What about medium tech?

community
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This might be a reason to be optimistic. Customer support is an area where independent forums are able to compete with social media. It might be worth figuring out why this is the case.

One of the difficulties in this topic is that Discourse is such a generalized tool that we’re not all talking about the same use case. I think my initial idea of “How can non-technical people be made aware that there are viable alternatives to Facebook and Twitter?” was a bit off. Marketing needs to be aimed at specific types of problems or use cases, not at the non-technical world in general.

My interest at the moment is in discussion forums with an emphasis on the types of discussions that are leading to extreme polarization. I’m suggesting that Discourse should be marketed to organizations that would like to see an improvement in the quality of discussions around various “hot” topics. These would generally be organizations that have a budget.

It’s quite possible we’re thinking of different use cases. What I’m seeing is an extreme amount of energy related to various issues. Where I live it’s spilled over from Twitter/Facebook to having opposing sides demonstrating in the streets. Strategically placed Discourse forums could siphon off some of this energy and encourage small groups of people to have more reasonable, productive discussions.

For other (more fun) use cases, the criteria for what Discourse would need to supply would be different. An example of that would be targeting social media creators who are tired of being “slaves to the algorithm”.

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I’ll try to make this brief. First, it seems quite similar to much of what was covered in the already-linked Why isn’t Discourse more frequently recommended as a “community platform”? topic. I want to highlight two things from my merely anecdotal but still perhaps relevant experience of late:

  1. My Facebook feed has become a virtual ghost town in the last ~6 months or so. There are maybe 5 people still actively posting, the rest all left, many of them for no viable alternative (Instagram most commonly, but that is not Facebook-like or much of a “community” platform, really). Many people likewise are abandoning Twitter/X because of Musk and/or the impact of his directional and feature choices, etc. There is some demand for alternatives.
  2. People are spinning up new communities all the time, with their own reasons and inspirations for how they will get users. Many just do it with Discord these days, it’s free, makes sense. But some will pay, and in those cases many choose other platforms than Discourse, often I think because of a desire to charge for access, which Discourse seems less well-suited for than e.g. Circle.

So basically: Facebook and Twitter are not inevitable and unassailable, and even if they were, smaller communities are still being started all the time despite the “cold start” problem (leave that to the admins and their inspirations!). And yet Discourse is still so seldom in the conversation when these little communities are being built, in my anecdotal experience. There has to be reasons…

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I still think that an important aspect of Instagram/Facebook/Reddit etc. being the default spaces is that that’s where admins (including non-technical admins and moderators) choose to set up and develop their communities in the first place, in the case of Facebook, Reddit and Discord for example.

Registering and using Discourse as a user is already much easier than setting up Discourse as an admin. I have a lot more trouble convincing other non-technical moderators/community managers to choose to set up a Discourse forum over other platforms, than to get people to sign onto existing Discourse forums.

See this again:

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Pretty much, it feels like going in circles on Meta now—I have replied on this topic and that one.

At this stage, I totally agree with the point that Discourse could have a much broader reach, but out there, Discourse is not actually recommended that often as a community platform amongst non-technical people.

I think we are talking very much in a bubble here. We are getting the same responses.

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It doesn’t have to be one thing. Difficulty to install is obviously a barrier for some people.

But in my experience people don’t even get that far. To start up a new community, people create a subreddit and a Discord server. Partly because the barrier to entry is super low. Partly because that’s what the audience knows and asks for. Partly because forums are considered outdated technology. Slow moving, lots of reading.

It’s a combination of Discourse not being a known option in the first place. If it is known, it’s an undesirable choice for people under 30. And if you choose to install it, it’s hard to do.

Even if you simplified the installation to a single press and you create an instance at myforum.discourse.org and made the admin UI extraordinarily easy to use, reddit/discord would still be the primary option for most people.

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Compared to WordPress Discourse is easier. Except one thing: demand to know how to use shell (and WordPress needs is too). My weak point is out there is, what, million wordpress sites where owners didn’t care (or they didn’t know :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) how difficult it can be. And that’s why webistan is full of questions and few answers too. But just handful Discourses.

And I claim it comes from two reason:

  • target groups are totally different; Discourse is expensive because CDCK sells it to corporates; from the beginning, and even when Autommatic took over, WordPress was targeted as ”free” option to common people
  • the reason or need why someone wants to start blog/CMS/e-commerce or a forum is fundamentally different

Sure, WordPress has its native (as a plugin) forum, but it is really awful piece of work.

But the main reasons why Discourse is relatively rare has nothing to do with difficulties. Hugo is difficult as f* and that’s why it will never grow. There isn’t too many options, free or reasonable priced, to change look or expand features.

Should Discourse offer thoroughbred e-commerce or real ability to handle podcasts? I don’t think so, because for that we have already good options, like WordPress. But… themes are quite similar and ordinary people just can’t use markdown even devs love it.

I have a feeling that reputation of difficult Discourse actually comes from devs. Out there are ziljons of coders who can build themes and plugins for WordPress. And then comes Discourse and struggling starts.

How can we/infamous someone beat social media and guide users back to forumworld? First we should stop saying how difficult Discourse is and take a little bit more… sorry… and take more US-style overpositive marketing attitude.

And CDCK should, if they want use time, power and money for that purpose, solve out two things ASAP:

  • I can setup almost what email-service in a minute; I can use a plugin for that (as my personal favorite: I have a plugin to backup my database as often I want and no one comes to tell me that I can take a risk to loose 24 hours messages)
  • give an easy button to hide every tools of composer exept upload (we kind of have this already, but the real solution would be that-we-don’t-name :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:)

Because even ”difficult rate” wouldn’t change de facto, it will be easier when out there is more forums by enduser-level-admins.

And at same time real end users star used to use Discourse and selling to B2B could be easier.

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If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard, “I know about [your website] but I don’t use forums” I’d have like $30. Which isn’t a lot of money but it does point to a marketing issue.

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I think that’s true. I got into WordPress (and Discourse in a roundabout way) through volunteer work. It’s fairly standard for volunteer run organizations to have a WordPress site without having much if any technical skills. I’m sure they are using WordPress because they are aware of it - they need a website and WordPress is the first thing that comes to mind. Things can get very messy in a technical sense. That’s just accepted as par for the course.

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Hmm, interesting that you both agree on Discourse being easier to use/admin than Wordpress. I don’t think I do, and there are a couple of aspects to that. It starts at the beginning, the install level, which is pretty inarguably in the favor of Wordpress for ease of use for a few reasons: its hosting environment (LAMP) is far more widely supported, many web hosts now have turnkey “Install Wordpress for me” tools, and even a manual install is generally easier with the availability of file browsing via control panels and PHPMyAdmin. Compare that to the command line requirements of Discourse.

Not to mention updates. I’ve had a few Wordpress sites for nearly a decade now and have very seldom run into issues with automatic updates. These days the web hosts often just keep things updated for you. After running a Discourse site for several years, I ran into issues updating through the control panel often enough that someone not savvy with the command line would be utterly lost trying to be a Discourse admin. I had to learn a lot about working with Linux, and to some degree I’m glad I did, but for most people it’s going to be too much.

Then there is technical support. Again there are many, many Wordpress-dedicated web hosts who will help you with WP issues via their native support. And if that’s not available, you can hire someone and there are a lot more options for consultants and they work cheaper than Discourse experts. Not surprisingly, and I’m not criticizing Discourse consultants, just stating a fact. That said I will applaud Discourse’s support community here in Meta for being a better and more discoverable one-stop for answering most Discourse questions, vs. the much poorer Wordpress “forum”/discussion experience for finding answers outside the norm. Reddit for WP of course has a comparable utility, but at least CDCK maintains an excellent single source for deep discussion and troubleshooting here.

Now outside of install and updates, I’d say they’re more comparable in intuitiveness and ease of use/admin. I certainly can’t see a super clear advantage to Discourse, except perhaps in some of the complexity of options WP has in Gutenberg these days. Discourse’s setting search and other things do make it easier to do certain things. But at this point I think the comparison fully breaks down, they’re trying to do very different things and the customers coming to them are doing so for different reasons in the vast majority of cases. I honestly don’t know how useful it is to continue using WP as a comparison.

The real question is what are prospective community admins/managers/founders choosing instead when they setup a community, and while it’s true that Reddit/FB/etc are common, that’s also not actually what is necessarily being raised by OP (and in the similar thread I linked to earlier). Anyone looking for a free community is going to choose a free option, which is basically Reddit, Facebook, or Discord. Anyone looking for an Enterprise solution is going to consider more customizable platforms, Discourse among them. But there is a decent market of people in-between that - and I have been part of this market off and on for a long time - of people who want a better or more customizable or just private community, or who want to own their data, or both, who are willing to pay to setup and maintain a good system, but whose budget is still limited, and often tech skills are a bit more limited too (vs. an enterprise customer, for example). This is the “Medium” in the title here, I think. And I do think they could be better served by Discourse in various respects; in ease of install and maintenance; in price; in theming improvements; etc. Much of this is discussed in other threads already linked in this topic.

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This could be a whole other topic. I’ve been providing Discourse and WordPress support for years now. They can both be difficult in their own ways. WordPress makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Discourse has made efforts to avoid that problem (with Docker, official plugins, etc).

What’s interesting to me is that people without a technical background are comfortable administering WordPress sites. That’s a reason to be optimistic about the future of self-hosted Discourse sites.

I started this topic as a kind of plea for the Discourse team to make an effort to market Discourse to a wider audience. They’ve made something awesome. More people should know about it.

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I apologize in advance if this was already covered in this topic and yet I think this speaks to my point:

I believe Discourse works well on a computer, much less so on mobile devices, especially phones.

I’m mostly talking about the long-form nature of Discourse, not whether there are bugs. Facebook, Twitter, and reddit seem to have much shorter posts and much shorter interactions, which seem to make it easier both to type and to read, at least for me.

For example, I was very excited to read this topic and it was 30 or so posts and some posts have multiple paragraphs (like this one), which seems orders of magnitude longer than the discussions on those other platforms. I’m not saying this is bad, just that it’s different and maybe why some don’t see it as an alternative to those platforms mentioned.

Also when I want to reply, I still believe long-form text entry is quite bad on mobile interfaces but maybe that’s just me. I also don’t send long emails from my phone without going a little crazy. It may be the text entry box UI or it may just be my expectation of shorter and faster interactions on a phone, I’m not sure.

I say this as someone who worries that most of the users who would join my forums may not even have computers and may quickly get tired of reading and typing such long posts on a phone.

If this is not on topic, maybe it can be a new topic. If it is on topic, what are your thoughts on how this impacts whether people see Discourse as an alternative to the other platforms?

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I kind of disagree. Discourse works decently good as long an admin remembers out there is such things as mobiles — I mean some layout questions, similar than widgets on sidebar of WordPress.

But for powerusers Discourse on mobiles is diffucult. But it cames from limitations of mobiles, not from Discourse itself.

Same thing than writing on mobiles is pain in the tender places. But it is not issue of Discourse, it is general question. But it is one reason why the composer is more… harder use than writing on social media apps. And maybe one reason why common users may feel Discourse difficult.

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Certainly not! editing in particular is bad, and with longer form writing you’ll usually need to do more editing.

There are a bunch of articles and opinions on this, here’s a pretty good one: The invisible problem – Scott Jenson — and the conclusion there is reasonable, this is an OS level problem that any individual app can’t do much to solve.

Mobile platforms are much better suited for audio/video/photo sharing than writing and editing long-form text.

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I think the issue is with long-form conversations on mobile, Discourse is a platform of long-form conversations, ergo I’d say it’s an issue with Discourse (not in a demeaning way).

Discourse could encourage more short-form conversations if it wanted to, and maybe chat gets at that, but I’d say in its current form it more strongly emphasizes long-form interactions, which seem to work better on desktop than mobile, especially for power users, as you mentioned.

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This discussion started with “big tech’s role in fueling online polarization”. Short-form conversations about hot topics tend toward polarization. To avoid polarization on complex topics you need nuance, and nuance simply takes more words to write and (also very important) more time to think and refine you own words as you type.

But who is interested on doing that? Certainly not the numerical majority of the population. Neither those who have an interest in polarization, for business reasons, conviction, and what not. But around each hot topic there is enough people who genuinely want to learn, collaborate, and bring the topic forward. I think there is a possibility to tell these people that the medium is the message, and that short-form mobile discussions won’t lead to anything fruitful most of the times, whereas platforms designed for civilized discussion can, even with the same well-intentioned participants.

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Mostly that exclusivity isn’t always a bad thing. Discourse is going to mainly appeal to people who have an interest in written language. Exclusivity can be taken too far though. The target audience shouldn’t be limited to people who have an interest in written language and have a technical background.

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That’s right. And that’s the point. And unlike on Facebook, you can read the entire discussion simply by scrolling. On Facebook it goes something like this

  • click “show all posts”
  • for any post with more than 5 words, click “show rest of post” and hope that it doesn’t make a bunch of other stuff go away.
  • scroll around trying to figure out how to read the next post

If you want people to have no more than a short sentence, then you’re not really having discussion or community, IMHO. If you want one person to post something and a bunch of poeple to respond with something that amounts to “me too” then facebook is great.

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The Reddit Sub I help moderate also is known for walls of text. Now I don’t think Reddit is great for long topics though or searching history as good as discourse.

Imho the main draw of these mega platforms is in part simplicity. What I mean is as I said earlier the mall vs independent stores. When you look for FB groups, Reddit subs etc… you only need 1 login account to access a wide variety of content.

Versus independent focused forums you need a seperate account for each one.

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With SSO/login integrations this is already possible (and pretty easy for the end-user). I literally just logged-in to Meta here with my Gmail account (which I originally used to create my account), and have had integrations of Discourse instances in the past with logins for Twitter, Facebook, etc. What they don’t have, however, is good central community discovery (search or recommendation), which FB at least has. In fact FB is fairly pushy about Group recommendations these days. :smile:

I continue to feel that a good opt-in and searchable directory maintained by CDCK, with optional recommendations displayable on each community (mutual benefit: if you show recommendations for other communities on your Discourse instance, you also get recommended on other instances) would be helpful. Discoursehub was at least something, but doesn’t exist anymore it seems. Hopefully something better and more well-integrated replaces it. Of course without having other reasons for people to be “on” Discoursehub (or whatever central site), they’re much less likely to find or be recommended something relevant to their interests, but at least it would be something.

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We have discover.discourse.org, which is pretty nifty (though still quite new and shiny :slight_smile:)

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