Discord is taking aim at Discourse. How does Discourse remain unique and stand out from the crowd?

General
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I absolutely agree. What Discourse promises to become is tantalising, yet it doesn’t come across as being committed to this radicalism.

Discourse is sometimes referred to as a “legacy platform” (e.g. this article from last year) in comparisons against modern platforms like Discord and Circle; and I can’t imagine searching “[keyword] Discourse” the way it’s normal to search “[keyword] Reddit”, even if this brought up Discourse forums in the results in the first place. One of the main reasons for this is that (for whatever reason) forums tend to become insular, and full of people who have never tried the new thing (and instead opt to argue on the forum about why they already know all about the new thing). That’s a far worse kind of noise than the noise typical of chats.

Fast-moving, topic-agnostic communication is a powerful counter against this trend towards decay in online communities. People can go do other stuff outside of the platform, come back with thoughts and links, and people who don’t keep up don’t get to participate because the discourse moves on.

@codinghorror gives a good explanation of why chats are good for forums here, even within the context of a single forum:

But it’s worrying that he even had to explain chats are not antithetical to “quality content, or with content at all”. It sounds like Facebook-exclusive users describing TikTok without having used it themselves to get how it works. As a discussion about how to design a “discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet”, that’s a non-starter. And it’s getting pretty close to a decade since the initial release.

The new generation of community software that embraces that ambiguity of platform design are “simple, modern, and fun”. What was “simple, modern, fun” a decade ago isn’t simple, modern, fun today. For example, see how similar the UI designs are between modern community platforms and modern chats. Chats promote speed and novelty, and the attendant UI designs support this feature. Speed and terseness is a good thing most of the time, especially when there’s a way to readily pursue depth as appropriate (i.e. chat-to-forum features). It’s fundamentally misguided to think that speed and novelty are opposed to serious and meaningful conversations.

I think we have to be careful here when thinking about what it means for the solution to have “already existed”. That being said, I’m inclined to say something similar about federation, and think that Discourse could benefit massively from federated chats and forums. Maybe only the chats could be federated, but help to bridge Discourse instances indirectly.

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22

That’s interesting. I’ve never ONCE searched “[keyword] Reddit”, even prior to my interest in Discourse. Fashions like that scare me to some extent, as they take away from the open nature of the web (Obsession with Facebook or Instagram are other examples, but that’s for another time …) Given Reddit is such an awkward platform to use (worst of all, the “click to expand conversation” dynamic), it’s surprising that it’s taken hold so much. Perhaps it filled a gap?

I would hope the SEO of my sites are strong enough to attract clicks without the word “Discourse” being included in the search.

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23

People use the old.reddit.com subdomain when they want to have all the conversations already expanded, and there’s extensions that enable things like that.

I think it’s more that subreddits can be rigidly focuses on a single topic in a way that reduces off-topic conversations, and aggressively sorts posts based on upvotes/downvotes. How it organises threaded conversations hierarchically is better than Discourse for conversations that don’t require the full context (i.e. the kind that users look for on Google and read without any intention of participating in the conversation themselves).

It’s interesting to consider how people use and contribute to Stack Overflow, since that feels more like the half-way between anonymous visitors to Reddit and community members on a Discourse forum. I wonder where a Discourse forum with a chat would fall.

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Perhaps. I’ve been an Open Source Zealot and evangelist for several decades now, and have (almost?) never used Discord. So there are plenty of reasons to discount my knee-jerk reactions here.

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25

For me it wouldn’t be so much for a fashion reason but more so for a predictable format. For example, if I’m around a table with 10 people and ask them “What’s your favorite food?” The reddit format would be then asking people to write down their favorite food on a piece of paper and everyone to hand me their piece of paper, allowing many independent answers. The Discourse format would be to have each person answer aloud one by one, going around the table. In short, reddit and other threaded formats often allow answers in parallel whereas Discourse (without plugins) focuses on answers in series. I don’t think one is inherently better than the other, just better for different purposes.

In that context, if I’m looking for a conversation-in-series, I may want to search for ‘[keyword] Discourse’ to find some of the best ones on the internet because I think Discourse does that roundtable format better than most.

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26

Yeah this is filling a gap Google created. SEO blogspam is so prevalent that if you’re searching for a product, the first page is often filled with sponsored content. Adding reddit to a search will increase your odds of getting results that at least appear to be a discussion between real people.

Reddit benefits from this quite a lot as a centralized platform. Discourse isn’t centralized and is whitelabeled more often than not, so it’s more likely that searching “[product] forum” is going to get you Discourse results… which seems healthier for the web.

Brave is working on adding discussion-focused search to their search engine… which seems to align better with our approach and can benefit everyone:

Google specifically removed their own “discussion” search filter years ago. Maybe it’ll make a comeback.

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You could very well be right.

Also, there’s an extension for Google Chrome that appears to bring it back.

Personally, I’d be thrilled if Google puts discussions front and center. It could help revive forums as a whole.

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If you try searching “[keyword] forum” you can see it’s no good for this case either, because it brings up forums related to the keyword topic (which is actually great if you’re looking for a forum; not so much if your search is granular).

Google isn’t even serving their own Google Groups properly. Hoping Google will align with what’s “healthier for the web” (unclear what that means; more indieweb sites?) doesn’t sound like an approach at all… unless there’s federation features planned that will shift the balance?

Also, “discourse” as a name has is really hard to use as a keyword (everybody from Twitter political commentators to academics use it):
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I wonder how well search engines handle treating discussions as a single set like they might do with domains, when putting pages onto a subdomain will worsen the SEO for them compared to putting them all onto one domain. Brave’s Discussions feature doesn’t work well right now, but of course it’s only been a week since launch.

These turned out to be for ads, not discussions. You have to wonder what Google thinks when they hear “discussions” (consider that this no longer means “forums”), and what they actually want out of displaying discussions in the search results. It looks like a way to cut into feed-based sites’ market (which display sponsored content within the same context as discussions). I have a feeling they’ll start testing YouTube Shorts in the search results, since they’ve just started rolling out ads inside YouTube shorts.

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31

Lol. Did they say that about Slack at some point? I’m sure they did.

Discord is great, but the future of communication is not throw-away ephemeral, forgettable noise.

The problem Discord has is at some point people will cotton onto the fact they are losing control of their data. Once a business gets big enough they will want to consider their options.

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They did! And it grew like crazy and was acquired for $27 billion. So whether it was or wasn’t, it sure made an impact. I think in particular their approach to integrations and treating chat as an interaction model for taking a variety of actions was actually fairly clever and forward-thinking. That’s now being adopted by many other tools.

I don’t really understand comments like this. Discord is a tool which, like Discourse, can be used in many ways, with varying degrees of quality. Go read through the Obsidian Discord where they’re having super in-depth and valuable conversations about knowledge management, productivity workflows, etc. and see if you still feel like it’s all “forgettable noise”. I’ll grant that the way the platform works does bias it towards “forgettable” at the least (“noise” is a needlessly uncharitable and factually inaccurate descriptor IMO), and I do wish people would use less inherently-ephemeral platforms (e.g. Discourse). But that doesn’t change the fact that people do use Discord for some very valuable and interesting purposes. Again, not my favorite tool, but neither is Slack, and Slack runs the daily interaction of 1000s of valuable companies…

I sure hope so! But what I’ve found, disappointingly, is that too few people really care about data ownership. More people care about “privacy”, hence the recent Facebook backlash, but I really don’t think that’s about data ownership as much as “not wanting big companies to have my data and sell it” (which is a far more relatable and visceral motivation for most). So, while again I agree with you, I wouldn’t count on this happening…

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33

This is not a fair comparison (as you point out).

How about the number of enterprise customers or their combined market cap?

Discord has minimised the entry barrier and perfected the spin up in a millisecond workflow. The barrier is so low, there’s no need to think about creating one or making sure it has a meaningful existence. Many of these “servers” are tiny and dead. My friend told me he created one the other day. I have no idea if anyone actually goes “there”, I’ve never used it, I have no need, I just DM him.

A subset of chat channels is in no way comparable to the utility of a full unix VPS with web app, database and a completely customisable set of functionality. Discourse is a platform, not a set of chat addresses.

No doubt Discords scalability and architecture are admirable and a beautiful thing to conceive. As a solution for people to have audio meetings or take part in shared experiences online it is fantastic.

Discord has also set the web back: there are support communities on there answering the same questions over and over and over. What a terrible waste of manpower, so inefficient. (The only thing worse is a proof of work algorithm … but I digress)

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34

Agreed. Our recently-retained SEO folk have pointed this out as well, especially since Google sometimes docks main sites for behaviour of subdomains (which is so braindead of them, but whatever).

I happen to agree though - I think there’s a real opportunity for Discourse to provide value where discord never could in the fact that discussions are open to the internet and, in theory, could be well-indexed in search engines.

Additionally, I wonder if Discourse could benefit from it being easier to start a community? I get the feeling that Discord is popular in large part because it takes about 5 minutes to start a community there, for free, with no server investment, and it happens to have a bazillion integrations with so many platforms that themselves don’t have good community building tools.

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35

Sure, fair enough. So set aside the number of servers and focus on MAU then, i.e. actual active people using the service for some purpose they feel is of benefit to them. Do you think Discourse is anywhere near 150m MAU across every instance? I’d be deeply shocked if it is, though I know there is no way to know for sure.

You’re right, they have different purposes, serve (somewhat) different markets, have different hosting and distribution and profit models. But in my experience there is a lot of overlap in certain areas of their respective markets, and if one or the other were to do a better job of integrating the value prop of the other service, many would likely consolidate for convenience, efficiency, etc. Hopefully Discourse becomes that consolidation point and not Discord, but that’s what this whole conversation is about: is CDCK doing enough to make that happen? Do they even want that? If so, what’s their vision to accomplish it besides adding a chat component?

There is no “could” about it IMHO, it is definitely a yes, it would benefit. That said, to-date this is not within Discourse/CDCK’s business model, and due to its hosting requirements (Docker, min 2GB RAM, etc.), it seems unlikely to become anyone else’s either. Communiteq does a great job of making it at least more affordable, but there’s still a big gap between $20/mo and free. And I think it becomes a fair question then of whether Discourse even wants to try to compete with free. I do think efforts to make Discourse cheaper and easier to setup, host, and maintain should be taken quite seriously, at the least. “Free” does not need to be the goal, but “reasonably affordable and easy” should. Digital Ocean on a $10/mo droplet is serviceable, but the knowledge and effort gaps from “Free Discord server setup” to “Setting up and understanding Digital Ocean and then setting up and understanding Discourse” is pretty significant. Maybe that can be narrowed…

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36

Well I’m surprised you really compare both products on just the “chat” / text feature…

For my community, we use both. And Discord it useful because of the AUDIO chat & video streaming features. The chat is better now but it took years to get there AND the thread feature is a joke, even our core users never see one unless they are invited in it…

To be clear, anything worth more than 2 lines of text will move to discourse. And our moderation do help to achieve that. We also try to minimize the community fragmentation by redirecting new users to the forum if needed.

Discord is very much like IRC: everything before the last hour is dead (much less on busy servers) and offers NO value to your community. And everything is owned by discord anyway. If people want to make the Facebook Group mistake AGAIN, let them have fun.

The new “forum” stuff will be very interesting for 100% Discord communities, online streamers with 0 web presence (that’s stupid but that’s another story), etc.

Yes but what is the balance? Spoiler alert: discord never made a dollar yet. That’s why they are pushing HARD their “premium” services and almost were bought by Microsoft last year. The day they force ppl to pay or are bought by a megacorp with a poor image is the day they start to die.

In fact, I’ll argue that Discord is under MUCH more pressure than Discourse. They need to turn a profit fast, and there is alternatives growing on their market (like Guilded.gg owned by the super-toxic Roblox makers, again, a story for another time).

As a user, I’m very happy with the dev. pace of Discourse and I really don’t think they need to overreact. And knowing the MASTER of the product, he will shrug this whole conversation, as he should. :wink:

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37

I think there’s a huge difference in philosophy of course.

Discourse gives you the freedom to walk away, create your own brand, keep your own data, be independently discoverable by anyone on the internet …

AND STILL you get free upgrades from the same core team (and some plugin providers like ourselves)!

How is that not really amazing?

OK there’s still significant work involved and some cost to run your own instance, but they have a hosted solution for those people who need it.

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If people keep making the same “mistake” over and over again, maybe it’s not their fault, maybe they just don’t have any better alternatives? People actually get a ton of real value out of Facebook groups, even as many dislike having to do it on Facebook. But what is the alternative? Discourse is not currently a reasonable one for a majority of that user and admin base.

Again I’ll point to the very history of Discourse itself, where it was able to “eat the lunch” of older, established forum platforms because it wasn’t stuck in old thinking. This is a classic business revolution problem: you start as the revolutionary (let’s say Google), and you end up just being the establishment, and someone else comes in to eat your lunch eventually. Unless… you can stay open minded and forward-thinking.

I 100% agree with you that it’s amazing, but I also 100% don’t understand why it’s relevant to this conversation. We (I think?) all want Discourse to not just succeed now, but well into the future, to be able to continue providing those free updates and maintaining a competitive product. That’s what this conversation is about.

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I’m clearly not the only one asking similar questions… :thinking:

This tweet sums it up pretty well.

Slack is so well-known nowadays that people are surprised when they learn that their friends have never heard of it. That’s how popular it is. I genuinely wish the same thing could be said about Discourse.

…And holy :poop:! Speak of the devil! The technology gods must be listening in on me… :eyes:

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40

One area where Discord is strong and Discourse is not is their mobile app for Android and iOS. This applies to the rest of “social media” players too. This is fully understandable when you know the economies and business models at play for both companies, but users don’t know, won’t care.

Discourse’s mobile-first approach is a huge achievement in web development, but limited to the constraints of web development. Meanwhile, users’ expectations are now set by the products of Discord, Instagram, Slack and the likes, who have been pouring millions in their mobile apps.

It’s a hard problem to solve, but it’s a problem for adoption especially when we are talking about chat features.

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Hmmm …

Discord is a React Native app … and so is Discourse’s Hub as well as the (not official) whitelisted mobile app.

You will also note that the desktop experience of Discord looks identical on the web as in the Discord app … just like Discourse.

The Discord app may benefit from the use of lower level React components for how it performs and behaves in React Native, whilst Discourse’s apps depend a lot on the Webview Component of React Native, but I’m not sure all the difference can be explained by the technology being utilised, and I have not noticed any performance issues.

What elements of the interface do you feel are better in Discord?

I personally think Discourse’s approach is completely reasonable and helps streamline development and maximises platform rollout options, essentially two types of formats (desktop, mobile) but deployment to all modern browsers, iOS and Android?

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IMO It’s not about the interface or performance. The main problem with the mobile app is that there are still no notifications on Discourse Hub on iOS for sites that are not on the official hosting. From a technical point of view I fully understand and support that but it is a large turnoff for a lot of people.

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