There's actually quite a number of large-scale slack groups emerging. You still need to sign up, and someone maintains them, but there's apparently no limit on how large they can get - only that the last 10,000 messages are available in them.

Here's an example: http://www.designerhangout.co/

Thanks for your input Sacha, I had never really been bothered by the ads in Sidebar. They don't bother me in most newsletters (though in JS Weekly the sponsored jobs take up quite a bit of space and are fairly front and center), it's just that I feel a bit weird putting them into the e-mail in the first place - email is such a personal medium, and that's one of the things that I put effort in with UX Weekly. However, if they're well targeted and controlled, it might actually be an interesting solution.

The feedback I've received just from posting these thoughts has given me a thing or two to think about. I've also had some e-mails from people saying they're happy to pay for the newsletter (and newsletters in general) directly, but were frustrated by the limited options for it.

A tiered subscription system might be one way of cracking this (with a free tier and a "pay what you want" tier), going the bandcamp route.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll have a look. At the moment there's a lot of effort that might come with moving to another platform.

Email Octopus is another option, but that requires setting up an AWS account, which I'm fairly hesitant about as well. https://emailoctopus.com/

Thanks! Definitely let me know what you think :)

It's this exact same conversation that is happening in the rest of the tech world. Guess what? You're wrong when it comes to this.

Sure, all things being equal it would make sense to prefer to invite "people interested in design". But all things aren't equal - the statistics clearly show this. They show this in work environments, they show this in pay rates, they show this in who's taking care of children, etc.

I personally doubt that it's because there's less women interested in design news. Design doesn't strike me as a classically unequally distributed profession. My personal experience is counter to this (though I am a man, I don't really know). I don't think the fault lies with women (as seems to be the implication of this response).

So then the next step is to examine in our community what is actually happening, and why there is such an imbalance. Why are there more men on Designer News? Is it because it's an unsafe environment? Is it because they feel like they're excluded? Is it because they have less time?

Maybe the answer is not to invite more women to designer news. I don't think the case is that they're not hearing about it. Maybe the answer is to talk to the women who were here and left. Why did they leave? Why aren't they coming back? Maybe it's time for Designer News to have a critical examination of itself before it goes down the Reddit and HackerNews trajectories.

Just downloaded this (I don't know why I trust you to provide me with something that won't infect me with viruses, but there you go, too late for that).

First reaction: it's pretty painless, definitely much more useful than what it was before. I like how little space it takes up on the side. Notifications from other teams finally are track down-able. Major plus.

Took me a moment to know what the Slack domains were for my organizations, kind of expected signing in with my email address to just log me in to all of them, or suggest them all anyway.

This is an interesting approach. It's just the other side of two-factor authentication, and might even be more secure than just a password. However, I suspect it's the side of two-factor authentication that people don't like, so I don't know if it's more user friendly.

I'd love to see this as part of an A/B test where some users go through this process and some don't.

How do people feel about not having passwords? They might not feel like it's more secure (however irrational that might be).

I feel like there's still something missing to take InDesign's place though. A lot of the things I work can end up being large documents that can be hard to get a grip on if just working with something like Sketch or Illustrator.

Would love to see something fit that space that plays nicely with all of these things.

I choose to believe that the folks at Adaptive Path would only make the transition if they knew they weren't going to be building out dark patterns for banking systems.

Hah, just saw this. Thanks!

Been mainly been using the newsletter to keeping abreast of what gets posted here.