I really respect Dribbble as a community.

Dribbble is lucky in that its core currency–the shot–is eminently expressive and quickly consumable. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

Creating value (and corresponding revenue streams) for a community often comes from connecting members to opportunities in the larger ecosystem. For designers, the obvious play was to help them get hired, i.e. connected to people and companies that value what they do.

Likewise, those companies–the demand side of the equation–came on to the platform as teams to establish identities and competitive advantages in hiring. (Teams have also been an enormous driver of business in the other direction for design agencies.) It's a virtuous cycle–designers post on behalf of their teams to build the team brand; but in doing so, they also build their own. Both increase their position in the marketplace by simply sharing what they're working on.

The challenge for Indie Hackers (I think) is that building indie businesses and discussing them are pretty abstract endeavors, and making ties to the larger ecosystem feels like a longer, less transactional, game. But I think there's an opportunity to build a valuable connections marketplace that benefits the community.

You already do an awesome job on the inspiration, moral support, and educational fronts. Additionally, I can envision Indie Hackers helping founders make great connections to:

• financing and investors
• co-founders
• designers=>devs and vice versa
• marketers (for devs and designers) and vice versa
• early/key employees looking for ground floor/bootstrap experiences
• mentors
• mastermind groups
• acquirers

There's a vibrant ecosystem around VC money that facilitates connections to meet the needs above that hasn't historically been available to bootstrappers. I believe the influx of new bootstrapper funds such as Earnest Capital (https://earnestcapital.com) presages that times are a changin'. IMO Indie Hackers is already playing a big role in that movement.

Keep up the great work!

At first, I honestly thought you're being sarcastic and pointing out everything dribbble isn't nowadays. It's become so toxic and spammy I don't even know where to begin. It’s good as a central hub for your portfolio and is indeed good for finding inspiration, but:

• comments are crap, just the Behance-style attention whoring, in the hope of receiving a new view or like
• only huge designers (with lots of followers) get more like actual comments like feedback but from the same people that just want attention.
• dribbble also started a design “trend” of making visual porn just for the sake of it. As in beautiful but unrealistic and useless designs (especially UI) that don’t solve problems and are even illogical at times

I was so happy when I first got invited a few years ago, it felt like an accomplishment because the guy who drafted me actually looked through some of my designs and even gave feedback. Now I’m so frustrated with dribbble. I think it’s become an anti-community in some ways.

Yes, you are right, but nowadays dribbble is more about getting likes. And most of the designs are only polished for posting on dribbble with no reasonable UX in mind.

I remember when I joined dribbble, people where friends, commented with tips to improve. Now it’s just „wow, cool“ comments.