial complexes who may have bot nets of 1000s or even 10,000s (or more) users to go relatively undetected, who then suppress certain types of comments if certain topics are mentioned, etc.
Author here—some of you old-timers may remember when the LayerVault team launched Designer News here back in 2013—almost exactly 11 years ago. Sadly, yesterday it went offline. Thought I'd share for any of the designers or UI engineers here.
> The team viewed the move away from skeumorphism as a more honest approach to design.
This is a nitpick in the grand scheme of this topic, but I wish this sort of language wouldn't enter the discussion. Most of what's discussed is fashion: skeuomophic/flat, neither is honest or dishonest. It's at such a high level of what they might term dishonesty that it's meaningless. Honest would be manipulating raw bits and everything else is dishonest? We don't need a moral reason to make a fashion change. "It's what other popular products are doing and we're following suit", or "we want to stand out so we're going with this" are perfectly fine. Everything else is imbued fluff.
I also take issue with the idea that non-flat means skeuomorphism. That false dichotomy robbed interfaces of a lot bandwidth.
Our visual system is designed to operate quickly, on a 2D field with 3D effects.
The latter aid both our fovea and peripheral vision in quickly categorizing, grouping, distinguishing elements and their roles. They are a significant help even when we only use one eye and only see a pure 2D field.
Careful use of color, shading that raises, lifts and sinks visual areas, textures, boundaries and other cues that demark coherent interface objects (is that editable text? a button? non-editable text?), smooth motion reflecting state changes, is not a misguided attempt to pull non-useful elements of our 3D world onto the screen. It is sensible design for the sense system that is being interfaced with.
Similarly, making many user interface elements invisible until somehow discovered is not "simplifying".
"Design Twitter" is the only reason I haven't deleted my account yet. Yes, Twitter is full of toxicity and can easily become an echo chamber -- but if you actively set out to create one it can be a unique positive. Bear with me.
I follow a range of designers and front enders from the early Dribbble days and basically haven't added many people since. Yes it might be "polite" to follow back friends and colleagues who follow you, but it disrupts the balance. I don't even follow my own parents back because it introduces a bunch of off-topic content.
I'm not a designer but have gone through similar things in my own niches and honestly I just decided to stop talking about things. It wasn't really healthy or useful the way in which I was talking about those things anyway. I think it feels like we almost need to constantly discuss our ideas about our craft or hobbies to an audience, but I've really enjoyed letting go of that and just focussing on my own stuff.
Same, I don't have any regular places besides random blogs to learn about design stuff from people who really care. Any recommendations people have would be very welcome!
Can't believe I'm saying it but twitter has become the main spot for me. Read.cv as others have pointed out is also good. Way less signal and noise than X of course, but the content is almost always very high quality.
Designer News used to be an amazing community I used to visit almost as often as HN nowadays. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it.
Dribbble is another such site that designers used to aggregate at, discuss, share interesting ideas and engage daily. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it.
I think most of the original community agrees that the combination of moving from invite only to open registration along with a lack of better moderation is where things started coming apart.
And that’s not to blame the moderators. I think they did the best they could. But with the onslaught of spam, they needed more of them, more dedicated (paid) and better moderation tools. They got none of that though.
You can see how that turned out in the screenshot on my site. That’s the front page with crypto spam.
Like many others in here I had completely forgotten about DN. I don't think I stopped visiting it because of declining quality though, but rather that the concepts and principles of good design proliferated.
A decade ago I still had this feeling that design was a secret world that I wanted to grasp but which felt out of reach somehow. Today, for better or worse, the essence of what we've learned is embedded within components, templates, frameworks, and examples, making the web predominantly aesthetic. It's more uniform which is boring, but I think the era of changing trends is more or less behind us. However, industry-specific differentiation persists—a fashion retailer's site diverges from a SaaS platform's landing page, yet each conforms to the norms of their niche.
> the era of changing trends is more or less behind us
I find this statement very odd. Even if everything had somehow reached a state of near-perfection, the history of the web (and fashion, architecture,
etc) seems to me to be an endless series of proofs that as soon as a period's worth of designers think that the arguments have been settled and all theories have been tested, some new trend (or a resurrected ancient monster) will come along and totally upend what's popular. I think this happens if only because young designers need to rebel. Ten years from now we might be living in a new era of glossy jelly buttons or steampunk or chrome or baroque flourishes. We might hate it - but in fact, the previous generation hating it might be the point.
HN. Splitting off a sliver of a community isn't necessarily viable, but that sliver is alive and well on HN and posts about design that are interesting tend to get upvoted, but not a whole lot of those posts are made. It takes effort and that's in part why reddit is so successful, there is enough traffic overall that niches can flourish that would never succeed as a stand-alone website.
HN solves this problem by not having categories, which is another valid path. But to make a 'HN for designers' is DOA unless you are willing to put in a lot of time, effort and probably money to attract and retain an audience.
Pretty sure HN is one of the worst places to talk about design on the internet because its population seems oddly averse to the concept, tends to deride it as the useless whimsy of decoration-obsessed simpletons, and in general has nothing valuable to say about it except for its own obsessions with nostalgia-inspired tech aesthetics.
It would be okay if it were just that, but coupled with the classic god-complex engineer attitude blaming every problem in the world on designers (you're a "manager"? take your number, you're next) it just makes for a very cringe experience for anyone who cares about design discourse.
Yes, HN is moderated, meaning that design topics, however rare, do attract discussion. Unfortunately some of that discussion is of the "designers have too much power" variety, but you have to take the good in with the bad.
Kind of unrelated but this story sounds like the way I feel about most of the internet and TV nowadays. Its just bots and marketers talking to/past each other. Now I know there are quality sites out there (HN for one!) but they are very hard to find.
I created an account in 2018 and barely visited as the top links were always so spammy. Felt like Steemit or one of those unmoderated Reddit-like sites that look like a link dump for every growth marketer in the world.
I used to visit but stopped years ago. Just not enough content on the topic I think. My replacement has been sidebar which is nice because it a curated top 5 links a day. sidebar.io/
Me neither. But it seems like it’s another (at least formerly) independent site gone. It’s sad to see the modern web being dominated more and more by the big players (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, reddit, Amazon, etc). I’m not even old (I’m in my twenties) but I still remember reading lots of good independent blogs and forums not too long ago.
Then, over time, it started to feel like the people higher up were less and less interested in the site, and no amount of moderation could fix some of the issues like the amount of spam.
I had a brief moment a couple of years ago where I went back to the site, cleaned up the spam and low quality posts I could find in the top few pages in the hope that it might kick off some kind of resurrection. It didn't, mainly because hardly anyone except spammers were posting to the site at that point.