10 ms·

StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse

102 points by slyv 14y ago

jtchang 14y ago
http://try.discourse.org/ http://try.discourse.org/ is ridiculously fast.
tferris 14y ago
"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 14y ago
  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.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  For tech discussions Reddit/HN are fine... But I really miss places where to discuss political stuff. These kinds of discussions really got stick in some 90s style niche forums. And in the forums I know that still have these discussions, they got just boring and repetitive.
spullara 14y ago
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.
themgt 14y ago
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/ 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 http://www.metafilter.com/124658/Not-phpBB
- troymc 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- runn1ng 14y ago
  I tried to register and login into your demo site, it worked, but I can't post anything. Also the metafilter post doesn't open for me.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  Excellent, if you need any help from us, ping us on meta.discourse or on GitHub!
zdmc 14y ago
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...
jacoblyles 14y ago
No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  I don't think nesting has become any more or less popular since 2004. Slashdot was nesting a lot earlier than 2004, as was email and usenet. At the other end, Google Plus comments don't nest, and nor have the typical PHP forums added it.
- iends 14y ago
  I've never really liked nested conversations, personally.
  - jacoblyles 14y ago
    A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed. Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find more posts responding to the OP and fewer posts responding to each other. Linear forums are built for announcements or Q&A, not conversations.
    - stch2 14y ago
      The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.
      - Androsynth 14y ago
        I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new. local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.
orangethirty 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Any more information? The website gives me nothing.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    Shoot me an email. The useless website is on purpose.
    - sysop073 14y ago
      I can see how your empty website will be crushing their fully-functional one any day now
      - orangethirty 14y ago
        It has not launched.
- koralatov 14y ago
  You're going to have to be a little more specific. How can you ``hold conversations ... without having to be on [the website]''? If you're talking anonymous comments, we already have those and they're largely a disaster. If you're talking something different, then what is it? I'm sure you can share the general concept without giving away your `secret sauce'.
adventured 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    We should never lose your place. We try very very hard not to. Experiment on try.discourse.org and see.
est 14y ago
Pocoo.org was missioned to make a BBS in 2004 http://www.pocoo.org/history/#history http://www.pocoo.org/history/#history Python community should be familiar with pocoo.org. These guys made Flask, Jinja 2, Pygments, Sphinx and Werkzeug
libria 14y ago
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-drivers-license.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drive...
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  Probably because OpenID has largely been recognized as a misstep. Separate logins for try and meta is just silly though.
dmazin 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    You must have a really small screen with low resolution.
    - joe_the_user 14y ago
      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.
gabipurcaru 14y ago
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.
dietrichepp 14y ago
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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Marazan 14y ago
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.
OGinparadise 14y ago
"Free, Open, Simple" and then a "Buy It" button with "Unfortunately, you can't … yet." so what's up?
DigitalSea 14y ago
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/ 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 14y ago
  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!
PavlovsCat 14y ago
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.
telmich 14y ago
It seems this is yet another Usenet re-invention...like stackoverflow is, too

102 points by slyv 14y ago

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

"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 14y ago
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.
blablabla123 14y ago
For tech discussions Reddit/HN are fine... But I really miss places where to discuss political stuff. These kinds of discussions really got stick in some 90s style niche forums. And in the forums I know that still have these discussions, they got just boring and repetitive.

spullara 14y ago

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.

themgt 14y ago

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/ 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 http://www.metafilter.com/124658/Not-phpBB

troymc 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
runn1ng 14y ago
I tried to register and login into your demo site, it worked, but I can't post anything. Also the metafilter post doesn't open for me.
codinghorror 14y ago
Excellent, if you need any help from us, ping us on meta.discourse or on GitHub!

zdmc 14y ago

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...

jacoblyles 14y ago

No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.

mmahemoff 14y ago
I don't think nesting has become any more or less popular since 2004. Slashdot was nesting a lot earlier than 2004, as was email and usenet. At the other end, Google Plus comments don't nest, and nor have the typical PHP forums added it.
iends 14y ago
I've never really liked nested conversations, personally.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  A linear forum compared to a nested forum is like cutting off part of your brain. You have to expend brain power sorting out multiple conversations occurring in the same sequence. The quoting mechanism is an attempt to unbreak the linear forum, but it's a kludge. Linear forums are a cacophony of conversations intermixed. Deep conversations die early on linear forums because they are too hard to follow. You will find more posts responding to the OP and fewer posts responding to each other. Linear forums are built for announcements or Q&A, not conversations.
  - stch2 14y ago
    The downside is that it's nearly impossible to go back to a thread and continue where you left off. With a linear thread, you can go back to the last post you read and continue from there -- with a fully threaded forum, I basically get one pass at the comments and then can never view that page again without huge effort to reconstruct my position.
    - Androsynth 14y ago
      I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new. local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.

orangethirty 14y ago

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 14y ago
Any more information? The website gives me nothing.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Shoot me an email. The useless website is on purpose.
  - sysop073 14y ago
    I can see how your empty website will be crushing their fully-functional one any day now
    - orangethirty 14y ago
      It has not launched.
koralatov 14y ago
You're going to have to be a little more specific. How can you ``hold conversations ... without having to be on [the website]''? If you're talking anonymous comments, we already have those and they're largely a disaster. If you're talking something different, then what is it? I'm sure you can share the general concept without giving away your `secret sauce'.

adventured 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  We should never lose your place. We try very very hard not to. Experiment on try.discourse.org and see.

est 14y ago

Pocoo.org was missioned to make a BBS in 2004 http://www.pocoo.org/history/#history http://www.pocoo.org/history/#history Python community should be familiar with pocoo.org. These guys made Flask, Jinja 2, Pygments, Sphinx and Werkzeug

libria 14y ago

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-drivers-license.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drive...

wahnfrieden 14y ago
Probably because OpenID has largely been recognized as a misstep. Separate logins for try and meta is just silly though.

dmazin 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  You must have a really small screen with low resolution.
  - joe_the_user 14y ago
    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.

gabipurcaru 14y ago

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.

dietrichepp 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Marazan 14y ago

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.

OGinparadise 14y ago

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

DigitalSea 14y ago

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/ 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 14y ago
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!

PavlovsCat 14y ago

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.

telmich 14y ago

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