Hey, it's the founder of indiehackers.

When I first saw indiehackers, I was in love with it. The execution was fantastic. You did a great job.

Then it got bought, and changed. Now it's forum-first, interviews second, and half of them are sort of locked.

Why do you now have to sign up for a forum to view the older product interviews? It's super annoying, so I just stopped reading. It also seems detrimental to the people who gave interviews early, they wanted press, rather than being hidden behind a sign up thing.

Is there any interest in reverting from this pinterest-style login-wall, or is that just too costly?

If this sounds blunt, it's only because I'm disappointed that a site a loved became less fun to use.

Walling off the content directories was an experiment to boost community membership signup, as community members are far more active than anonymous visitors. It's worked — people have joined the community at a much higher rate — but the downstream results haven't been significant enough for this to really be the backbone of our growth strategy. I will likely revert it soon in favor of other approaches, for example, creating search engine friendly evergreen content like this article.

Slightly off-topic, but what happened to indiehackers? I liked the page more before the redesign/stripe-takeover.

The page was more clearly arranged and you could browse it without being logged in or having an account. There is also this ridiculous "stripe-verified" badge for businesses doing business with Stripe now, which is not that interesting for indie hackers I guess.

It also seems the interviews are not that important anymore, but being some kind of community is - but I don't think that people want that, because we have that already here or at reddit - the nice thing were the interviews.

>> you could browse it without being logged in or having an account.

That's a fair point I hear quite a lot. Not sure what the reasoning is there (assuming it is the case).

>> It also seems the interviews are not that important anymore, but being some kind of community is - but I don't think that people want that, because we have that already here or at reddit - the nice thing were the interviews.

Have to really strongly disagree on this point... The IH community is - without a shred of doubt in my mind - the single most impactful thing Courtland has built at Indie Hackers. Happy to believe that you don't want that, but there are a lot of founders and lurkers on the IH forum who really do want it...

> That's a fair point I hear quite a lot. Not sure what the reasoning is there (assuming it is the case).

That it's incredible inconvenient? I don't want to do discussion there, but just read what other people tried and did.

The result is that I just make throwaway accounts for such websites to get to the content and I appreciate if I don't have to do that.

Sorry, you misunderstand me. I meant I'm not sure what Courtland's reasoning for walling off the interviews/articles is.

Oh, sry, I see.

I guess that it's just a Stripe marketing channel and the number of sign-ups supports some metric.

I personally liked the interviews and now it’s just a summary :(

The interviews haven't gone anywhere: https://www.indiehackers.com/interviews

What do you mean by summary?

I think the confusion is that the design of this page:

https://www.indiehackers.com/products

is closest to the old layout where each block linked to the founder interviews. I basically wrote the site off until today because it looked like the interviews had been walled off.