I left Reddit largely because of the death of the community spirit triggered by u/spez. I used to moderate large subreddits and was really happy to volunteer my time for the subs I cared about.
Recently, I blocked all AI, including Google’s, and it’s already clear that this has even affected the organization of my search index.
I’m not against using AI. I even used it to internationalize my content so it could be indexed and receive visitors from other countries. Unfortunately, the return I got from search engines and AI crawlers was a systematic attack on my server (it sometimes even looked like a DDoS). I translated 160,000 posts and 12,000 topics from my community, hoping that Discourse’s powerful organizational format would be enough to get referenced and attract new members.
I understand that it’s great to maintain the essence that Discourse is powerful enough to adapt to the needs of each self-hosted or paid CDCK customer, and I agree with many parts of the article. However, the comparison with Reddit is unfair to Discourse. On Reddit, I followed global platform guidelines, adhered to shareholders’ impositions, and dealt with operational rigidity that usually worked against the community, causing many moderators and top moderators to leave. The path forward needs to be the one advocated in the article: autonomy for clients and self-hosted instances to define the direction of their communities, regardless of the niche.
As I mentioned in another topic, the key difference between Discourse and Reddit is that the core of the project is about human exchange and connection, whether the community is business-focused or hobby-based.