Idea: Chat Posts

Feature
1

The great thing about having a forum is that you can archive and search all of the material very easily.

However, people are turned off by forums because of the lack of spontaneous exchanges.

I suggest a hybrid alternative: users can make posts that contain chatboxes. These chatboxes have a message limit and can be easily archived.

This way, you have a mix of spontaneous exchanges and slow, well-thought-out posts.

4 Likes
2

That’s an idea. Are there some forums platforms that work like that already ?

3

I don’t think so.

1 Like
4

That’s literally a 'Trollbox‘ on crypto space. Check xmrbazaar(.)com.

I don’t know if it can give value to Discourse, because there are chats, messages and topics/posts.

Should change everything to not be redundant.

5

I’m on the website, I can’t find any examples. What should I click on?

6

There is some new (still slightly unrefined) functionality to do just that with Event Posts:

Perhaps you could ask for that to be extended to all Topics?

1 Like
8

From a moderation perspective, I think this is not a good idea.

Of course, it depends on the specific community but I see lots of potential for abuse and trolling.

Just my tuppence worth.

9

YouTube live streams, except that the chat is enabled when the live stream is happening. Comments are enabled after the live stream is finished.

2 Likes
10

And all that SEO is then lost to the ether.

I think the events format really makes sense but you really want people to chat about a normal post and none of that material to then be searchable on the internet?

11

SEO is actually being replaced by IA.

12

But the most effective AI uses web search? And web search uses … SEO.

You can’t only use AI without web search or you miss the last few months since the newest training data.

So SEO is still king.

In fact SEO is a blend of embeddings and keyword search. It’s been this way since well before the LLM revolution.

Google has been using embeddings for web search since 2015.

13

Mainstream will be published or edited by IA, SEO will be almost unexistent for humans.

Check Antitrust Division | U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC [2020] - Remedies Hearing Exhibits

The human interactions is going to be dark, meanwhile we have some spaces like Discourse, ActivityPub, Peertube.

But not organic SEO like old days (webmentions on resistance).