Discourse is supposed to be mobile-first (though the experience has told me otherwise multiple times): it’s written here and here.
But Discourse has also brought more and more features (often useful!) over the years.
It’s a bit hard to find a screenshot of what the mobile composer looked like 10 years ago, but there is one here provided by @codinghorror on an iPhone 5:
How it looks like today (I purposely added content in the text area, because adding content also adds new icons/features on the screen… 
)
It feels overwhelming. There’s the top left icon which changes if I’m creating, editing, or doing something else.
There’s a icon whose purpose is not clear to me, as I have never tried tapping it (does it trigger a function, or show a tooltip?).
There’s the icon, which I don’t know what it does either. I know the two other icons on the same row, and I use them from time to time 
Anyway, the very first row of what we see on the topic creation contains text and 5 different icons, some of them being a bit cryptic until we try them (I suppose).
Then, there are the fields 
.
The narrow category selector can barely contain a short, parent category name. Children category will be almost always truncated or simply out of sight.
Both inputs are even more crushing the content because they contain :
- the categories icon or bullet,
- a or icon
- and a icon.
Then, the composer which forcefully displays the toolbar.
I don’t think we can toggle it? Anyway, a toolbar is useful for sure. We can scroll horizontally to reveal more formatting option, and I think you’ll miss this feature if you don’t already know it (the gradient hint is too subtle).
Having the rich/markdown toggle as the very first (and the widest, and the only colored one) icon from the toolbar seems a weird choice. I’m more likely to use bold or italic than going forth and back between the two editors.
Finally, on the last line, we have option that make sense.
But, again, there’s text and 5 more icons, but I think I don’t have much against them… Except, perhaps, the Gif option. Many smartphone keyboards have a Gif search. It could be removed, or put in the toolbar.
I know nothing about design, so I won’t try suggesting more, just mostly sharing my experience, what I see when I create a topic, and what above all, what and how much information my brain has to process. And, I must say, there is a little too much to see and process.
I wish the layout was cleaner, less icon and feature-bloated, focused on the task we ask for: write content, post content, be happy.
edit: small additional thought. Back in the days of older forum software, they would provide many features of questionable interest and tons of useless information. They would add all of those to show to their users and visitors, “look at all we can do!”
They did things because they could, not because they wanted to or needed to.
Seeing the profusion of icons and features added to Discourse over time (most are optional, but still… Just look back at the screenshot 
), I sometimes feel Discourse is slowly drifting toward the same old, and undesirable “show-off” path.
is delete… but they certainly feel like they’re in the same realm of functionality. We used to have one and would ask about saving a draft with a modal… was that trade-off worth having fewer buttons here?
)
