Designer News is invite-only and will remain so forever.

While it's still in its early stages, we want to future proof things quite a bit. Currently, we can map our users onto a directed graph which will help immensely with spam, dead accounts and so forth. (If you're a spammer, everyone you've invited gets their account nuked along with the person that invited you.)

Also, one of our users put together a sweet visualization of this in action, which you can see here:

http://ejfox.github.com/DesignerNewsMembers/