Definitely understand this, and it’s tough to explain! I’ve approached this before by calling designs like theirs more “opinionated.” Circle does things like round corners on boxes and buttons… their icons contribute too… they’re rounder, softer. They use more whitespace within certain elements. A little can go a long way.
Messing around with CSS for 10 minutes can get some of that feeling in place (but yeah parts of it would need bigger structural changes, maybe even changes to how things are by default).
As far as I know you also can’t change any of that within Circle. They have a strong opinion of what the UI should look like and that’s what you get.
Discourse goes the other way… we want sites to be customized, sometimes very heavily, so we don’t have much of an aesthetic opinion by default; we get out of the way so you can theme. Early on Discourse had a stronger visual aesthetic with text shadows, rounded corners, etc… this made it much more difficult to theme because you had to “undo” all of these opinions if you didn’t want them.
Anyway, I think the difference in approach is something to keep in mind when comparing. Removing theming from Discourse would make my job a lot easier (we also build themes for our Enterprise customers), and we could be much more strict and opinionated about the default design because there are fewer considerations.
We’re always improving and reading feedback. We’ve been adding features like choosing a custom fonts and color palettes when you’re setting up a Discourse site… and I hope at some point this year admins will be able to choose a full theme when they’re setting up their site (and we’ll have more theme options for sure).
I can see the appeal of the sidebar, I’ve built a few sidebars for Discourse myself… and I’d say this is a difference in philosophy. We’re fairly protective of what gets added to topic pages because we don’t want to distract from reading. Circle chooses to carry the navigation everywhere and is therefore more consistent and quicker to navigate between categories. I think there are pros/cons of each approach… one pro for Circle is that at this point the 3-column layout is very familiar and has wormed its way into everyone’s brain (largely because of Facebook). Familiar feels friendly!
I agree that markdown and the side-by-side preview feels more complicated specifically for low-skill computer users (which IIRC is most people). It’s not the Facebook input box or a Microsoft Word document, so it’s uncharted territory for many. We’ve discussed some hybrid approaches where images and formatting would appear inline with markup in one window (github and some others do something similar), but it’s a big complex change with lots of pieces. I don’t think we’d ever go WYSIWYG, but there are WYSIWYG-ish things that could probably help.
Agree here too! I’d like this to be something we can improve on within the next year. We haven’t touched the profile summaries in quite a while, and there’s not much of an information hierarchy there… it’s a firehose of stats.
I’m not sure if it was the original intention, but I think the fun part is about participating with the community and not necessarily the software itself. Are parties fun? depends on the company you keep! I’m biased but I have fun talking to people on Discourse (and other discussion platforms too)… sometimes older/broken/buggy forum software detracts from that.
The simple question can be funny… we’ve gotten “too complicated” feedback from people who primarily use social media… and “too simple/too much whitespace” complaints from old school forum folks.
Simple depends on where you’re coming from. Is Circle simpler? Yep. Are we simple compared to legacy forum software? Yep. Could we be simpler? we’re always finding new ways… (and your feedback helps, thanks for taking the time!)