素晴らしい！
Discourse チーム、おめでとうございます
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いいですね、とても良いニュースです。
「いいね！」 3
その通りですが、隠れた問題は、Facebook や Discord などの「無料」ソフトウェアは、実は「本当に無料」ではないということです。セットアップは無料で、インストールも最初から完了していますが、あなたが商品なのです！
オープンソースは少し異なります。一度「無料」となると、豚小屋のたとえで言うところの豚になってしまい、元には戻れません。
私たちは現在、無料でホストされる Discourse インスタンス向けに、YouTube、Patreon、GitHub プログラムへの参加をより容易にする取り組みを検討しています。
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/
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Apologies in advance for A: my late reply, and B: the length of it (which partly results from A 
).
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.
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. 
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. 
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. 
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.
Yes, absolutely! And I’ve echoed that above too, as I’m replying down the thread in linear fashion.
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…
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.
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.
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!
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:
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. 
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えっと…ありがとう。でも、その結論にどうたどり着いたのかよくわかりません。もしかして誤解されているのでしょうか？私はどのフォーラムも運営もモデレーションもしていませんし、そんなことには全く興味もありません！ただ、4 つのフォーラムで読むことも書くこともとても多いです（週に 15〜20 時間ほど）。だから、Discourse を「選んだ」わけではありません。ブログに書くためだけに使っているだけです。でも、それは主に「使うのが楽しいから」です。他のソフトウェアが楽しくて使いやすくなれば、いつでも乗り換えることもできるでしょう。でも、他の 3 つのソフトウェアがそこまで到達するには、まだかなり遠い道のりがあります。
だから、選択バイアスなど全くありません。私がここにいる理由は、繰り返しになりますが、Discourse が楽しいからです。もっとその楽しさを求めています。ユーザー体験を、一見限界のように思えるところまで、いや、それを超えて向上させたいのです。使いにくいからではなく、使いやすく、かつさらに多くの可能性を示してくれるからです。
（もちろん、Discourse を実装したりモデレーションしたりするのが難しいか簡単かについては、全くわかりません。それは私が言いたいことではありません。）
私は、私の最初の投稿で、私にとって非常に重要な例をかなり多く挙げたと考えています。でも、もっと挙げることができます。あるいは、単純な ユーザーテスト比較をして「あなたの言うことが正しい」と証明することもできます。
もっと挑戦的な課題をください。4 つのフォーラムで比較してみせます（他のフォーラムがどんなソフトウェアを使っているかはわかりませんが）…
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「選択バイアス」とは何か、もしかすると誤解されているかもしれませんか？意味。Discourse の管理者だと仮定してしまい、申し訳ありません。このコミュニティの人々に対してそのような一般的な前提を抱いていることに気づき、それがどの程度真実なのか疑問に思います。とはいえ、あなたは Discourse を利用したり、好んだり、あるいは何らかの形で「関与」しているからこそ「ここ」にいるわけで、ここにいる大多数の人々も同様でしょう。これが選択バイアスの定義です：あるものが良いか楽しいか、あるいはその他を問う際、すでにそのものを利用したり、語ったり、管理したり、改善したりするために時間を費やしている人々にだけ尋ねることはできません。彼らはそのものに時間やエネルギーを捧げるという選択をしており、それはそのものに対する好意を意味します。
別の言い方をすれば、IPB や vBulletin、NodeBB、あるいは他のフォーラムへ行き、そのフォーラムのツールを愛しているかどうかをユーザーに聞いてみてください。おそらく「はい」という回答が「いいえ」よりも多くなるでしょう。ここも同様です。ご理解いただけたでしょうか。
ツールが必要・利用可能だが、あえて「使用しない」ことを選ぶ人々のほうが、製品を「どのように改善できるか」について最も優れた洞察を持っていることが多いと思います。もちろん、これは既存ユーザーのニーズと慎重にバランスを取る必要があります。ユーザーを満足させることが何より重要な仕事です！しかし、多くの企業は成長を望んでおり、そのためには新規顧客を見つける必要があります。その際、一般的に人々がなぜ自社の製品を選ばないのかを理解することが不可欠です。
これが私の見解です。このスレッドのあなたや他の誰かを誤って特徴づけていないことを願っていますし、以前にあなたに対して特定の前提を置いてしまったことをお詫びします。
「いいね！」 1
oshyan さん、改めてありがとうございます。実は、さまざまな種類の選択バイアスについてはよく知っています。それでも、私に関してあなたがどの種類のバイアスを指しているのか、いまだに確信が持てません。
どうして私が所属する他の 3 つのフォーラムのソフトウェアにこれほどイライラするのでしょうか。2 つについては「嫌悪」にまで至っています。それでも、コンテンツはまあまあ良いので、まだ使い続けています。
使っていないソフトウェアについて、ユーザーにどうやって意見を聞けるのでしょうか（そもそもどうやって彼らに接触できるのでしょうか）。
なぜ、ソフトウェアを嫌っている私のような人に聞かないのでしょうか。Discourse をさらに良くするための私の数少ないアイデアのほとんどは、Discourse 自体が既に可能にしている機能です。ただ、私のフォーラムでは「すべて」を導入する余裕がないだけなのです。もし他の 3 つの製品について改善策を聞かれたら、私は一つの洞察を伝えたいと思います。それらは互いから何も模倣すべきではない（なんて考えはありえません！）——むしろ、Discourse を模倣すべきなのです。
ああ、わかった、他の 2 つには一つ良い点があります。多様な「いいね」のオプション（サポート、ありがとう、役に立つ、あるいは複数の絵文字など）ですね。しかし、Discourse の絵文字の速さ（入力中であっても）、そして別行で表示された際の拡大機能は、その点で十分に対抗できます。
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別のトピックに移動した方が良いでしょう。「リンクされたトピックとして返信」機能を使ってください。