Discourse usability

[Martin <debacle@debian.org>]

Hi Neil, hi project,

thanks for putting effort in communication improvements, either on
the social or on the technical level.

I'm a Discourse user on various instances, but I'm not an admin on
any of them. This is my end-user experience:

Good:

- Discussions are usually well structured. It is easy to find start
  and end points.

- Moderation or other means of filtering seem to work. At least,
  signal to noise ratio was always great.

- Search function returns useful results most of the time.

- "Like this post" is a nice, low-barrier form of acknowledgment.

Bad:

- Offline usage and local archive is hard, i.e. re-reading when
  disconnected, hold back a text, e.g. to think it over, is difficult.

- I like to use the console. Discourse does not work with any console
  browser I tried, nor with eww. Reading is possible, login is not.

- Entering any longer text in a web browser is a nuisance. Like many,
  I manually copy and paste between text editor and browser.

- The web interface is too ponderous, too cluttered, too distracting
  for my taste or maybe for my age cohort.

Ugly:

- Badges. "Earned 'First Emoji'", "Earned 'Anniversary'". Is it only
  me? But I feel devalued and belittled by gamification.

Note, that the "bad" points cannot, unfortunately, be mitigated by
using the email interface instead of the web interface, because:

- It does not represent the same content, i.e. some advantages are
  gone, and this leads to an information imbalance between users.

- Discourse email is badly formatted and disrespects any rules one
  expects in a "real" email conversation, such as quoting.

My personal and preliminary résumé is: "Something like Discourse would
be great, but maybe better something else, esp. w/o gamification?"

Sorry, this got longer than I wanted to.