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:
I never believed in invitation only. It work on certain types of communities, like torrents, with 100% control of the use. But on sites like HN, you simply doesn't need to use invite only.
I believe in a meritocratic system. If you contribute with good information, insight or whatever resource you want to call it, you will be rewarded well so the community will be.
Just think than one asshole with invite can invite another 23 assholes. Then you're beloved community will be ruined and "invite only".
I'm curious to know if there's an application process that's in the works or if it's going to stay entirely referral-based. Without the ability to interact with anyone or any content on the site, I can imagine this'd be a huge turnoff for designers who might not be in your particular clique.
As an aside, I just tried to register without a referral code and simply got a 404 error.
I'm curious to learn more about the decision to keep it invite only. I can only provide personal insight, but I lost interest as soon as there was a link I wanted to comment on and couldn't.
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/