[vaylian]

One of the design goals of Discourse was that it should work well on mobile phones. I guess most other forum software is either from the time of before widespread smartphone use or it doesn't consider mobile users. With that being said, I actually don't like discourse's UI and prefer more classical forums like PHPbb.

[shrimp_emoji]

Working well on crappy toy devices = working shittily on actual computers

Smart watches should have taken off, so everything could have been made post stamp-sized to work well on them and become completely unusable on a screen larger than your hand.

[simias]

Discourse goes a bit overboard with the javascript and all the bells and whistles but I don't understand how anybody could prefer PHPbb over it, other than familiarity. That being said I always found PHPbb abysmal to use, even in the early 2000, so clearly I'm biased.

My main issue with Discourse is that I prefer HN/Reddit-like threading for replies rather than linear comments, but PHPbb does the same and there are pros and cons for both formats anyway.

[timeon]

> even in the early 2000

Those signatures loaded with images and longer than actual content were pretty bad.

[Dalewyn]

You could turn them off, you know.

Yes, 20 years ago we were able to customize software for use. Mindblowing, I know.

[phs318u]

The first 5 words of your comment were highly relevant. The rest is snark. This is HN - please don't contribute to its enshittification.

[Dalewyn]

Go blame the software industry for throwing away what made software of yesteryear so amazing to use. I'm just a simple farmer tending to his memes.