I definitely respect a healthy level if disagreement & discussion here, but I’m not sure you are being very fair in your assessment of Discourse’s take on integrating elements of social media into the platform.
I don’t think any of us doubt wonderful things can happen in social media, but I think this conversation would benefit from specific examples of awesome things not happening on discourse because of a design hinderance on our part.
The traditional “feed”, where the activity of random “friends” you may follow are pushed to you based on an algorithm’s decision of how “engaging” that content may be for you is not something I believe would enhance discussion on a forum.
Also, I think most of us now know that the “feed” has been purposefully designed to hijack attention, and keep users engaged on a surface level to spend more time on a platform. Is that what we want to emulate?
Some other questions in regard to a traditional feed:
Would the algorithm pick individual replies from a topic and surface them out of context to me?
- Would this be beneficial to a conversation if one reply from a conversation I am not apart of is surfaced to me?
Would the algorithm suggest topics it thinks I may be interested in? (we do this with suggested topics at the bottom of a post feed.)