# Discourse vs Circle

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-circle/166935
**Category:** Comparison
**Created:** [October 12, 2020, 12:31am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-circle/166935 "2020-10-12T00:31:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 19

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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [December 24, 2020, 12:55am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-circle/166935/19 "2020-12-24T00:55:49Z")

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> [@oshyan](#):
>
> and without admins having to experiment or adjust a lot of things to make it so. Some kind of “easy mode” or even ( _shudder_ ) “Facebook emulation” could actually go a long way toward bringing even more people onto the platform, for the benefit of everyone.

Sure, for example a “simple mode” where you hide the editor preview by default is something that @tobiaseigen has requested. We could also hide the toolbar buttons completely so the editor becomes a _very_ simple input box with absolutely no possibility for confusion, like so:

### Before

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/6/c/6c80edc28e3b4d14220c5b336ffdc840a57cae03.png)

### After

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/d/5/d5c908de63ca39163664992b05420d45b1bf30e0.png)

And it’s also possible to hide elements on the homepage as needed, if view counts aren’t important those could be suppressed, as well as activity date, and the number of avatars could be limited to one.

### Before

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/d/c/dc4f5b3f1316f213af66ccb75fa43baf683e04e8.png)

### After

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/f/6/f6b5241f39183ca5a154ca0293180066bb37b2eb.png)

This has come up in the past many times – and the answer is usually “turn things off via CSS”. We’ve also progressively simplified the UI over time, as you can [see here wayy back in 2015](https://meta.discourse.org/t/information-overload-some-insight-through-qualitative-interviews/34804/10).

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