Why would Discourse's business model work when Stack Exchange v1's failed?

Well, lots. Pretty much everything.

Stack Exchange does not do discussion. What Stack Exchange does is focused, fact based Q&A, which is the opposite of discussion, and they’ll be the first to tell you that. More specifically:

  • Stack Exchange was intended to displace experts-exchange and other “evil” or extremely low quality Q&A sites. Topics are generally scientific or technical in nature, things that can be verified with facts, and strictly limited to Q&A.

  • Stack Exchange is primarily designed to service search engines and produce useful artifacts. For example, when searching for a programming problem, Stack Overflow is one of the first hits (often the first!); users click the link, read what people have to say, then go back to work. Write once, read thousands or millions of times.

  • Discussion is strongly suppressed, except insofar as it enables better questions and answers. Only the minimum amount of discussion necessary to support Q&A is allowed. Changes are best presented as edits to the underlying question and answers, not a long chain of back and forth text.

  • Moderation is necessarily strict; only practical, answerable questions that support the topic and are useful to future visitors are allowed. The difference can be subtle, particularly to users unfamiliar with the Stack Exchange model of high signal, low noise Q&A

  • Popularity is frequently at odds with the goals of Stack Exchange.

  • You spend a lot of time educating the community to encourage behaviors that are conducive to learning, not necessarily entertainment. It takes a lot of ongoing discipline from moderators and experienced community members.

  • Not all topics and communities can sustain this technical Q&A format where the best answers should be verifiably and provably correct, at least in some small way.

Stack Exchange is not open source. And I’d argue it doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be open source, since the model requires such strong rigor and discipline. If you open sourced SE, all you’d accomplish is thousands of failed communities pop up all over. Have any of the OSS clones of SE succeeded? I would argue none of them have. Because strong curation and centralization is necessary for the model to survive.

This is why Area 51 exists, to point experienced Stack Exchange community members at new sites so they can be seeded with people who grok the model – and most importantly, have the discipline to enforce it.

Q&A is a small part of what many communities do. For example take LEGO. How much of LEGO is strict, fact-based Q&A? Most LEGO communities would need the following:

  • look at this cool LEGO thing I built!
  • buy and sell rare LEGO kits to each other, people who get it
  • share an interesting LEGO story
  • ask about the best ways to build LEGO
  • ask about the best places to find LEGO
  • hanging out and talking about non-LEGO stuff with other LEGO enthusiasts

None of that is allowed on Stack Exchange, by definition.

So there’s your 3 key differences:

  1. Stack Exchange does not do discussion, by definition.
  2. Stack Exchange is not open source.
  3. Q&A is a small part of what many communities do.

Now consider how Discourse works for comparison:

  • Discourse is intended to displace all existing forum software, and become a part of the fabric of the Internet. Topics are determined entirely by what the community will allow, limited only by the community’s imagination.

  • We expect people to find discussion topics via Google, but what Discourse encourages most of all is participation to build a community. We want people to identify with a forum. Rather than presenting the answers to their questions, Discourse provides a platform for engagement (what do you think of, what’s the best, how do you like to…) and a long lasting experience.

  • Discussion is encouraged, for any reason at all, for as long as everyone likes. As people respond, the whole discussion flows downstream chronologically in traditional fashion.

  • When everything is “on topic”, moderation is far easier, because the community only needs to decide when users are trolling or being overtly rude, not make value judgments on the relative utility of contributions as they do on Stack Exchange.

  • in Discourse, popularity can be encouraged without reservation, because it means the discussion is working and people are having fun. It’s OK to produce only 5% or 10% useful content to the outside world.

  • As long as community members aren’t being mean to each other, they don’t have to spend a lot of time educating other users about how Discourse works; they are free to engage in whatever topics they find enjoyable and interesting.

  • Any community, provided it is of reasonable size, can sustain a forum where its users share their thoughts, opinions, and feelings.

Really, Discourse and Stack Exchange could not be more different. In practically every way I can think of they are in fact opposites.

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