You’re raising an important point!
Every forum has a culture that builds around it and a status quo that is formed over time.
When I started using Discourse as a means to communicate between team members, preserve research insights, track conversations better than email chains, etc. in the beginning of COVID19, I wanted to make sure that this tool is used correctly, well at least according to my vision of what “correctly” was.
In my case it was not so difficult because we were a team of 7 people in total and I could literally guide every single person in the team to create topics that are well separated in their subject matter, yet not duplicating the same subject over multiple topics. That replies are written with future value in mind (e.g. you did an experiment? describe it, give context, show what and how you did, use graphs with axis labels.. so that when you read this post in a few months, it will have value to you), put stuff in the right category, be efficient - write the most amount of information with the minimal amount of words, be kind, and so on.
Once you have a good core culture, every new employee that joins the company naturally embraces it with minimal guidance.
I still do the occasional conversation with specific people about how their topics and replies could be better. This helps to maintain good culture.
Bottom line, I believe if you work on your core culture when you are small, it scales nicely when you grow.
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