What does HackerNews think of discourse?

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

There's Discourse[0]

[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse

They wrote Discourse not Discord, two different and unrelated things

https://www.discourse.org/

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Discourse is free software [0], you can simply host it elsewhere, the pricing you're looking at is their managed option, which while convenient absolutely isn't necessary.

[0]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

The software, community, and the moderation/administration of it need to be thought of as one complete thing where each part places limits on the other.

A Group is its own Worst Enemy - https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...

Consider the lessons from LambdaMOO or Communitree in there.

The design of the software promotes and discourages certain types of interaction. Stack overflow famously doesn't have a great commenting system - and it was intentionally designed that way to make long running comment back and forth difficult and unpleasant because that was what Jeff wanted (incidentally, one of Jeff's mentors was Clay Shirky who wrote the above mentioned A Group and was on the board of directors of early Stack Overflow). And as much pain as comments on SO had, the alternative for moderation would have been much worse in the framework of Stack Overflow.

Likewise, there's code on HN (an algorithm) that down weights overheated discussions ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 ).

The technological and social cannot be separated and need to be built, cultivated, and grown in tandem with intention.

And this is where I get back to reddit... you can do all these things on reddit, just that it takes a bit more creative use of the features within reddit and use of external tooling to enforce it.

If I was to try to build something, I'd honestly start from Discourse ( https://github.com/discourse/discourse ) and then work to build the additional features to encourage the type of community that I'd want there and tooling for moderation.

As it is, I'm not that interested in building on discourse and reddit works. If I had to deal with a larger sub where I can't read all the posts each day or was a target of trolling / low quality content, I'd likely start spinning up things like a program that rate limits people who haven't participated much in the sub initially... possibly borrowing some sentiment analyzers to try to get a heads up where there's flame war brewing.

If I wanted something more "real time", discord posts are rather interesting... with the associated discord moderation bots.

Think about what you want, the community that you want, and then the how you want the community to mold the technology and the technology to mold the community.

From the HTML source code:

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1]

[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse

[1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

> Best solution? Most easily maintained?

We apply the Occam's razor here. For a given problem, a smaller program that solves the problem is a preferred solution. It is not a very good metric, and it is fine to disagree with it. But getting a "best" solution, requires one to define what "best" is, and there is no such agreed definition for code.

> The majority of "useful" tests either are stand-ins for what the language should have given you anyways (proper type checking), or they find and fix known bugs, e.g. the intersection of three features.

Find and fix known bugs is one aspect of it. You are not accounting the entire philosophy of test driven development, where one specifies functionality as tests upfront, and later writes code to pass those tests. Anyhow, we have found large projects like Discourse [1], Gitlab [2], Diaspora [3] have tests that specify code behavior well enough so that RbSyn can synthesize them. Very few tests are type-checking, bug fixing and intersection of 3 features.

[1]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse [2]: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq [3]: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

What about Discourse? They have an open source, self-hostable version:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can install it on your server without problem.