I definitely understand the value of learning from competitors or other products in adjacent areas, and I think Discourse has frequently done that. Examples both positive and negative, of specific features from other platforms, often come up in feature discussions here over the years. E.g. the discussions on invite links or official reactions plug-in, where Discord has come up.
But I think that the point of this discussion was more misguided. It was not about learning from what Discord is doing to improve Discourse as a product. I can argue that there was not concrete discussion on that, and the forum feature on Discord had not even come out yet either. It was about the threat that Discord poses in terms of popularity.
Now when something is trendy or popular, there is very often “We should adopt X” or “We should use X” and it becomes very hard to filter out the noise. Often people don’t ask “Does X make sense for our needs?”
E.g. “we should use Facebook for our community because everyone is on there” or “we should adopt Slack for our company communications because everyone else is using it.”
This is common enough for technology stacks for example, that there’s the term “magpie developer” for it — i.e. always chasing something shiny and new.
For example it was brought up that Discourse doesn’t have the logo on its instances and that makes it less well-known. One of the points of a white-label app though, is that companies can have their own branding on their forums, rather than Discourse’s logo. There’s only a sketched-out Discourse logo when you start an instance, to encourage people to replace it.
That point came up not from the perspective of improving Discourse as a product for its users, but from the singular standpoint of popularity. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to want to make Discourse more popular, just saying that it is a bit dangerous when it’s a singular goal because you can miss a lot of other factors.
A more subtle change would be how the open-source Ghost blogging platform does it, e.g. it has something like “Made with Ghost” at the bottom of the page, on the default theme. This does not interfere with customers having their own branding.
Now that Discord’s forum feature has come out in beta launch, I do have some things to say, but for most of this topic, people didn’t even know what Discord was aiming for with it. It might be something very different and right now it is still early days.
E.g. In Discord’s beta forums, I see people still type multiple successive single-line replies, pressing Enter after each line. This includes 3-character replies. It’s still a bit noisy.
Discourse has guarded against this by having 20-char minimum by default. Plus you’d have to do Ctrl/Cmd + Enter to reply, since Enter just adds another line break. And there is the consecutive reply limit of 3 by default. This is because it wants to encourage you to add more thought into your responses by default, rather than lots of noisy replies.
Maybe Discord might address some of these in future. Or maybe Discord is just trying to solve a different problem to Discourse altogether — like just having something better than the pinned messages feature, to retain history, while still encouraging a very low barrier to joining discussion. In that case, there is still room for Discourse, and much of the discussion here was extremely speculative.
I think perhaps it’s a little over-exaggeration on the influence of Discord. The Babble chat plugin was around for years to express this desire for chat beforehand Babble - A Chat Plugin
These were genuine problems that I had with Discord, and sure there are a lot of things I like about the platform.
But it’s frustrating when people present the most popular kid on the block as someone who you are expected to copy from, even if it doesn’t make sense for you. You can end up with a conglomerate a bit like Wordpress has, from copying whatever is most currently popular over the years and trying to be all things to all people.
So it’s worth exercising caution.