4 ms·

What are your thoughts on Discourse? They are also aiming to change the discussion board space.

• buro9 13y ago
  On Discourse... it is always hard to tell in the early days where a project might go, and what the pivots may be. We all have to start somewhere and we are judged on what we put out today more than where we are aiming for tomorrow. I don't want to make the mistake of judging them by their current position or their near-term roadmap. From what I've seen from the project so far (and of course I take an interest) they are aiming at a different solution for a different set of problems and potential market than we are. I feel that viewing us as competitors is to view the stagnation of discussion boards as a generalised problem. Actually the market is so vast that the problem sets we are both aiming to solve differ. I believe both approaches will be successful in much the same way that the blogging community have made both Wordpress and Tumblr successful for the different approaches to blogging. The market being so huge that even if we both have massive success (and my definition of that is huge) we will still barely have dented it. Would Discourse work for the set of problems I feel we are attacking? No. But the market is so huge that for many people their problems are solved better by Discourse than what we're doing and vice versa. So I personally think it's great that there are more people working in this space helping to make better forums for everyone. Perhaps in the future we'll converge on the same solution, in which case... great times, we'll both have a sparring partner and a good fight on our hands to spur us on, in the mean time my thought is that they are a partner in the fight against a plague of bad forum software.