What a fantastic and intelligent thread this is. It it worth it to restart again here and see where Discourse stands 7 years later? It seems like it is in a very good place, but I’d like to see if indeed that’s the case. Seems like the Wordpress.org/.com model is working.
And the recent Discourse for Teams launch is a validation that the core can be used to venture into evolving collaboration markets dominated by giants like Slack and Microsoft.
I agree with everything @codinghorror suggested here, but I’d like to add one more common theme I’m seeing specifically around tech communities recently.
Most of the noise now occurs on DM community platforms like Slack and Discord. I see Discourse today as an elegant way to capture and condense valuable signals happening in these platforms, and seeding them in Discourse for further moderation into valuable signals with GenAI to offer a helping hand in aiding moderators get things done faster. Having human-moderated and validated summaries of real human questions and answers will enable us to capture the noise and turn it into much more value.
I do think this puts Discourse and StackOverflow a bit more at odds as Discourse for being solely valuable for 5-10% value and 90-95% noise, will no longer be why folks will use it anymore. In our data community, I see many of us flocking to Discourse as it allows a looser leash of what’s permitted but enables us to contribute with friends to make much more valuable content while the bulk of noise can occur on DM platforms.
Stack Overflow will still be a good root place to get started when communities have yet to establish a Discourse, but the real cream of the crop seems to be in when communities successfully make a less noisy Discourse.
So big changes since thread happened:
This is how we combat GenAI feeding itself garbage content. That will be my aim anyways! 
that’s very well stated and I completely agree. I hope we can convince even more people to eventually share this level of insight!