Table of Contents
Foreword
Jeff Atwood
But what is Discourse about?
Discourse is a project about fundamentally reinventing a technology that hasn't changed much since the year 2000, web forums. All the cool people spend all their time talking on nifty modern websites like the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Tumblrs these days. Who even visits forums any more?
That'd be like going all the way across town to a run-down arcade to play that ancient, creaky old Street Fighter II machine when you could be playing a 3D, high definition fighting game on your console in the comfort of your own home, against anyone in the world over the Internet.
The very idea of typing paragraphs to other people has fallen out of favor as well. Can you even type a paragraph on Facebook any more? Is this even possible? Doesn't the enter key submit your brief thought on someone else's status update? 140 characters in a tweet should be enough for anyone, right? And why bother with those characters at all when a screen full of copypasta images on Pinterest will suffice. It's faster to visually process than a lot of tedious words.
Who the hell cares about typing paragraphs on the Internet any more?
Well, as it turns out, we do. A lot.
Most of my early years on the internet were spent on Discourse forums rather than other platforms. More recently I've used Discord in these past few years years and then just tried out X/Twitter etc.
Having had to use some of those other platforms more recently—in order to check out where other prominent people in my primary fields of interest are holding their discussions online—has made me reflect upon how simple things in Discourse that we take for granted are rendered deeply awkward & almost even discourteous on those platforms, which makes them detrimental for rational discussion.
At Length, At Leisure
In Discourse, it is simple and easy:
- to type in paragraphs!
- to respond to relevant discussions from a month ago, from a year ago, even from 5 years ago
It's not even like the main selling point of Discourse or anything, but I've come to realise how much discussion quickly suffers without the first point. We underestimate its value. Because without being able to type in paragraphs, people stop trying to list their reasons for why they believe in things. The limit effectively greatly limits people from giving evidence for their thought processes.
Then a culture is born where people just force each other to have specific opinions, instead of trying to convince others of an argument by logical reasoning and debate because that would require more words—which they are discouraged from including.
This is deeply detrimental where as a society we start to use such a platform as the main vehicle for national political discourse. Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan wrote about these aspects well—how the nature and form of a medium determines its content.
From Marshall McLuhan via this blog post by Alex Mitchell:
The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
Societies have been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
From Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (Chapter – The Age of Show Business):
Of course, to say that television is entertaining is merely banal. Such a fact is hardly threatening to a culture, not even worth writing a book about. [...] But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. [...]
The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called "television". And what they watch, and like to watch, are moving pictures—millions of them, of short duration and dynamic variety. It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accomodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accomodate the values of show business. [...]
When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ...?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only shows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heel by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas.
Regarding this—i.e. a culture where people just force each other to have specific opinions instead of arguing their case, because reasoning becomes too lengthy and almost distasteful to regularly engage in—it's rather detrimental.
It's so detrimental to the point where serious wars are currently being fought (as other wars have been fought before) and support and opposition for these wars is garnered not through rational debate but through virtue-signalling — like displaying flags on your profile — and reducing political discourse to "our side is good and the other side is evil" or "everything from the other side is propaganda".
The things that frustrate me the most in those platforms is:
- it not being customary to type in paragraphs
- being limited to responding to only the last 24-48 hours of discussion in busy and active channels
I don't know why this becomes such a dealbreaker on those other platforms, but just an ordinary post that would be a few paragraphs long in Discourse (each paragraph being 3-4 lines long) is almost considered a wall of text in Discord. You just take it for granted that you can write a post that long in Discourse. But in Discord, I guess the problem is that there are just a few channels for each umbrella of discussion (instead of many, many topics in a category on Discourse). So if you spend too long on something, someone might have another topic of discussion in between, and then it feels rude to focus too much on one particular topic when there are more new up-to-date events that other people want to talk about. This stops people from talking about much older events as well as dissuades them from speaking too much about any one event in particular too.
This becomes a problem when people use the platform as the main hub for something – a lot of people are using Discord as their community nowadays. Because almost no one types in paragraphs, because there are no paragraphs for anyone to read, eventually people almost effectively stop being able to type in paragraphs. This is because it becomes a cycle where because you don't read paragraphs since there aren't any around, you can never learn enough about something beyond the first 1-2 talking points — and therefore you yourself also can't write anything in paragraphs about a topic since you never got to learn enough yourself.
I'm seeing this come to real life where I've been learning Russian as a language. My fellow classmates, teacher and I sometimes run into friends or colleagues who express super anti-Russian or Russophobic opinions and yet, when prompted, are unable to articulate why — nothing beyond basic archetypes like "Putin is evil" and responding to arguments with "that's Russian propaganda".
We're suffering as a society because of this — think of all the domestic policies and policies on geopolitics that we could all have serious discussions about, and yet so many people become limited to just 1-2 lines of thought on an issue because that is what social media has trained them to have.
There are definitely people who write articles in-depth and discuss all these in-depth — like Events in Ukraine on Substack who easily dispels many of the myths about the so-called "heroic" and "honourable" regime in Ukraine just through directly translating from Ukrainian sources. Take note, for example, of how Ukraine waged war on its Eastern Donbass region and people in mainstream liberal Ukraine regularly described the Donbass as a "cancerous tumour" to be excised in the aftermath of 2014, only for them to howl when that region overwhelmingly wanted to join Russia—which was also reported by an American journalist who visited the region in March 2022.
Events in Ukraine
Or another is Glenn Greenwald—one of the journalists who whistleblower Edward Snowden went to in order to break the story of mass spying by the NSA and more—who does hour-long news shows on geopolitics, civil liberties and more, with detailed yet accessible reasoning. He spoke beautifully about how deceptive the Western propaganda surrounding Ukraine is:
Glenn Greenwald
It's difficult to recall a more brazen illustration of how media war propaganda functions – at least without going back to the 2002-2003 debate over whether to invade Iraq – in exactly the way that George Orwell so often predicted and warned about – especially in his very famous novel “1984” about how tyranny functions. The Western media simply insisted that the exact opposite of what they told you three months earlier was true. They disclaimed everything they had said before.
That a union of government and media will radically revise history in order to maintain popular support for a war was central to how Orwell's dystopian, totalitarian government of Oceania functioned in that novel. Whenever Oceania's leaders subtly redirected the hatred of the citizenry from longtime enemy Eurasia to new enemy Eastasia, the messaging to the citizenry brazenly changed, all based on the propagandistic premise that nothing had changed. As Orwell wrote: “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
And just like that – presto! – everything that the citizenship was told previously was no longer applicable. A brand-new reality – suited for the needs of the new war – was in its place. In a process that should be very familiar to Americans who lived through the wars in Iraq, then Libya, then Syria, and now Ukraine, what was until very recently declared to be a loyal friend and partner could switch on a dime to be not only an enemy, but an enemy that we have always opposed, and vice-versa. As Orwell wrote in that book, using his protagonist Winston Smith: “The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.
But when everyone else becomes limited to conversing in 1-2 lines on platforms, discussion suffers and our society suffers for it.
Additionally, aside from being able to converse in paragraphs, another important feature which Discourse has that other platforms don't excel in is being able to respond to topics and news events past their immediate passing. This is important because it allows for other people to join in on the discussion even if they're not in the same timezone as the person who posted the event or topic, and even if an event happened in the middle of the week and they couldn't respond to it until the weekend.
Allowing for more people to join the discussion over time and allowing them to list their reasoning means a bigger pool of opinions to draw upon and learn from, rather than from just whoever happens to be online in that particular moment of something being posted. So it makes for higher quality of discussion overall, because there are more people who can contribute — including people who know more about a particular topic and not just people who were there in the moment that something was posted. And the higher quality also arises from being able to take your time to respond, because people don't feel pressured to just write something short and quick to get their response in before the next hot topic comes up, and therefore can put more effort and thought into their responses.
That's why two of the most simple features on Discourse:
- the ability to write in paragraphs
- the ability to reply to a topic more than 48 hours old
should be treasured. And even when it seems like everyone is migrating to other platforms, I hope people will still keep choosing Discourse because the quality of the discussion becomes better just from having those two things.
P.S. I know that other platforms like X and Discord have been trying to make room for long-form content by introducing new features, like "subscribe to post longer tweets" and "subscribe to write longer 4000-character posts on Discord" plus forum features and so on. But X hides pretty much the whole post until you click to show the whole thing, and Discord's forum feature is still pretty nascent where people still typically reply with just a few lines, because pressing Enter sends the message instead of starting a new line and the column width for forum posts is by default extremely narrow. So not only do you have to pay to write more in one go on both platforms, it's also not really seriously made for reading, compared to the ease that you have on Discourse.
I still maintain that when on Discourse compared to other platforms—when both Discourse and another platform like Discord have been simultaneously used by the same community—I always see people elaborate more in-depth on Discourse, and I learn a lot more from them on Discourse compared to the other platforms.
Great to see new competitive pricing tier on Discourse
I do think that the new $20/month tier in Discourse's pricing will make it easier for smaller communities to use Discourse—alongside other past efforts like the free.discourse.group initiative.
One of the self-reinforcing problems that can arise with only high-tiered pricing available is that usually bigger companies with existing communities can afford those, but not smaller communities that are just starting out. So smaller communities tend to start off on some other "free" or low-cost platform over Discourse—particularly if they also don't have the technical know-how or interest for self-hosting. And once their community is bigger, the community is already attached to the other platform that they started on, thereby also making it even more unlikely for them to migrate to Discourse.
In fact, there is a quote relating to that particular phenomenon when it comes to both politics and online communities (I thought I first saw it via codinghorror on Twitter, but I can't seem to find it):
The resistance to change in a system is proportional to the number of active users squared, multiplied by the number of years the system has been in use.
Anyway I do think that the high-tier pricing has been good for attracting companies that already had large communities that were using other legacy forum software. But in this space where there are a lot of free platforms that people have been gravitating towards to start their community, I am definitely a big fan seeing the new lower competitive pricing tier.
P.S. Discord Horror Stories — the REAL sacrifices that you pay for closed-source freemium
I will say that one of the most depressing things I've ever seen is the absolutely poor security on Discord, all of which pretty much wouldn't happen and has never happened on Discourse, Slack or anywhere, to such a horrifyingly large scale. People lose access to their entire Discord accounts because of various innocuous-seeming hacking campaigns.
Some of these involve just accidentally clicking a malicious link sent via servers or DMs which downloads malware to your computer. This takes over your Discord account and starts spamming DMs to all your contacts and servers with the malicious link too.
This is even more devastating where people are using Discord for their work chats (becoming pretty common in game dev circles) and they lose access to their entire servers for their work chats. I've seen people say how they and a few other team members are paying Nitro members—Nitro is Discord's subscription feature which lets you use custom emojis across servers and all that—and they've reached out to Discord but they either get no response at all, or Discord can't help them.
Just search "Discord bad security" and see the sad horror stories from people and their unanswered calls for help:
We use a discord server to run a small business (indie game studio) and we all pay for nitro. Three weeks ago, a contact who's a game developer sent us a build to try. As it turns out, the build was malware, that dev had already been hacked, and the whole thing turns out to be a common discord scam (coincidentally more effective because it was coming from someone who is legitimately an indie game developer). One of our studio members who originally created our Discord server lost their account in the hack.
Since then, we've been kicked out of the server we use to run the day to do day operations of our studio, and criminals have access to a ton of confidential data on that server, and have been impersonating the employee and trying to scam business contacts.
This is obviously a gigantic f***ing nightmare, and Discord's new "process" for dealing with this has been wildly inadequate. We submitted a ticket through the "stolen account" form and have literally not heard back for three weeks. We reported the account via the app (which is what the instructions say to do) –
and, again, nothing. How long is this nightmare going to continue? No way to know. Can we prompt them for an update? No. That's "abusing the support process." This is not a support post. We don't need help (at least, not any that anyone on this forum can give). But Discord is a bad company. We trusted them to host a business-critical service on their platform, and that trust was a huge mistake. I'm cancelling my nitro subscription, and I encourage you to do the same. Discord fundamentally does not respect you as a customer and will absolutely leave you out to dry with zero recourse over a problem that would take a human two minutes to identify and resolve.
The way discord handles hacked accounts is completely unacceptable
by u/BullockHouse in discordapp
More horror stories in the Account & Server Management category on Discord's public Feedback forums. Here is another:
This is historically the worst support and security I have ever experienced. There was plenty of time to save my account as i almost immediately stopped an attack on it, and instead, they have taken days and days with absolutely 0 support or reply. Now I have lost all of my servers and that account is for sure ruined and useless. And I am a lucky one because I immediately realized what was happening. I am 100% certain other people were nowhere near as lucky and probably lost nearly everything because of scams/hacks etc like this one.
Stop investing in a shop and all this trash and update security and your support team. It really is that simple. This app is way too big and has way too much access to everything and the ability to link nearly every other account into it, it is absolutely Discord's responsibility to protect users, especially because of this.
Here are more people sharing what happened after their accounts got hacked on Discord:
I had my identity completely stolen including email, amazon, paypal, bankaccounts, and discord and much more. The support team(basically AI bots at this point), keep automatically marking my tickets solved. It seems like discord is either losing a lot of money and doesn't have staff to actually look into creating solutions, or they just don't gaf. In my case, I don't have any form of social media other than Discord, so I've literally lost connection with some my my cousins and old friends. I officially hate this app.
And more:
My account got taken and they started spending money. I submitted a ticket ang got no real help for 20 days. Seeing as the support would not respond I had to do chargebacks for the purchases. When I finally got my account back they disabled it and told me they would not reinstate because the chargebacks not giving me a way to solve it.
Yeah it's really sad to see.
What's also sad is that people paying Nitro subscriptions when you can easily get something so much better, more secure and customizable like Discourse for the price of one or two Nitro subscriptions. Self-hosting Discourse is just a bit over half the price of a single Discord Nitro subscription! And now hosting Discourse with CDCK on the lowest tier is cheaper than getting 2 Nitro subscriptions. (Sorry if the calculations are a little off — I'm doing rough currency conversions in my head because Nitro pricing is localized.)
On Discourse, you also get unlimited emojis and so much more customisation over the look of your community space than on Discord's limited proprietary color schemes and arbitrary emoji limits.
And because of the Hacker One bounty program that Discourse has—and also because Discourse open source—it makes it easier for Discourse to be notified of any serious security issues. The fact that Discourse isn't a single centralized online platform is a benefit too, because losing your account on one Discourse forum does not directly impact your accounts at all on other Discourse forums like it would on Discord.
Anyway that's just also covering another benefit of Discourse—security—that we often just take for granted too.
Alongside being able to type in paragraphs and respond to topics beyond the immediacy of one or two days—which makes for more meaningful and much better quality of discussion—Discourse's great security and new lowest-tier hosting pricing should make it a really good choice for many communities (in addition to already being very cheap to host as an open-source application).
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