Discourse annuncia investimento Serie A da $20m da parte di Pace Capital e First Round Capital | Blog

[UnicornX]

Ottimo!
Congratulazioni al team di Discourse

[Muhammed_Bawady (Muhammed Fawzy Ali Bawady)]

Sembra una cosa positiva, ottime notizie

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Esatto, ma il problema nascosto è che il software “gratuito” come Facebook, Discord, ecc. non è davvero gratuito… è gratuito da configurare e l’installazione è già stata effettuata per te… ma sei tu il prodotto!

Il software open source funziona in modo leggermente diverso. È complicato perché, una volta scelto la strada del “gratuito”, nel senso dei maiali al recinto, non c’è ritorno.

Stiamo sicuramente lavorando per rendere più semplice l’accesso ai nostri programmi YouTube, Patreon e GitHub per le istanze di Discourse con hosting gratuito.

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

Voglio solo unirmi a @codinghorror e @jord8on nel sostenere che Discourse sia divertente e non solo privo di attriti o semplice. Sono un utente frequente di 4 forum sullo stesso argomento di salute.

La tua esperienza è sicuramente preziosa e utile da ascoltare! Anche la tua, come quella di Jeff, è senza dubbio soggetta a bias di selezione. È molto probabile che chiunque scriva qui su Meta non sia solo un utente di Discourse, ma probabilmente stia gestendo o almeno moderando un’istanza di Discourse. Quindi è molto più probabile che chiunque qui lo apprezzi. Lo apprezzo anch’io, anche se non tanto quanto te e Jeff.

Ehm… grazie, ma: non sono sicuro di come si arrivi a quella conclusione - forse hai frainteso? Non gestisco né modero alcun forum, e non sarei assolutamente interessato a farlo! Leggo e scrivo molto su 4 forum (forse 15-20 ore a settimana). Quindi non ho “selezionato” Discourse, se non per scrivere un blog su di esso - ma questo principalmente perché è divertente da usare. Potrei cambiare idea in qualsiasi momento se il software degli altri diventasse mai divertente e facile da usare, ma per gli altri 3 c’è ancora molta strada da fare. Quindi niente bias di selezione. E il motivo per cui sono qui è perché - ancora una volta - Discourse - è - divertente, e voglio averne di più. Migliorare la mia esperienza utente fino ai limiti apparenti… e oltre… non perché sia difficile da usare, ma perché è facile e allo stesso tempo apre a nuove possibilità.
(Certo, non ho la minima idea se implementare o moderare con Discourse sia difficile o facile, non è di questo che sto parlando.)
Credo di aver già fornito molti esempi che per me significano molto nel mio primo post qui sopra, ma potrei farne di altri. Oppure potrei fare un confronto naive con un test utente per “provare che hai ragione” : dammi altre sfide e le confronterò sui 4 forum (non so quale software usino gli altri)…

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Hmm, forse hai frainteso il significato di “bias di selezione” means? Mi scuso per aver dato per scontato che tu fossi un amministratore di Discourse; questo mi porta a riflettere sul fatto che ho spesso questa presunzione generale riguardo alle persone qui e mi chiedo quanto sia vera. Detto questo, tu sei qui perché usi, apprezzi o sei in qualche modo “investito” in Discourse, il che è probabilmente vero anche per la stragrande maggioranza delle persone presenti. Questa è la definizione di bias di selezione: quando chiedi se una cosa è buona o divertente, o qualsiasi altra cosa, non puoi limitarti a chiedere a chi già dedica tempo a usarla, parlarne, amministrarla o migliorarla. Hanno fatto una scelta consapevole di dedicare tempo ed energia a quella cosa, il che implica un favore verso di essa.

In altri termini, vai su forum basati su IPB, vBulletin, NodeBB o altri e chiedi se gli utenti lì amano lo strumento su cui è basato il forum. Probabilmente otterrai più risposte affermative che negative, esattamente come qui. Vedi cosa intendo?

Penso che siano spesso le persone che hanno un bisogno o un uso per uno strumento ma scelgono di non usarlo a possedere alcune delle migliori intuizioni su come un prodotto potrebbe essere migliorato. Ovviamente, questo deve essere attentamente bilanciato con le esigenze degli utenti esistenti. Bisogna mantenere gli utenti felici, è sicuramente il compito numero uno! Ma la maggior parte delle aziende vuole crescere, e per farlo devi trovare nuovi clienti, il che generalmente implica capire perché le persone non scelgono la tua.

Questa è la mia prospettiva, in ogni caso. Spero di non aver frainteso te o chiunque altro in questa discussione, e mi scuso nuovamente per aver fatto certe assunzioni su di te in precedenza.

[JayCS]

Grazie ancora, oshyan. In realtà conosco vari tipi di bias di selezione. E ancora non sono sicuro a quale tu ti riferisca riguardo a me…
Come mai sono molto irritato dal software degli altri 3 forum a cui partecipo? Al punto di “odiare” due di essi. Eppure li uso ancora perché i contenuti sono abbastanza OK…
Come puoi chiedere agli utenti di un software che non usano? (Come fai anche solo a contattarli?)
Perché non chiedere a qualcuno come me che usa un software che odia? La maggior parte delle poche idee che ho su come Discourse potrebbe essere ancora migliore per me sono funzionalità che Discourse già permette, semplicemente il mio forum non può permettersi “tutto”. E se mi chiedessero come migliorare gli altri 3 prodotti, ho un’osservazione da fare: non dovrebbero copiare nulla l’uno dall’altro - che pensiero orribile! - dovrebbero provare a copiare Discourse…
Ah ok, ce n’è una bella cosa che gli altri due hanno: possibilità diversificate di “mi piace”… (supporto, grazie, utile; o diversi emoji). Ma la velocità degli emoji di Discourse anche durante la scrittura, così come l’ingrandimento quando sono su una riga separata, compensa questo aspetto.