Dribbble started as a promising online community: founded in 2009 by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett, who beta-launched the invite-only site for designers to share their work. Over the following five years, the site added several new features (ie. API integration, Attachments, Player Stats, Pro, Job Board, Meetups) and the community grew to 486,771 members. Their invite-only, designer-oriented approach helped make Dribbble one of the top online communities.
In January 2017, Dribbble was acquired by Tiny (founded by Andrew Wilkinson — the guy who tried taking credit for designing Slack before being publicly corrected for his gross exaggerations). Shortly afterwards, Zack Onisko was appointed CEO. This was the beginning of the end:
Onisko led Growth at Hired.com prior to being the CEO of Dribbble. The first of many changes under Onisko’s leadership was to remove the invite-only component that helped keep Dribbble’s content of high quality. Dribbble also acquired Crew in 2017 and CreativeMarket in 2020.
In the last two years, Dribbble has dropped from 4.5 / 5 stars to 2.1 stars on Trustpilot.
In this time, CreativeMarket has dropped from 4 / 5 stars to 1.5 stars on Trustpilot.
Why this precipitous drop? A slew of changes implemented by Onisko & Tiny to inflate short-term revenue and growth at the expense of customer (and seller) satisfaction:
All but one post are from paid accounts for the search "Typography”
Every single post is from a paid account for the search “Web UI”
Every single post is from a paid account for the search “Presentation”
New “Boosted” post feature: costs hundreds of $ for a fraction of the engagement Dribbble posts used to organically receive just two years ago
Changed the Dribbble 'popular' page from featuring new & fresh daily finds to only posts by “curated” designers (aka. paid accounts):
Thanks to these algorithm changes, you’ll find masterpieces like the below at the top of Dribbble feeds today:
