Social media and instant messaging fundamentally changed how we talk to each other.
The paragraph has ceded power to fast moving and ephemeral chat that inevitably leans toward the shallow and reactive. Easy and immediate access to information, has replaced depth with speed in both digital and offline conversations. We talk, and we talk fast, and we rarely stop to listen.
I totally missed this post when it was posted last year.
It is pointing one of the main problems that I have seen in the online communities that I’ve been involved in the past five to seven years, where most of the interactions have been moved to real time communication channels (telegram, slack, whatsapp…), and that has drastically changed the culture of the community.
One of the main problems that I see is that once the community dynamics have changed to using mainly real time communication, it is very difficult to get people to engage back into a synchronous channels.
Even for the topics that require a more slow pace reflection, people now default to the chat rooms where it’s obviously not the right place to have a proper discussion. This also creates a new barrier for the people who don’t have all the time in the world to engage with a very fast paced medium where you probably have hundreds of messages per day.
One of the biggest challenges for me is how to turn an synchronous channel (like discourse forums) into a place where people want to engage again, and not only a place where I can post summaries of what has happened on the chat rooms and nobody engages.
Anyone has experiences in this area, and what are your best tips and tricks?
What about enabling Chats, Voice, and tweaking your themes a bit to give them a little taste of what they probably use all day?
It is mandatory to offer real value in forum-based communities to survive: What would users find there that is not available on Discord or social media?
Communities are very well established in other chat platforms, asking them to migrate to another chat system is no realistic, they like their discords, telegram, whatsapp apps and their features.
From my point of view Discourse should complement the existing chat channels, not aim to replace them.
I agree, and years ago I asked about bridging them extensively, but it was not supported and Chats was landed.
The user experience when chatting in Discourse is not —and will not be, given its architecture— the best, but the real value must surpass what users find in infinite scrolls, typing messages, colors, or reels. I think that is the real point, if you really want to do it.
Taking Meta as an example, it has chat, but practically no one uses it. The trick is that those who are used to writing in real time can do so today so they don’t feel disconnected from their everyday, everywhere basics.
Think it like “okay Darling, I don’t have Netflix, but I have many books on philosophy and mysticism. Which one should we start with?”
I am also thinking of adding short videos of Discourse usage with zoom or typing effects and all the new thing. It really pains me to know how much destroyed the reward circuits of people have been.
Wild times; having a forum today requires a lot of resilience.