I suppose Discourse is in a tight spot when it comes to choosing and implementing their own features for the chat functionality, since they have to prioritise people who are used to forums and probably don’t like chats (whereas Discord has all the chat-proficient users they could want to test and get feedback from; though Discord must be in a similar spot when it comes to making forum-like features, but more on that later). Most of Discourse’s own features could eventually be cloned through one of Discord’s countless user-made bots, save for one:
Coming from using Discord more than Discourse, it seems quite clear to me that the only truly fundamental point of difference between chats and forums at this point is how discoverable the content is and how long a conversation can persist (e.g. by being bumped; turned into another thread, etc.). If Discourse had a proper chat functionality already, I would put that front and centre as the first thing that a user interacts with when joining the community. As @erlend_sh describes in another thread:
Discourse has very little “over” Discord when it comes to this competition within the stack; people still struggle with losing users to Facebook groups, when Facebook is languishing like never before. Differentiation based on strict typological differences (“Discourse is a forum; Discord is a chat”) will become meaningless very soon, and thinking along those lines is already simply naive. It seems like Discord is close to solving their own “signal to noise ratio” problem that @codinghorror mentioned 9 years ago in his Discourse launch article:
At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That’s why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that’s why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already .
Discord seems like it’s about to do the same judo flip that Jeff used on the oldschool forum software he criticised, but to modern forums like Reddit, Facebook, and Discourse. What I think sets Discourse apart strategically from Discord at this juncture is that Discourse is currently a forum software, and Discord is currently a chat software. Discord is therefore leveraging how its chats work in order to branch out towards the most effective ways of integrating forum-like functionalities into their system (that they look like forums is incidental).
Discourse should do the same, and branch out based on what existing forums are already doing well. For example, it could be a killer feature if Discourse allowed users to create new chat contexts from existing forum posts, much like how Discord allows users to create “threads” from any existing message within the chat. Users could also take content from Discourse chat and turn them into new forum threads, or wiki articles. Add Discourse’s sophisticated, bottom-up moderation functionalities to this way of organically branching out discussions and you might get something so new that it can scarcely be recognised as a “forum”.
Discourse should consider pivoting to a chat-first app, at least as a mental exercise while they work on the chat.