It seems that someone is trying to popularize the forums based on discourse.
What’s this company? Who is marketing?
This has been discussed previously:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-makes-discourse-org-hosting-better-than-Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting)-com-if-anything/27526/2?u=awole20
3 Likes
Thanks a lot. Then do I need to delete this post? Or I just change the name to:
How do Discourse System Market itself ?
In fact, I want to listen more about the opinions from the marketing people. You know, when a product is going on market, many things will change.
And Now I think , the discourse system is not so market friendly.
I want to listen to some peofessional ideas. Could you please give an intro here? @michaeld (Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) founder)
E[quote=“xiasummer, post:1, topic:57221”]
It seems that someone is trying to popularize the forums based on discourse.
What’s this company? Who is marketing?
[/quote]
We’re not trying to do that - we (me and @rgj) have already been doing that pretty succesfully for 3.5 years - we got our first hosting customer on August 2, 2013. This was even before discourse.org was selling their hosting 
We have had previous experience in secure and high available application hosting and when we read about Discourse 4 years ago we immediately saw the beauty of Discourse, but also realized that Ruby on Rails is much harder to host than for instance PHP. And that is when we decided to see if there was some market potential.
I think we are doing a pretty nice job in delivering good value for money and we have a good reputation in the market. These two things are the absolute requirements for being succesful.
We’re trying to innovate continuously and are trying to contribute to the ecosystem wherever we see something lacking, so we authored a few plugins like the adsense plugin, the migrate-password plugin and the sitemap plugin. We also built the first working SSO mechanism which has been deprecated for the official SSO implementation, but still makes us proud.
Ok, enough about us. What do you mean when you say that Discourse is not so market friendly?
12 Likes
Hi, glad to see your feed back.
These days, I’m thinking about the Value of a Foum in a The Current World (You see, most people read by Phone rather than Computer, people mostly use Google + Facebook/Twitter/Quora/Wechat/Zhihu )
In my opinion, Discourse is quite beautiful, but not so good at popularize itself. And a not so active community means DIE!!! .
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It’s quite neat, neat is beautiful, but not making people additicted to it. Many websites uses subscribtion system, make people remember logging in everyday.
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Many websites Use invitation for bonus system, make people keep inviting their friends
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Many websites use bonus system, like user level (which often has 10 even 100 levels, rather than 4 levels in Discourse) or Forum Coin , to make people feel that they has gain sth, to make them feel the stimulation / motivation.
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Many websites use evaluation system . You see, people go to the forum to read valuable posts. The not so valuable posts should be ranked lower and the valuable ones should be upper. If the discourse just makes All the stuffs there , then who will want to read these ?
Have to say it again. Not so active communities will DIE!!
Your can read more here:
How about reply via email and mailing list mode?
Trust levels are more about enabling things based on trust than about showing off. But how about the badge system? Totally awesome.
2 Likes
Yes, About the badge system. Badge system will bonus people in many dimensions. You don’t know when you will get one. Like the first like, “first reply”, “first share”, etc. Getting such badges truely make people feel glad for a while.
But, there are some flows:
- You don’t know when you will get one. So, it’s more like a surprise pleasure. Not regular.
In the very first days of using the Discourse, I keep getting badges, but since then, in about 8 months I think, I get nothing. That makes me feel so boring when replying or creating now posts.
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You don’t know how to get one. You keep logging in every day, keep replying, keep providing good answers or good articles, but nothing happened then.
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The award are in multi-dimensions, so people won’t be competing !!! While Competing and Showing Off is a very good motivation method.
I’ve already tried to create a few new badges to award people. But, not so many and not in One System. You see, people like to get some small award for some small effort, not Wait a long long long time and do much much much work and get a big award.
On the other way, I think maybe praise number system is a good system to develop. People can just work for collecting praises for important contributions. You can View the most popular ask and answer Chinese Website Zhihu, their system is based on praise numbers. For each question, the most praised answer will be listed first. For different areas, the most praised person is listed first. If you want to apply some previleges, you must have enough praises. But, that also makes people try to show humor in their answers to get more praises, that makes many answers seem to be not so serious. But, active Comes First.
Have a look at Zhihu’s Award System
Zhihu’s “Personal Achievement” Board
Translation:
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Personal Achievements
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How many praises you have got. (Most important)
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How many Thanks you have got.
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How many times have your answers been collected.
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How many questions have you attended.
We should rethink and rethink deeply.
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What is award? What should awards look like in an internet form?
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How to keep people enthusiastic?
You’ve come up with some ideas, and they might be really good - but can we be expected to “like” them before you’ve shown some evidence or data to back them up?
Multiple exclamation marks and bold text do not make a point more believable.
Discourse uses gamification in a very measured way. To me it strikes the correct balance between rewarding good behaviour and turning conversation into a daft point-scoring exercise that rewards egos rather than civilised discourse.
You said Discourse isn’t addicting. I find it very addicting, as do plenty of my forum users.
10 Likes
Oh, that sentence is just kidding. And the bold words means to help people read easily. That’s the key words, you can read it in a glance.
Quality conversation comes first IMO and that’s core to Discourse’s mission. Incentivizing and gamifying things systematically only gets you so far and often leads to an implied hierarchy or globs of poor quality content.
It’s about a balance between volume and quality of interactions. With quality conversations being the highest order. Signal over noise needs to be the differentiator,
8 Likes
good answer. you are right.