from Hacker News

StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

by slyv on 2/7/13, 2:46 AM with 82 comments

• by jacoblyles on 2/7/13, 3:38 AM

  No nesting. Is this 2004?

  How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.

• by gabipurcaru on 2/7/13, 5:20 AM

  I really like the StackExchange family. But this is weak, IMO, for some reasons:

  1. A typical forum looks simpler to me than this. If they're going to reinvent forums, it should be intuitive

  2. AJAX? Yea, fine, but only as means to an end

  3. "Discourse is designed from the beginning for high resolution touch devices." -- Tried on my nexus 7 and it looked bad, I had to turn on the laptop. Not all mobile devices can be described as "high resolution touch devices".

  4. Their key features: "Conversations, not pages", "Get notifications when mentioned", "Simple, but with context", "Remembers your place", "Reply while you read", "Reply as a linked topic", "Real time updates", "Links automatically expand", "Bring your friends", "Paste to share images", "Log in with … anything", "Moderation that scales with the community", "Categories that grow with you", "Search that actually works", "Simple metrics", "Your stuff belongs to you", "Comprehensive API", "No app required". -- These are all welcome features, but they don't reinvent anything IMO, more like an incremental improvement. Most of them could just as well be implemented as plugins to traditional forums.

  That being said, forums need to be reinvented, but Discourse doesn't do that.

• by adventured on 2/7/13, 3:52 AM

  First impression after spending some time on try.discourse.org --- it's very messy.

  The mess that online forums have been, seemingly since forever, should be reduced, not continued with snazzier implementation.

• by tferris on 2/7/13, 3:34 AM

  "Forums are the dark matter of the web, the B-movies of the Internet. But they matter,"

  I totally agree with Jeff and do welcome any innovation in this space but it's hard to imagine more efficient comment/forum systems than the Reddit/HN style (I like even more the Reddit style since it offers more features and hides irrelevant or long discussions in a better way). I'm not much a fan of the linear, non-nested, old-fashioned but wide-spread bulletin boards style which Discourse follows.

• by themgt on 2/7/13, 3:37 AM

  We got a basic demo online (w/o API keys for 3rd party auth, and there's some broken stuff): http://discourse.a.pogoapp.com/

  We'd like to ultimately contribute back some 12factor-esque code (e.g. ENV vars instead of YAML for config, Procfile to define processes). It was interesting reading the comments on the Metafilter thread about how the app seems promising but difficult to host compared to shared hosting+PHP: http://www.metafilter.com/124658/Not-phpBB

• by zdmc on 2/7/13, 3:38 AM

  Welcome to a prettier online discussion. I don't intend to be an active contributor, but so long as the content is indexed by the search engines, then I am sure I'll benefit as an active consumer (much like I have with Stack Overflow).

  From my perspective, Discourse is a polished forum; analogous to Stack Overflow in the Answers World (many of the other Answers sites are ugly, ad-filled, and closed to the public). So I welcome this, and look forward to seeing the resulting discussions in my search query listings...

• by dmazin on 2/7/13, 4:52 AM

  discourse's design entirely misses the charm and feeling of community that "ugly" forums like phpbb offer. This just looks bland. Maybe it can work for technical or support forums but not real communities.

  In general it seems like a lot of design fails to understand the difference between a clean bathroom and a charming but messy living room. You do not want the former.

  It makes me think of Spolsky on what a singles bar designed by Nielsen would look like: clean and the menus would have 16pt Arial type. But it would be empty because everyone would be at the gross dive bar across the street having fun.

• by DigitalSea on 2/7/13, 12:01 PM

  I admire Jeff as a person, the whole Stack Exchange network is amazing but Discourse needs some serious thinking applied to it. If Jeff wants to release a decent forum application, he should look to Vanilla for inspiration: http://vanillaforums.org/ — in my opinion, Vanilla is probably the cleanest and best forum application out there today. PHPBB and MyBB feel horribly dated and vBulletin is expensive and looks like it hasn't been updated in about 15 years.

  The forum market is ripe for disruption on the same scale Wordpress disrupted the CMS market, fancy Javascript is not enough to disrupt the market. I personally find infinite scrolling to be buggy and highly annoying when you're scrolling and trying to read text, then BAM! scrollbar gets longer and the page jumps.

  Simplicity is the key, not a large number of features and copious amounts of Javascript unnecessarily added in. Discourse as it currently stands doesn't impress me on the same scale Stack Overflow did at least not in its current form.

• by jtchang on 2/7/13, 3:32 AM

  http://try.discourse.org/ is ridiculously fast.

• by dietrichepp on 2/7/13, 7:23 AM

  I don't care what makes it different from PHPBB. We know that PHPBB is horribly broken for a wide variety of uses (and incredibly useful in its niches). I want to know what makes Discourse different from Google Wave. Google Wave is a lot more recent, and has already bubbled and fizzed out, and the idea that you can invite people into conversations, the idea of unlimited flow, reminds me much more of Google Wave than anything else.

• by libria on 2/7/13, 4:35 AM

  Atwood has previously been a big proponent of OpenID[1]. Why no implementation here?

  After signing up for try.discourse.org I now have to re-register to post on meta.discourse.org as well.

  [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drive...

• by spullara on 2/7/13, 3:37 AM

  I'm a big fan of reinventing forums. The current software used for forums is terrible and this fixes many of the issues with them. Looks like he has even thought about SEO as the underlying links on the infinite scroll pages will work for crawlers.

• by Marazan on 2/7/13, 9:29 AM

  As I said on Atwood's blog post, there is nothing wrong (and a lot right) with the 3-pane setup of a mid 1990's newsgroup reader. It's surely not beyond the ability of a modern programmer to implement that in a web-browser today.

• by est on 2/7/13, 4:34 AM

  Pocoo.org was missioned to make a BBS in 2004

  http://www.pocoo.org/history/#history

  Python community should be familiar with pocoo.org. These guys made Flask, Jinja 2, Pygments, Sphinx and Werkzeug

• by telmich on 2/7/13, 2:50 PM

  It seems this is yet another Usenet re-invention...like stackoverflow is, too

• by PavlovsCat on 2/7/13, 1:02 PM

  If you go through the list in that wired articles of things that supposedly set this apart, you'll find that in most cases, that stuff already exists. That leaves two things:

  "a “best of thread” view, which shows the best reply to a particular thread based on unspecified factors" & "“aggregated links” view, which displays all outbound links mentioned in a thread, plus how many times they’ve been clicked"

  Wow. This is turning from puzzling to genuinely funny. You know, two things anyone could add about to any existing mature forum software in about an afternoon, and which they don't, because they do nothing to improve online discourse. And Wired writes an article about it.. love of money truly is the root of all unintentional comedy.

• by OGinparadise on 2/7/13, 9:55 AM

  "Free, Open, Simple" and then a "Buy It" button with "Unfortunately, you can't … yet."

  so what's up?

• by orangethirty on 2/7/13, 3:49 AM

  Nuuton makes this obsolete due to being able to hold conversations (with nesting) about a given topic or website without actually having to be on it. Plus it eases search for information inside those same topics by indexing each post as an independent entity. Good try, though. Nuuton launches in March.