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 <i>and</i> 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 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But it doesn't feel like a community. The dashboard makes it feel more like Twitter or Tumblr than DeviantArt and Dribbble.
Hi Kyle,<p>If I may ask for 1 feature request (programmer specific):<p>Really good GitHub and BitBucket and Google Code integration. In particular, newsfeed-like thing that keep track of:<p>* Who is working on what...<p>* New comments on issue tracker...<p>* pull requests from github or bitbucket or others...<p>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'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: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018880" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018880</a>) but maybe I'm wrong...