Designer News is dead
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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.
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.
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?
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.
To give it a positive spin, huge kudos to @dang for his amazing work at keeping HN great!
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.
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".
Hoping to get an answer on this one myself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
E.g., what’s the “HN” for designers?
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UX_Design/
The motherlode, probably a good place to ask if there are interesting niches for whatever particular thing you are interested in. Good luck!
https://web.archive.org/web/20150618094329/https://www.desig...
In a way, it does feel like HN as someone point out in another comment
In general I found the discussions pretty shallow and anemic compared to HN, even during the supposed golden age.
This post gives me nostalgia.
RIP DN
DN was fun for a very brief moment. But really, it died so long ago I think someone flat out forgot to tell it.