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Dan Luu | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Its backend performance also appears to be quite bad, e.g., they banned Bing from crawling them because they couldn't handle the 0.5 QPS of load that Bing was sending their way: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/981992814824378369.

But, computer performance continues to improve and discourse will probably be usable on a cheap phone within a decade and maybe servers will also become fast enough that they'll be able to handle 0.5 QPS of load.

The bigger issue is that the design is strongly anti-user in a lot of ways, e.g.,
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Dan Luu | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 One of the major design decisions was to have no downvotes, which was justified as a way to created "civilized discourse", the idea being that people should discuss their disagreements, resulting in "civilized discourse".

I predicted this wouldn't work because people sometimes have a very strong desire to express displeasure, and if they can't do it by downvoting, they'll do it by writing nasty comments. You don't even have to have used the internet to guess this, e.g.,
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01cf6009 | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @ed709062 Yes the underlying ideology of Discourse is terrible. You can strip that stuff out to a certain extent but it still drove these kinds of design decisions
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Dan Luu | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 if you watch someone who's road raging, they often try to get the attention of their target and they keep getting angrier and angrier and angrier when their target doesn't notice they're being given the finger or whatever.

If you ever watched a forum migrate to discourse, you can see this exact thing play out. I read the blizzard forums around when I played Overwatch for https://danluu.com/overwatch-gender/ and it was exactly as you'd expect. The number of mean/toxic/jerk-y messages went way up.