phpBB has been virtually the same for 20 years. Normally I'm all "ain't broke don't fix it", but forums have terrible UX that we grew to "love" because there was no alternative. If they managed to make some UX improvements that Discourse made, there could have been a chance.
Forums do indeed have terrible UX… but it says a lot that they still compare favourably to what we have today, in many cases. phpBB is hard to use, but it has instructions everywhere! Whereas modern alternatives are (sometimes) slightly easier to use (once you know how), but with no instructions.
People don't read instructions. If you need instructions on how to use a UI (especially for something as innocuous as an online forum), then it's not intuitive enough.
[b]I like being told how to make my text bold.[/b] No amount of intuition would let me figure stuff like that out on my own. (Note: I made that text [i]italic[/i]… had to be told how to do that. Does that make Hacker News particularly bad?)
“Intuitive” means “behaves how the user expects” – with computer things, that usually means “behaves how the user is used to”. If we focus on making things intuitive so they don't need instructions, and then don't provide instructions, we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience (preventing them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how things work).
we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience
That's why your example of needing tags to bold text is an excellent example of shitty UX. A WYSIWYG editor where you click the Bold option to enable it, and click it again to disable it would be much better.
But that means hidden state. If I quote somebody, I can see how they produced their markup in BBcode, but in WYSIWYG I can't see which icon button to press.
Quite funny, because when bbs became the norm, the old generation was quite vocal on how bad they are because of their flow-style discussions. At that time, Usenet and mailing lists were the norm, which had thread-like style, like this forum or reddit.
