We can reduce trolling and memes with UI design and by not allowing pictures or rich text editing. You can see it already on our new forums:
The things are properly aligned and clutter is gone.
From a cursory point of view, it seems to have more in common with Disqus than Discourse. It's embeddable, doesn't allow rich posts or markdown or our support for embedding videos, github, wikipedia, amazon, etc.
It's also closed source, although it is free and they claim they'll never insert ads.
I have no idea about their support for the other challenges we've faced such as infinite scrolling that is compatible with the back button.
I am skeptical of redis as their only data store. We use redis too in Discourse but this would demand that all forum content can fit in memory at once, and there is a chance if a server crashes you'd lose so. Not to mention querying it is much more difficult especially when filtering.
Either way, we're glad to have the competition!
As you can see, we specifically don't allow images, rich text editing or videos. We want to focus on content and the discussion. Our minimal design emphasizes this.
We also think that infinite scrolling is bad UI design. We had it on our early versions but took it away. Much clearer without - you should try too! But of course, the more we differ the less we compete with each other.
I'm happy to have many others in the forum space as it legitimizes our cause and pushes everything forward. Our main goal is to modernize forum software and so is yours, so we're fighting the same battle here.
Also there's no way we're backing down on infinite scrolling :)
Two reasons nobody should take your UI design seriously: 1) "no way we're backing down", 2) infinite scrolling.
As far as redis, we've put a great deal of effort into our redis infrastructure. We heavily shard and replicate data in such a way that memory constraints are not our biggest concern.
In any case, thanks for your thoughts!
What confuses me a little is the part in the manifesto, where they basically claim, Moot will reduce trolling and memes and make conversation more meaningful. I think that any technical platform can be compromised, no matter how sophisticated. Sure, you can reduce trolling by voting etc., but how is technology supposed to help if the users themselves are not providing enough meaningful content?