
StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse - slyv
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/
======
jacoblyles
No nesting. Is this 2004?

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

~~~
bonaldi
Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation.
They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table
with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the
conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody
gets lost.

 _All_ a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order.
Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe
exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were
last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it
works _against_ the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate
in complex conversations.

~~~
jacoblyles
I would argue that the problem with flat forums is that people have to hold a
lot of state in their heads to follow the conversation.

~~~
bonaldi
But that's hardware accelerated. There's a lot of brain given over to doing
just that. When you stop that working by presenting the conversation in an
incompatible codec (threaded), you switch over to the equivalent of software
decoding.

And that is as bad an idea for conversation as it is for h.264.

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gabipurcaru
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.

------
adventured
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.

~~~
bunkat
I'm not a huge fan of infinite scroll for things like this either. I always
lose track of where I am in the list as new things keep being added. And then
when I navigate down a level and come back up, my browser tends to lose track
of where I was.

~~~
codinghorror
We should never lose your place. We try very very hard not to. Experiment on
try.discourse.org and see.

------
tferris
"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.

~~~
codinghorror
Part of my working hypothesis is that the reason flat forums are so ubiquitous
is their simplicity -- I think larger audiences just don't "get" threading at
all, and there are a lot of ways for misused (and even correctly used)
threading to actively harm the discussion.

------
themgt
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>

~~~
troymc
The relative difficulty of getting hosting for a Ruby app vs. getting hosting
for a PHP app may work in their favour: they intend to offer managed hosting
akin to Wordpress.com. (WordPress.com can be used for free, but there are all
sorts of paid extras.)

~~~
mattmanser
They've said in the other thread a couple of days ago one of the long term
aims is to make this super easy to install and as part of that they want to
help make Rails super easy to install.

------
zdmc
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...

------
dmazin
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.

~~~
joe_the_user
I hate phpbb and their ilk and use them often in forums for the tight, obscure
subcultures that I'm a part of. I don't think phpbb gives a sense of
community. I think a sense of community makes people willing to put up with
the barfy fugliness of phpbb.

On the other, discourse actually just seems to have a different kind of
ugliness rather than a good design or a good interface. Why do they all have a
banner/header that takes up half the screen? Why all the unnecessary crap?

~~~
Kiro
You must have a really small screen with low resolution.

~~~
joe_the_user
Not really, I use several completely average PC laptops

The thing about phpbb-type board is that they encourage the people who them up
to put huge graphics on the masthead, so the average subcultural board is
actually going to be significantly larger than a pure default install.

------
DigitalSea
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.

~~~
danneu
One of the necessary features of a forum going forward is a notification
system.

I ported a vBulletin forum to a custom Rails app, and rolling a notification
system is THE feature that inspired me. Meanwhile, on a conventional vBulletin
forum, you're arduously making the rounds to see if anyone is even responding
to you. It's hilarious.

Definitely one of the things that Discourse gets right!

------
jtchang
<http://try.discourse.org/> is ridiculously fast.

------
dietrichepp
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.

------
libria
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...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drivers-
license.html)

~~~
wahnfrieden
Probably because OpenID has largely been recognized as a misstep.

Separate logins for try and meta is just silly though.

------
spullara
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.

------
Marazan
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.

------
est
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

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

------
PavlovsCat
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.

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

so what's up?

------
orangethirty
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.

~~~
wingerlang
Any more information? The website gives me nothing.

~~~
orangethirty
Shoot me an email.

The useless website is on purpose.

~~~
sysop073
I can see how your empty website will be crushing their fully-functional one
any day now

~~~
orangethirty
It has not launched.

