I find Discourse absolutely horrendous. Discourse mailing-list mode is a tack-on at best, and the formatting you get in mail notifications basically require you to be online to visit the link. And the gamification is also a huge put-off.
Web forums made us forgot how far we came with NNTP years ago. Even the shittiest NNTP could do subthread splitting, hiding and scoring. Handling hundreds of messages per day was easy. The convenience of doing-it-all under one powerful client was massive.
You can still do that with mailing lists, as long as it's not as badly managed as forums-with-a-wanna-be-mailing-list-mode addon as Discourse is.
Web forums made us forgot how far we came with NNTP years ago. Even the shittiest NNTP could do subthread splitting, hiding and scoring. Handling hundreds of messages per day was easy. The convenience of doing-it-all under one powerful client was massive.
You can still do that with mailing lists, as long as it's not as badly managed as forums-with-a-wanna-be-mailing-list-mode addon as Discourse is.