Discourse Announces $20m Series A Investment by Pace Capital and First Round Capital | Blog

[UnicornX]

Great!
Congratulations Discourse Team

[Muhammed_Bawady (Muhammed Fawzy Ali Bawady)]

Sounds good very good news

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Right – but the hidden issue is “free” software like Facebook, Discord, etc isn’t really free… it is free to set up and the install is already done for you… but you’re the product!

Open source works a bit differently. It’s tricky because once you go “free”, in the pigs at the barn sense, there is no going back.

We are certainly looking at making it easier to get into our YouTube, Patreon, and Github programs for free hosted Discourse instances.

https://blog.discourse.org/2018/12/free-hosting-for-patreon-creators/
https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Apologies in advance for A: my late reply, and B: the length of it (which partly results from A ).

@codinghorror

Well, sure, but this gets into “I really don’t care for country and western music.” That’s fine. Not everybody likes every style of music.

So when you made made the claim that Discourse was “at the unique intersection of… being the easiest [debatable], most frictionless [likewise], simplest [hrm, depends how you look at it], funnest way of getting things done…” you just meant for you, and maybe some other people? Come now Jeff, you got $10 million in funding, surely what you were saying was that Discourse is - or aims to be - all those things, right? And not just to you, or a few people, but a lot of people… right?

So I’m just saying, it’s a great goal, but I think there is more work to do in all those areas. I appreciate that you find Discourse fun already, and others do too (sometimes even I do! ), but it could be more fun for more people and, more importantly, easier and simpler for more people. I fully support those goals. Also, I think @danielw hit the nail on the head with his read of what I was getting at, and his perhaps minor but useful example of usability challenges for some people.

@codinghorror

though we do tend to prioritize feedback from our hosted customers because that is essential to our survival as a business. Just take a look at a screenshot of Discourse from 2013 and compare it with today. So different!

Very true! And I do want to say that I completely understand prioritizing paying customers and the fact that Discourse is a profitable business as well as open source is one of the things I like about it, and one of the reasons I actually recommend Discourse. Sure, there are other open source forum platforms, but how much confidence can you have in their longevity if they’re mostly volunteer-run, and donation funded? You are absolutely taking the right approach here, and this recent funding round certainly speaks to that.

@codinghorror

I’m curious if there are other products you use where you’ve had lunch with a founder, on them, with gifts? I’d say that’s quite an indication of how willing we are to listen.

Hah! Such geographic serendipities are rare, but I’ve had my brushes with other luminaries. Your schwag was definitely the best though. You know, of course, that I was delighted to be able to talk to you in-person about Discourse, and the gifts have remained useful and appreciated reminders of your proactive interest in connecting with your community (and you’re right, those are really good pens! ).

That said, surely you can also appreciate that I wouldn’t be a very good critic and advocate for what I see as positive change if receipt of gifts changed what I say and how I speak my mind. I am grateful for the time and open discussion, and remain both a passionate fan, and a hopefully useful advocate for growth in new or underserved directions.

@angus

When you’re building open source software you get many requests from all quarters, on a regular basis. Some are very thorough and thought through, others are not. In fact, sometimes the level of attention to detail is inversely proportional to the level of insistence from the person requesting the thing. No matter how willing you are to engage with users you don’t have inifinite time or patience.

Yes, I can absolutely appreciate this and have direct experience of it myself, with more than 10 years spent inside a small software company. It wasn’t open source, but we ran into the same issues with feature requests, etc. There were way more request than we could ever implement, and many of them didn’t necessarily belong in the same product. Feedback triage is hard. In fact… I’m curious how, specifically, you feel open source might change that dynamic. I do think there is perhaps something in the free aspect, in that it is often argued that people who don’t pay for something don’t value it, and perhaps thus don’t understand how much effort went into its creation, how challenging it is to change/improve it, etc. We actually had a free version of our software too, it might have caused problems for us, come to think of it.

@angus

In fact, in other contexts, people would find it strange if a business started to adapt its practices based on the feedback of anyone who happened to rock up (and didn’t purchase anything).

Yes… unless you’re considering (as you most often should, at least a little) whether there are adjacent markets that you could serve without a total rethink of your product, and would gain you proportionally greater revenue vs. needed changes in your product. If said business was for example in a fast-moving technology industry with a growing number of incumbents and a rapid expansion of related possible opportunity spaces (e.g. paid courses and communities), it would be smart business to be looking real hard at why people are choosing your competitor more than your own tool for these related-but-different projects, and contemplate - as CDCK did when it created Discourse for Teams - whether you should be making changes to serve these new markets.

@angus

Yes, it’s not the only such open source project in existence, but there are relatively few paired with a successful business model. That model means you can reasonably expect it to be viable for another decade, which is not true of some of the other options out there.

Yes, absolutely! And I’ve echoed that above too, as I’m replying down the thread in linear fashion.

@angus

what we should ask ourselves as part of the community of users, communities and businesses that use it is how we can continue to build and incentivise the non-standard aspects of it which we’ve all benefited from, and will continue to for years to come.

Indeed, and I think about this a lot. For now the best I think I can do directly is to talk about and advocate for things I think could be beneficial, for myself, and the communities I work with, as well as the communities I see using other tools that I think Discourse could better meet the needs of with just a few tweaks. In the relatively near future I’m also planning to try paying for development of some plugins of interest to me. But I think the really big impact stuff, federation, and the like, is really going to require some embracing from the core team itself. I realize there is some movement toward that already…

@angus

Yes, lets keep making feature requests, raising PRs and advocating for changes we believe would be beneificial. Let’s do that as diligently as possible, and even more so. Keeping that spirit alive is just as much on us as it is on Discourse.org.

@danielw

It is frustrating to see entrepreneurs in my field praising other, more limited and more expensive community platforms than Discourse! I want Discourse to be more appealing to more people.

Yes, exactly! (and also fully in agreement with everything else you wrote) My advocacy for changes is driven by a love of Discourse and a belief that it is, in most respects, a better platform than many others out there, especially as a foundation for broader functionality (still centering around community and discussion, of course). I want more people to be choosing Discourse, and when I ask for some new feature, or design change, etc., it is with this in mind. It actually pains me at times when I see people choosing other platforms that feel less well architected.

@JayCS

Just wanna chime in with @codinghorror and @jord8on in support of Discourse being fun and not just frictionless or simple. I’m a heavy user of 4 forums on the same health topic.

Your experience is definitely good and useful to hear! It also, like Jeff’s, is no doubt subject to selection bias. It is more likely than not that anyone posting here on Meta is not just a user of Discourse, but probably running or at least moderating a Discourse instance. So it’s much more likely that anyone here will like it. I like it too, just not quite as much as you and Jeff.

@danb35

You don’t have to guess at any of those commands, you don’t have to adapt them to your environment, etc.–just copy and paste from the docs. It certainly isn’t any more challenging than the “normal” forum setup of “download tarball, extract, create database, configure PHP app to connect to database”. It’s different , but if anything, it’s less challenging–especially since you don’t already need to have a webserver, PHP, and a database all up and running first.

My experiences of the past few days directly contradict this. It is extremely difficult for someone who is savvy in a given technical area to understand, specifically, how one could make a mistake or fail to understand something or how the literal copy/paste commands wouldn’t just do the right thing. I say this as a former IT person for 15 years, who often experienced the same frustrated wonderment of how X user managed to misinterpret something in the docs, or mess up something that seemed incredibly simple to me. But… they do it. And I do too, when I’m working in an area I’m not an expert in.

Across 4 separate environments (Ubuntu native, WSL, Bitnami virtual machine, Docker) I ran into a unique set of problems in trying to setup Discourse from scratch. Every. Dang. Time. I have some logs of what came up, if you or anyone at CDCK is really curious to see, but they’re probably not quite detailed enough to be real problem cases for investigation. I do think the docs could be improved though.

Also, I keep writing a reply as I read down this thread, only to find @danielw has already written a better one. Well done sir!

@danielw

My point is, rather, that there seems to be a pervasive mis-judgement around here of how tech savvy most online community builders are. And when someone mentions this – as you say, it’s not just me – there is a tone of incredulousness, even disbelief.

Yes, I experience this too. Although it’s definitely a mix. And overall people are very nice, just… not quite believing or understanding of the problem sometimes (the problem often being someone doesn’t understand the seemingly simple directions or requirements or whatever).

Another thing I want to mention on that subject is that the really important part of community building is mostly not technical. Community builders are connectors, they are people persons, they are enablers, talkers, creators, and much more. But they are not necessarily tech people. What CDCK aims to promote is “civilized discourse”, and there is nothing inherently technical about that. I, for example, have managed to figure out how to do some cool things with Discourse, but it’s been a slog at times, and some things I’ve simply had to give up on. In contrast, I successfully ran at least 4 separate online forums on multiple other forum platforms previously. The one thing they all had in common? PHP. Look, I’m not trying to open that can of worms. But I had to say it.

Sorry, tech stack is a red herring. This is the point: in an ideal world Discourse would be as easy to spin up an instance of as a Facebook group, or at least as easy as Circle (arguably it is with hosted options, but not quite…). I’m not saying free, like Facebook, just easy. But as it stands Discourse is a technical platform to implement. Even if you get a hosted version, it’s kinda complex. In a good way! In the sense that it’s quite capable. But it’s also filled with options, jargon, and inside knowledge, if you’re not already technically-minded.

I say all this as someone who runs 1 open forum hosted on Communiteq, 1 personal “digital garden” also hosted there in a separate Discourse instance, and then my own test instance on Digital Ocean using their Docker image. Then I just spent the past week trying (and mostly failing) to get an instance setup from scratch in multiple environments (outlined above) for yet another project. I’ve tried all the major ways to setup Discourse except the official hosting (for price reasons). And while I have a technical background in other areas of tech, apparently I’m just ignorant enough to encounter some these pain points. I can only imagine how hard it would be for someone less technically savvy than I.

Just as we now have Discourse for Teams, I wonder if there is a place for a “Discourse for Small Communities” or “Simple Discourse” or something. An easier, less complicated, more visually “friendly” (colorful, rounded, etc.) version. Just thinking out loud, but the specific solution is less important than simply understanding and acknowledging the problem: Discourse might benefit from “grandma mode”.

And with that I echo your final statement:

@danielw

I don’t want to keep complaining on a page announcing a great success. Very happy for the team, and I hope the platform goes from strength to strength.

@codinghorror

We are certainly looking at making it easier to get into our YouTube, Patreon, and Github programs for free hosted Discourse instances.

Great to see this (not all of which I was aware of). Definitely glad to see this, and I may have some people to connect with these options now.

Thank you as always @codinghorror for your engagement around these topics. We don’t always agree, but I do always appreciate your contributions to any discussion I’m involved in. Thank you as well for lunch. If you ever want to get together and chat about these kinds of things in-person (or just have a drink and not talk about work ), I’m not far away.

[JayCS]

@oshyan

@JayCS

Just wanna chime in with @codinghorror and @jord8on in support of Discourse being fun and not just frictionless or simple. I’m a heavy user of 4 forums on the same health topic.

Your experience is definitely good and useful to hear! It also, like Jeff’s, is no doubt subject to selection bias. It is more likely than not that anyone posting here on Meta is not just a user of Discourse, but probably running or at least moderating a Discourse instance. So it’s much more likely that anyone here will like it. I like it too, just not quite as much as you and Jeff.

Errm… thanks, but: Not sure how you come to that conclusion - praps you’ve misunderstood? I am neither running nor moderating any forum, and wdnt in the slightest be interested in doing so! I just read & write a lot on 4 forums (praps 15-20h/w). So I haven’t “selected” Discourse, other than to write a blog on - but that mainly because it is fun to use. Which I could change any time if the software of the others ever got fun and easier to use, but that is a really long way for the other 3 to go. So not the least selection bias. And the reason I am here is because - again - Discourse - is - fun, which I want more of. Improving my user-experience to the seeming limits … and above… not cos it’s hard to use, but easy and at the same time pointing to more.
(Of course I haven’t the slightest if implementing or moderating with Discourse is hard or easy, that’s not what I’m on about.)
I think I’ve given quite a lot of examples that mean a lot to me in my first post above, but I could give more. Or do a naive user test comparison to ‘prove you right’ : gimme some more challenges and I’ll compare them on the 4 forums (no idea what software the others use)…

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Hmm, perhaps you misunderstand what “selection bias” means? I apologize for assuming you were a Discourse admin, and it makes me reflect that I do have that general assumption of people here and I wonder how true it is. That said, you are here because you use, like, or are otherwise “invested” in Discourse, which is probably true of the vast majority of people here as well. That is the definition of selection bias: in asking whether a thing is good or fun, or whatever, you cannot just ask the people who already spend their time using, talking about, administrating, or improving it. They have made some choice to devote time/energy to that thing, which implies favor toward it.

Put another way, go over to the IPB or vBulletin or NodeBB or other forums and ask if the users there love the tool that forum is about. Likely you’ll get more yes answers than no, same as here. See what I mean?

I think it is often the people that have a need/use for a tool but choose not to use it who often have some of the best insights as to how a product might be improved. Of course this must be carefully balanced with the needs of existing users. Gotta keep the users happy, that’s certainly job #1! But most companies want to grow, and to do that you gotta find new customers, which generally involves understanding why people don’t choose yours.

That’s my perspective anyway. Hopefully I’m not mischaracterizing you or anyone else in this thread, and I do apologize for making certain assumptions about you previously.

[JayCS]

Thanks again, oshyan. I am actually familiar with various kinds of selection bias. And I am still not sure which kind you are referring to regarding me…
How come I am very irritated by the software of the other 3 forums I am on? To the point of “hate” of two. But I still use them because the content is fairly OK…
How can you ask users about a software they do not use? (How even get hold of them?)
Why not ask someone like me who uses software he hates? Most of the few ideas I have how Discourse might be even better for me are ones that Discourse already enables, just my forum can’t afford ‘all of it’. And if they’d ask me how the other 3 products might be improved I have one insight for them: They should copy nothing from one another - perish the thought! - they should try to copy Discourse…
Ah OK, there’s one nice thing 2 others have: diversified “like” possibilities… (support, thanks, useful; or several emojis). But the speed of Discourse’s emojis even while writing, as well as enlarging them when on a separate line, makes up for that.