ZURB is fantastic, and I really hope they follow through on their intentions for the service as listed in the blog post.
Like other commenters here, I couldn't justify spending time on Forrst vs. Dribbble + StackOverflow because the quality just wasn't there. While there's definitely great content to be found, the current layout isn't conducive to finding it quickly, and you run into enough bad design and code during that process that you're turned off (although it does make you feel better about your own work!). It's faster to just close the tab and look elsewhere than hope you find the diamonds in the rough.
If they want to be a 'relaxed' platform for criticism (which I have been looking for, and would even pay for if the community and incentives were top-notch), I would highly recommend that the "like" button has an opposing "dislike" ability and force the user to give feedback through highlighting areas of the code or image like many existing tools, browser extensions and services like LayerVault already offer. Why do people like it? Why do people not like it? A "like", even on Dribbble, means nothing to me. I want to know specifically what I can improve upon.
I used to be a diehard Forrst user. It was an awesome community--a core site that I contributed to and drew from everyday. Then, last March, they sold to Colourlovers...and everything went to hell. The quality of the posts went way down. Feedback went down. Comments became vehicles for spam. Community standards were no longer enforced. Forrst right now is a wasteland compared to what it was a year ago.
What ZURB is buying is not what Colourlovers bought.
Not to belittle to the work of Kyle, but the community was headed down-hill before Forrst sold for the first time. It's evidenced by the number of rules they had to bring into effect to counter-act the things you mentioned.
WARNING - Opinions! Feedback on Forrst was generally meaningless, the community was immature and the quality of work and questions was really, really low.
I couldn't agree more. Also, sometime around when CL bought it, Forrst made some weird changes with sorting. Like if I'm on "Popular Posts" and scroll to the point where it loads in new posts, all of the posts are dated over a year ago. It's very buggy now-a-days, it seems.
Forrst has been a wasteland (like you mentioned) for quite awhile now. I feel like it's going to take a lot to get the original steam back.
> Kyle, do you still have any day to day involvement since selling to CL? I am grateful for the community you built up and hope that ZURB can bring it back up to snuff.
I left mid-summer, so not presently, no. Appreciate that, and I'm hopeful that it's in good hands with Zurb.
Kyle, do you still have any day to day involvement since selling to CL? I am grateful for the community you built up and hope that ZURB can help bring it back up to snuff.
Have you at all considered relaunching it under a different name? There must be things that you would've done differently now, with all the experience you got from running Forrst.
I can't really think of any cases where some web service was loved, and then hated and then managed to restore its reputation. Watching a formerly great service crash and burn leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of users resulting in a situation that I believe is much harder to undo than it would be to just create a "spiritual successor" follow-up with a different brand name.
Anyone from zurb reading, please put a direct link to your home page. There is no link to your home page in your blog. First time readers need to know what you do without a hassle. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4146888
I have an overly simplified answer as to why Forrst is getting passed around like this.
..and that is;
It took me two long years to wait and finally earn an invite to Dribbble.
Signing up for Forrst was just a matter of clicking a link that was submitted on HN.
Interpret that how you want, but that simple paragraph reveals how and why you should strive to build and foster a community, not just push out MVP's, see if it bites, close shop and/or sell for cash. That's counter intuitive to creating value.
Dribbble suffers from this same problem too though, as evidenced by the somewhat depressing "Everyone" feed. It's more about who you know (or follow) rather than how talented you actually are. A lot of people just invite friends, co-workers or random people that get picked from a hat. There are "Get your invites!" contests every day that don't require anything but a reply, a retweet, a link to the inviter's website.
There's no way to reprimand players who [consistently] invite poor designers or people that don't post (likewise, there's no way for those of us who have invited people who don't use their invite to revoke it), or compensate those who have added valuable contributors.
I wish there was a feature like StackExchange's bounty where you receive praise, a Pro account or additional invites for onboarding someone prolific in their field or just someone that does fantastic work but hasn't really surfaced in the community yet.
Personally I'd love to see more dev/designer hybrids and ways to find those people (or use the bounty feature to promote people inviting the types of users the site is lacking). Right now there's the ability to add skill tags, but those have little to do with what my actual roles are within the organizations I work for. Being able to search by "product" or "motion" or "type" designers would help me find users to follow a lot more than just hoping I come across them through other means. Then we get into their follow cap, which.. I won't even go there.
We acquired Forrst because we're community people and we saw a great opportunity to help Forrst grow as a place for creatives to get better at their craft / share information. With COLOURlovers we have have a thriving community for creative inspiration and we recently launched CreativeMarket.com as a place closer to the execution side of projects. Forrst played well as a opportunity to connect with users along the spectrum. What we noticed though was that with all our attention on the successful launch of Creative Market, we weren't finding the time to really devote to Forrst to make it great. And being respectful to quality communities, we thought the best thing to do for it would be to find a home for it that could dedicated those resources. We've known ZURB for several years and had partnered with them on a creative project before. We reached out, had a conversation and mutually saw an great opportunity for them to grow the Forrst community.
No wonder I was confused. I wonder whether they are really buying the team or the community. It seems that there are less activities going on at Forrst these days.
I didn't see any mention about the price they bought it for, and based on the recent downfall Forrst has had with users, it could have been pretty cheap for all we know.
Like other commenters here, I couldn't justify spending time on Forrst vs. Dribbble + StackOverflow because the quality just wasn't there. While there's definitely great content to be found, the current layout isn't conducive to finding it quickly, and you run into enough bad design and code during that process that you're turned off (although it does make you feel better about your own work!). It's faster to just close the tab and look elsewhere than hope you find the diamonds in the rough.
If they want to be a 'relaxed' platform for criticism (which I have been looking for, and would even pay for if the community and incentives were top-notch), I would highly recommend that the "like" button has an opposing "dislike" ability and force the user to give feedback through highlighting areas of the code or image like many existing tools, browser extensions and services like LayerVault already offer. Why do people like it? Why do people not like it? A "like", even on Dribbble, means nothing to me. I want to know specifically what I can improve upon.