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by re-thc
1100 days ago
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Some communities do run Discourse. All I see are lots of questions and now answers or discussions. It doesn't really work. Slack was popular before Discord. I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve. More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord / common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it. |
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Technical systems that we need help with are always complete garbage, users are clueless/eternal September, spammers/trolls/vandals are relentless, and it seems futile to expect people to spend countless hours on moderation and providing high-quality answers for free.
Chat groupware (IRC, Slack, Discord, etc.) doesn't work well for Q&A because the same questions get asked over and over, previous answers are hard to find, the noise to signal ratio is high, and work scales linearly (or worse) with the number of users. And of course they are sequestered and invisible.
Q&A sites like StackOverflow etc. seem to have their own issues: hostility to new contributors, worthless non-answers/spam/AI generated garbage/'welcome to the site' posts/etc., moderator power trips and status games, bad profit-driven oversight, etc..
The main reason HN works, as far as I can tell, is good moderation - which I imagine is a lot of work. I don't have any other explanation of how HN has survived while comments on other sites (ars technica...) have gone to hell.
But few sites can compare to the utter uselessness and idiocy of the Microsoft Support Community, which is indistinguishable from a parody of itself.