I find your reply very interesting @Jagster, it hits many important points and trends.
Forever, the vast number of visitors were anonymous users who just want info and to move on with their day. This is not a new problem. Having a core set of users who care enough and belong to a community is the key to surviving over time. A forum with no activity does not survive.
A big challenge AI poses is a drain on attention; we all have limited amounts of attention. If 99% of our attention goes to robots, only 1% is left for other stuff. This trend can be a pull on your most active users and is certainly something to watch for. In the long term, does anyone have the ability to compete with robots that love us and say yes all the time? The fundamental thing we at Discourse bring to the table is human connection. We believe this is deeply important and think it will win.
All companies have a high priority to get the right answers out there. This article is talking about how “the new SEO” is about getting quality, correct information out there.
In an ideal world, if a company feeds a “hit and run” anonymous user with the correct information right away, this can help in two aspects:
- Community content quality; asking 100% duplicate questions is very taxing on a community.
- Support is a very expensive arm of most companies out there; this reduces costs of private support because nobody needs to open a support ticket.
I think a great unlocker we will have is tools like ask.discourse.com (RAG based on live community content), which help ground answers right away with the most recent up-to-date information. Running engines like this is a great way of routing people to the right place in the community and answering all the easy questions right away.
They are also great at helping community managers understand “SEO pathologies” your community has.
- Wrong answers the robot gives are an opportunity to correct the backing information. Post more canonical content (in search-prioritized categories), or remove search landmines.
- Missing information on the forum that was never discussed but people keep looking for is an opportunity to kick off discussion in topics lots of people care about.
The age of AI is presenting us with a ton of new and wonderful challenges:
- AI just sucks all the great information out of communities and can feel parasitic to many communities. There is no scheme of licensing we can opt for. I have noticed a reasonable amount of private communities pop up and many places with gated content. An interesting approach is figuring out what content you should gate to enable a more thriving community?
- As community engine providers, do we need to build new systems that “extract the summarized truth” out of a giant messy community and kill off the lies? Then give the “golden information” to search engines and LLMs?
- People are increasingly using AI to author a community with robot-authored content that is being presented as human, which is dangerous. Trust is paramount; this is why we believe strongly in ALWAYS labeling AI-generated content.
- How do we remind people of the value of human connection? A “join the conversation and talk to humans” CTA starts being an interesting thing to explore in the age of robots. Discourse ID can lower the barrier of joining.
At the core of everything though, great content with a thriving community are the biggest ingredients you need for success. Start there, then lean on the many Discourse features to make it more effective (docs/wikis/search priority/reporting/Q&A/solved/ideation, and more).