This might be a bigger indictment of the internet today moreso than a commentary on anything Discourse is doing.
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Totally agree and it is already under discussion.
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And one such need is the chronic care peer support communities that I tried to raise as a topic last year … There’s some unlisted attempts at that use case… @simon R U any closer to a forum to discuss ‘the what hasn’t been envisioned yet’¿
Chronic care communities have member empathy, they don’t have as much need for discourse’s surveillance tools, would benefit from thought given to medical info handling, have more need of retrieval of ‘shared wisdom’, open avenues of monetisation from data aggregation & anonymisation - amongst other tailorings & purpose driven tailorings.
There are a few PhD topics in the sociology of curation of culture etc
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I only partially agree with this. I think Discourse is best in class for detailed, considered discussion. In particular Developer communities. By making it more accessible to a general audience there is a risk of making it worse for this core user group. Then what platform caters for that user group instead? In my opinion there isn’t one.
I guess the question could really be, what does Discourse want to be in the end? An all encompassing conversation platform - chat, forum, voice and video calls, and whatever the future throws? Or does it want to focus on a particular form of conversation?
I noticed last year at CMX that there are many community platforms, but many of them are focussing on connecting people rather than facilitating them for conversation. By this I mean the engagement and interaction level is the focus, rather than a particularly meaningful discussion. Many of these platforms are design to be fun and easy and appeal to as many people as possible. Discourse on the other hand started out with a different goal - Civilised Discussion. It’s also the only platform I can think of with such prolific technical “guard rails” to facilitate this. It basically forces that to happen unless you choose to moderate it differently.
I would love to see more people take to Discourse, but I would hate to see it deviate heavily from that original course and dilute itself into becoming something like Circle. Circle already exists, Facebook already exists, Twitter is debateable. I don’t see Discourse as a Community platform, or a social media platform. They tend to focus on attention, connection, fun and engagement. I see it as a collaborative problem solving platform where community is a very nice side effect.
I love what Discourse is, and would love to see them continue to grow in the direction of Academic Discussion, Support Forums, Internal and External Developer Communities, and of course - Personal Journals 
Other use cases exist, but those are the ones where I personally see Discourse as best in class. It would be very sad if those strengths were compromised and diminished as part of becoming more accessable to use cases that may be better suited to another product anyway.
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Enthusiast communities too. By no means restricted to those with a developer mindset!
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At the risk of seeming combative - which I very much don’t intend - I think you’re making a bit of a “straw man” argument here (and I’m sure that’s not intentional). It seems to me that you’re putting forth a number of comparisons and presumptions that create an unappealing picture of the changes being suggested for Discourse, but not addressing the very real potential for a more nuanced approach that is not so polarized.
This is not a debate between “Make Discourse into Facebook!” or “Keep Discourse the way it is!”. Nobody (I hope) wants Discourse to be Facebook, to prioritize shallow “engagement”, etc. If you go back 5 years and have the same discussion, you could very well bring up things like adding Chat or multi-emoji “reaction” features as potential ills that CDCK should avoid so it doesn’t end up like Facebook, and yet here we are: Discourse has successfully incorporated both, and for the better of the platform and all communities that run on it. If we want to make the future of Discourse better and more successful than the present, we need to think about and discuss changes like that to its features and approach that will preserve its best parts while expanding its capabilities and reach in healthy, positive ways.
We can’t just prioritize keeping things as they are or the platform and community will stagnate and die. And I think CDCK’s moves to implement some of these features in recent years demonstrates that they can be trusted to find good ways of doing so that are compatible with the underlying philosophy of the company and the Discourse project as a whole. I choose to have faith in CDCK, and at the same time I do think they need help to see some of the potential for change and the real need there is for it.
I 100% agree that this is in large part a discussion that needs to be based on what Discourse/CDCK “wants to be”. That said it is definitely not just a choice between what Discourse is now and “an all encompassing conversation platform with chat, forum, voice and video calls”. There are certainly some people that want to see Discourse integrate voice + video, and there may even be some 3rd party plugins that make this possible, but it is not a focus I would ever suggest for Discourse! Nor do I think many others here are seriously suggesting that. So I think bringing up this “kitchen sink” approach doesn’t really represent a serious option being considered here.
Is there no possibility in your mind that “civilized discussion” could also be friendlier, less technical-seeming, easier to use? Is there no middle ground between the engagement-focused approach (which I agree is unhealthy, both for users, and for the resulting discussion/interaction), and the more dense, formalized feel/approach of Discourse? Does the feedback here from people who obviously very much like Discourse, but also find it at times confusing, overly-technical, etc. not seem worth trying to understand and address?
Circle and Facebook aren’t open source or self-host. There are few if any options that do what FB/Circle/etc. do that are open source or even self-host. If you’re aware of other platforms that have the positives of Discourse, but orient more toward “ease of use”, etc., I’d be curious to know about them. I’m not really aware of many clear candidates. Forem is probably the one that comes to mind for me.
The “focus on attention, connection, fun and engagement” is a choice, not an intrinsic bundle of necessary things that Discourse has to choose to either adopt wholesale or reject wholesale. It’s also important to recognize that those factors in themselves are not necessarily bad or good, nor inherently destructive to “civilized discourse”. The approach that most commercial platforms take in relation to those qualities is financially-motivated, and in particular numbers and advertising driven, and that is what I think tends to bias the implementations (e.g. Facebook) toward the negative, toward shallow “engagement”, viewing conflict and hot takes as useful (engagement! 
), etc. But there are other ways to view “engagement”, “connection”, “fun”, etc. that are, I believe, very compatible with the Discourse ethos and goals. And I think Discourse could stand to be a little more fun! In fact so it seems did/does CDCK: the rich emoji “reactions” I mentioned before are a clear sign of this.
Like you I love the core ethos of Discourse and CDCK. I am here because I see Discourse as one of the few available options for a discussion/community platform that operates in a truly ethical, user-oriented way, and does so at a professional level such that it can be relied on by companies and other orgs who understandably want to know that their platform of choice isn’t likely to just be abandoned tomorrow. CDCK walks the line between financial needs and community needs very well as a successful open source project. But Discourse can also be more enjoyable and easier to use for its current, core audience, and in the process of becoming so it might even be able to reach an even greater audience. If it could do so, without compromising its core values and the ethos behind its interaction model, that would - I think - be a benefit for CDCK and for all of us! I hope you can see the potential for that too.
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I like this take 
(even if not everyone will agree)
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There must be some perspective effect whereby our own use of a product (or platform) seems to us to be the typical use. If so, it must be worth overcoming it. It’s a platform for topics and responses, which supports categories and restricted access, which has search but does not have an algorithmic feed. It can be used in many ways. It can be a support platform, or a collaborative platform, or a discussion platform, or a community platform. Or more.
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True. My view is admitedly wrong in this, it is a community platform.
What shapes my view is the people around me in big corporate who attribute the term community to:
- social media - share anything with anyone, minimal/no moderation
- audience - tell people about our stuff, marketing.
These are very different flavours of community, which facilitate a much cheaper, short term, disposable form of engagement.
I get upset by this because I feel like putting Discourse in the same bracket as audience tools like Twitter, and social media like LinkedIn and Facebook, really doesn’t do it justice. For example, I’ve spent more time considering this single response, than any other response on any other platform.
Hence this belief:
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In a previous discussion, I found these words to express my thoughts:
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For better or worse, “community” is the term that non-technical people use now. Previously forum, bulletin board, message board, discussion board, bbs… The product has gone through many name changes as it has evolved to become more mainstream.
I think it’s very possible to facilitate healthy discussion and still be simple and easy to use. That is what the community platform I build does. But Discourse, from the beginning, has taken a different path of being extremely feature packed. Cramming tons of features and options into a software inherently makes it more complex and harder to use. One can’t have it both ways.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to share a bit about your experience here. It’s also certainly brought new life to this discussion.
I’d be happy to talk more about it with you, and you’re also welcome to share more here, but this post alone so far has already been valuable, so thank you.
Yes, we certainly value making Discourse flexible enough to meet a broad variety of use cases. That said, we think there are reasonable approaches we can take to reduce complexity. There are some low hanging fruit here where things are unnecessarily complicated that we can simplify with some straightforward time and effort. The idea @bloomexperiment shared is another example of the kind of thing we’re thinking about:
I have been thinking along very similar lines, for what it’s worth.
Some things we’ve (re-)discovered in our recent research around use cases is that communities don’t fit in a box.
Moving some of this setup from being whole site setup to being setup for a smaller space within the site (a group or category, or some combination of the two) can help address that. A given community could have a space for more social stuff and another for working on a project and another for answering support questions.
This would also allow communities to experiment more.
We can certainly continue this in the topic you started, but wanted to acknowledge it here first.
I appreciate your taking the time to share a few example of things that you think may be worth improving for the overall user experience for community members in Discourse. @lindsey and the team that was formerly focused on chat are now looking at this space more broadly and there is plenty of overlap with what you’ve listed here and what they’re starting to look at more closely.
thank you for highlighting this. It is something that we also revisited recently. Along with civilized discussion, we place particular value on enabling communities to get lasting value out of their conversations and the content they collectively create.
always nice to get your insights here @oshyan. We are certainly continuing to invest in making Discourse something people really desire to use (admins and community members alike). We know there’s plenty to do here and always will be!
We talk about this on occasion as well. There are times when I see Discourse more generally as a communication platform. We use it ourselves for collaboration and are always happy to see topics like these: Why you should use Discourse internally for your company/team instead of Slack (4 years use case)
An interesting framing for this is broadening the value of community itself. @HAWK gave a great talk recently about using Discourse for collaboration, framing it in terms of the value of building an internal community.
I strongly recommend watching it if you haven’t had a chance to do so.
(She’ll also be at Running Remote in Portugal in a few weeks to tell a similar story).
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I think this is very much the case. I would suggest that it appears to be a natural human tendency, and it takes conscious effort to see things with less of this natural bias.
Yes, precisely!
Sadly I think the real problem here is corporate interests coopting the “Community” term in arguably unreasonable ways. If you follow Rosie Sherry (Rosieland) this mischaracterization of what “community” means is widespread. I think in some cases it’s just ignorance, but often I think it is a somewhat intentional attempt to capitalize on and gain control over what is otherwise a more user-centric, independent phenomenon by nature.
So while I definitely share your concern there, I don’t think the answer is to try to define Discourse’s purpose more narrowly, or with different words. Instead I hope we can all push back against the commercial interpretation of this important word! We all, as humans, need “community”, and we can’t let companies decide what that means!
And thanks @mcwumbly for that in-depth reply. That’s very encouraging.
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I completely agree. I find it a particular pain point because I cant describe my job unless I have an adequate description of the platform. “Developer community” would be the closest thing, but that’s a side effect. We’re actually there to problem solve. “Q&A platform” also doesnt fit because we often work towards the solution through multiple posts, rather than one correct answer like stack overflow.
I called our instance an innersource platform for a while, but that feels like a much wider philosophy.
Then I tried to be more specific with “crowd-solving platform”, but that also sounds something a government would use to suppress protesters…
I’m currently sitting on “Co-solving” (collaborative, cooperative problem solving) which isnt great but maybe it gives management the buzzword they need to understand the use case and purpose in one word 
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I wanted to follow up on my post and note that I had a great conversation this morning with @lindsey and @mcwumbly about our experience considering different community platforms. It’s clear from the conversation that they understand the challenge we ran into and are interested to address it. I’m looking forward to see where that work ends up.
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This has been an incredibly fun topic to read through—I ended up reading the entire topic. The conversation was incredibly informative, and so many things I want to respond to.
I have no reason to respond, but just want to add to the conversation 
I wrote something similar before:
In my experience having worked in a few product organizations (currently in one, where I’m building a community for users of my company’s product) and having been a user of many other products (B2C, B2B, etc.)…I will always choose a product that focused on their extensibility story first, and then needs to work their way over to the ease-of-use side. The inverse of course being a product that focused on ease-of-use first and then has to figure out how to become more extensible later.
(Writing this from the lens of an enterprise community) In fact, I signed up on Circle.co after reading this topic, and I was so severely disappointed for many reasons, but most notably one: it was all about me, and about my business. It wasn’t about my community, my users, or the experiences they need. So many bad products get built today, especially around the topic of community, because those products focus on me and my business needs first—I need them to focus on my users! They’re about engagement, metrics, beauty above all else…all of the things they think will attract me to be a paying customer.
This is such a fallacy because while those goals are my destination, they shouldn’t be the vehicle to get there. The way for me to get business value is by working backwards from my users—building a community that my users, need, want, and enjoy (many times in that order), and putting myself last in the equation. It will almost always feel like a forcing function to actively not work on your priorities when building a community (after all, I’m a business and need to make money!), yet the results for us have been overwhelming in delivering value for our business with Discourse as the most key component to doing so.
Can Discourse do better at usability, tailored experiences for the SMB, etc.? Does it have it’s quirks? Of course. I’m constantly hitting my head against a ceiling (not a wall) because we’re always pushing this platform to its limits. But because of the emphasis on extensibility, I have yet to meet a challenge that I haven’t been able to solve with Discourse—and believe me, we have built some insanely cool things that some thought were not possible!
This was a long way of saying that given the two choices, I will always go with the application that has a great extensibility story, because I can shape it into the experience I envision. The alternative, an application with a few well-designed uses cases (as long as you look through a couple pre-defined pinholes) with no ability to grow just will not do in building the best community for your users in the enterprise. Again, completely acknowledging @Grae’s concern as valid for the SMB though!
Also, Circle isn’t alone in their misguided focus, either. Khoros is another offender of building experiences that focus so much on “business outcomes”, ironically, they miss the mark completely. A community platform needs to focus on the community, and let me focus on the business outcomes.
I’m torn on this one—my heart and mind are both of two places. On one hand…
I want Discourse to focus on the core component of community that it is now: discussions and bringing the users together in a meaningful way, and giving me as a business all of the extensibility and flexibility to mold that into something great for my users.
On the other hand…
As part of a much broader experience for my community members who use my product, I need other things and I really want those things to have a seamless experience with Discourse. Just a few examples, though not an exhaustive list:
- Documentation (real documentation, not shoehorned into categories/topics)
- Content/file hosting
- Media (e.g. videos)
- Custom webpages
- Live stream platform
I don’t like the idea of my users having different experiences for each of those, and I believe CDCK has a great philosophy of building, shipping, supporting, and maintaining a great product. I think it’s time that they branch out to build more products (while not changing the ethos of core Discourse)!
As an enterprise customer, I do want everything in one place, but I personally won’t go with a product that does everything but poorly. I always tell my team, “When faced with a decision on what’s most right for our users, or easier for us…always choose what is most right for our users, and it will always benefit us in the long run.”…and it has every. single. time. So many times in the last 4 years that meant a fair bit of customization around/related to Discourse, and every time it turned into a major win for our business.
So while I want both things to be true yesterday…
I think this is because of what I wrote to some responses above: these platforms are attempting to focus on what community leaders are focusing on: business outcomes. Instead they should be focused on the community, and let the community/business leaders focus on getting to those outcomes by building a community that their users need.
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First and foremost, great response! Passionate and dedicated builders like you are a big part of the success of Discourse to date. That said the entire point of this topic is questioning whether CDCK - and its broader mission - might be better served with a broader focus to attract people that aren’t so intrinsically inclined in the way you are.
Unfortunately that does appear to be what a lot of people setting up community do focus on. It’s wonderful that you and many others here at Meta actually focus on community needs first, but it’s basically “preaching to the converted” if the selling point is “community first”. If the goal is - in part - to make the creation of good communities (from a technical perspective) easier and more attractive, then some amount of selling to people who don’t innately prioritize community will have to be done, IMO. The rapid growth of Circle.so and similar platforms illustrates that for many people their strategy is working. If Discourse is meant to be primarily just for community builders who already prioritize community first and foremost, that’s valid too, but it feels to me like a distinctly narrower and less potentially world-changing vision.
It’s good that they’ve successfully sold to you and people like you. But is that enough? Is it the kind of success and impact they aspire to, or at least could?
That’s not “the” alternative though. That’s one extreme alternative, of course. But a middleground is also certainly possible: build use cases, “wizards”, and other tools into the existing Discourse to help people realize and implement/deploy its potential. In a sense this middleground is possible because Discourse is so flexible, whereas a platform like Circle may be designed to be more appealing for certain use cases out of the box, but couldn’t show you and give you the option of the variety of use cases, layouts, etc. that Discourse could (if such features/tools were built; what I’m saying is the underlying flexibility allows this whereas Circle does not seem to).
Why do you think they and Circle are doing this though? Are they just bad at business? Is it failing to make them successful? Or is it making them successful and if so are there things that can be taken from that to make Discourse more successful while not losing its mission, flexibility, etc?
I harken back to statements made in the blog post for their last funding round in Q3 2021:
Do you think that describes Discourse today?
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From the outside looking in, most definitely! This is hands-down the most fun enterprise tool I’ve ever had the opportunity to get to use—this, and Airtable! I’m in this tool 5-7 days a week and after 4 years, I feel like I’m learning (or teaching) something new every day!
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personal anecdote; I found Discourse because I was Google searching for “best web forum software” and browsing the handful of “top 10 software” list articles. The old PHP based softwares were on all the lists, along with one called Flarum which I very nearly tried out, but also Discourse was on most of the lists. It was then that I realized that “Discourse” was the thing that all the support forums I had used in the past ~5 years was running on and that I recognized it even though I never noticed I had been using it across many different websites.
However, what ultimately influenced by decision to try using it, was the deployment method. Flarum looked good but the deployment sounded complicated. Discourse uses a Docker based deployment, which is a god-send. I work on servers all day long, I dont want my hobby forum to be another round of “work”. Not sure if its been emphasized how big a deal this is. If Discourse was not Docker based, I would have passed it up. Similarly, the detailed deployment and management documentation, along with this forum itself, gave me enough assurance to invest my personal time and money in putting together a deployment for it.
I guess this does not help the company behind Discourse very much though, because I am not paying them for the service, I am self-hosting it. But it is a pretty significant point that the vast majority of software communities I take part in have already moved to Discourse. Seems like pretty much everyone is suffering greatly at the hands of Slack and Discord for “high signal low noise” discussions, partly because valuable information just gets lost in the sea of messages, as someone in here already noted. In the workplace, I also see a lot of competition from Microsoft Teams, believe it or not. They have a “forum” style interface built in, which is downright awful, but its also connected to your company’s IT interfaces and other MS products, along with the video calling features. I keep floating the idea of a Discourse forum for internal use, but the lack of the extra integrations leaves it unfeasible. Nobody at work wants yet another account they need to manage on yet another company website. Perhaps if there was some way to have Discourse embedded more closely into the company’s internal infra, it could make headway there.
On the flip side, however, I do feel like Discourse’s “out of the box experience” leaves a lot to be desired if you want a “low signal high noise” community. Discourse does not have as many of the “fun” features that make other platforms like Discord enjoyable to use. Maybe there is not really a market for this anymore, but there are still people out there who greatly appreciate using a forum for fun, meaningless, enjoyable conversations. One such community I am familiar with had about 200 million posts from a couple thousand users before it shut down. Those users will all be looking for new homes; Discord is actually not too popular with that demographic due to its “chat room” format, but I am not sure if they will find Discourse to be “fun” enough to keep their attention.
Not sure if its been mentioned, but I feel like one of the reasons Discourse might not be recommended as much is because it feels too “clean” and too much like a “business tool”. I think the comparison to something like Facebook Groups is interesting, considering that companies like Facebook invest absurd sums of money into boosting platform engagement and getting people addicted to their platform. Perhaps the lack of such measures would contribute to fewer people raving about how much fun they had e.g. scrolling threads on Discourse for three hours last night.
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