Re:Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evid...
by nightpool on Sunday October 23, 2022 @11:47PM
(#33312762)
Yes, this is a good summary of how I feel about discussions too. Non-technical users are going to be more comfortable using non-Github platforms anyway, and for technical users issues or chat are probably a better fit in 95% of cases. Not worth opening an entirely separate forum for.
Last month we had ~25 code contributors and ~2.32 million users. About 100,000 users per code contributor.
As a user-facing app, rather than 'open source infrastructure', we receive a very large number of support queries from end-users. A significant number of these will be users who are entirely non-technical, or don't speak English at all (looking at my last support efforts, ~20% were non-English + resolved via screenshots, videos + Google Translate).
I'd much rather have our community triage via one of: Forum, Discord, Reddit, StackExchange, Google Play, Mailing List, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger and leave GitHub for code/documentation-level discussions.
Opening up GitHub discussions adds another level of distraction to GitHub notifications, and provides little benefit in return given the existing established support channels.