太棒了！
祝贺 Discourse 团队
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听起来不错，真是个好消息。
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没错——但隐藏的问题是，像 Facebook、Discord 这样的“免费”软件并非真正免费……它们只是免费部署，安装也已为你完成……但你才是产品！
开源软件的运作方式则有所不同。这有点棘手，因为一旦你像农场里的猪那样选择了“免费”，就再也无法回头了。
我们确实正在努力让免费托管的 Discourse 实例更容易接入我们的 YouTube、Patreon 和 GitHub 计划。
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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呃……谢谢，但是：我不确定你是怎么得出这个结论的——也许你误解了？我既没有运营也没有管理任何论坛，而且对此毫无兴趣！我只是在四个论坛上大量阅读和写作（大约每周 15-20 小时）。所以我并没有“选择”Discourse，除了在这里写了一篇博客——但这主要是因为它用起来很有趣。如果其他三个论坛的软件也能变得有趣且易用，我随时可以换过去，但其他三个平台要达到那个水平，还有很长的路要走。
所以根本不存在什么选择偏差。我来这里的原因——再次强调——是因为 Discourse 很有趣，我想要更多这种体验。将我的用户体验提升到看似极限……甚至超越……并不是因为它难用，而是因为它简单易用，同时还能引领我们发现更多可能。
（当然，我完全不知道实施或管理 Discourse 是难是易，这并不是我想讨论的重点。）
我觉得我在 上面的第一篇文章 中已经举了很多对我很重要的例子，但我还可以再举一些。或者做一个天真的 用户测试对比来“证明你是对的” 
：再给我一些挑战，我会在四个论坛上对它们进行比较（我不知道其他三个论坛用的是什么软件）……
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嗯，或许你误解了“选择偏差”的含义？我为之前假设你是 Discourse 管理员而道歉，这也让我反思，我确实对这里的人普遍抱有这种假设，我不禁怀疑这种假设在多大程度上是真实的。话虽如此，你在这里是因为你使用、喜欢或以某种方式“投入”于 Discourse，这一点很可能也适用于这里的绝大多数人。这就是选择偏差的定义：在询问某事物是否好或有趣，或其他任何问题时，你不能只问那些已经花时间使用、讨论、管理或改进它的人。他们做出了一些选择，将时间/精力投入到该事物上，这暗示着对其的偏好。
换种说法，你去 IPB、vBulletin、NodeBB 或其他论坛，问问那里的用户是否喜欢该论坛所使用的工具。你很可能会得到比“不”更多的“是”的回答，这里的情况也是如此。明白我的意思了吗？
我认为，那些有需求/用途却选择不使用该工具的人，往往对如何改进产品可能提供最好的见解。当然，这必须与现有用户的需求仔细平衡。必须让用户满意，这无疑是首要任务！但大多数公司都希望增长，要做到这一点，你就必须找到新客户，而这通常涉及理解人们为何不选择你的产品。
这仅仅是我的观点。希望我没有曲解你或本线程中的任何人，我为之前对你做出某些假设而道歉。
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再次感谢，oshyan。我实际上对各种类型的选择偏差都很熟悉。但我仍然不确定你指的是我哪方面的偏差……
为什么我对另外三个论坛的软件感到如此恼火，甚至到了“讨厌”其中两个的地步？但我仍然在使用它们，因为内容还算可以……
你怎么能向用户询问他们根本不使用的软件呢？（甚至如何联系到他们？）
为什么不问问像我这样使用自己讨厌的软件的人呢？我关于 Discourse 如何能更好地为我服务的少数想法中，大部分其实是 Discourse 已经支持的功能，只是我的论坛负担不起“全部”而已。如果他们问我如何改进那另外三款产品，我有一个见解：它们应该互相模仿——千万别这么想！——它们应该尝试模仿 Discourse…… 
啊，对了，另外两个平台有一项不错的功能：多样化的“点赞”选项（支持、感谢、有用，或多种表情符号）。但 Discourse 在输入时表情符号的响应速度，以及在单独一行时放大显示的效果，足以弥补这一点。
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最好通过“回复为链接主题”功能将此内容移至另一个话题。