I don’t like that us thinking. Are us those how are answering or who are asking helps here? Or does us mean nature of issues in tech support forum, as this is? Or does that refer to role of Discourse admins? And if that is true are we talking about big enterprises with IT-division or selfmade selfhosters?
Outside main revenue of CDCK, Discourse as a platform is heading toward non-engineers, as WordPress did, just mentioning one. Here is a lot of pure hightech talk, but really big part of topics comes from people who are very far away from engineer level — and my guess is they are more interested of how that community and discussion works and lives, than technical details.
I heard a lot stories how good support is somewhere. Sure, it is cruicial to fix issues as fast is possible, but the real metric is how little is support needed. It tells right away how good a product is. Part of that is easy customizations, and part of that is possibility to choose what to see on admin page. If someone needs some tech details, like seeing what version is in use day after day, then that is fine. If that need is more sales category, as fine that too.
But building some borderlines and saying that we are one homogenous group with same needs, is really dangerous. I’m not afraid of tech, but for me it is just a tool, not a purpose.
An small example. For me is really important to see how many (possible) human visits my forum gets and from where. That I need everyday. That is more sales things (even I dislike that term). I need amount of bots too, because those create unwanted load, but I don’t need that piece of data everytime, but every now and then, and that’s why I’m totally happy to do extra clicks, as long that information doesn’t clutter my environment every time. That is such tech-engineering info, I guess.
So, even engineers have tendency to do if-then-else thinking with zeroes and ones, we have overlapping needs. And that’s why we need options to choose from.