As someone relatively new to the enthusiast community, I’m stoked about KT. While my status as a keeb noob may not afford me much credibility, so far I really like Discourse, which has a much better UX than other outdated platforms that, to me, feel much less inviting.
Thanks for offering your insights; this is really great to hear! Don’t be ashamed of being a noob. Our goal is as much to bring new people into the community and hobby as it is to lure over the old guard. In any case, it’s not a zero-sum game. The more keyboard enthusiasts who find a comfy home online where they can flourish, the better all the communities are and the more cool stuff happens from which we all benefit. In short: welcome! 
Great numbers for a first few days. The mentioned server move (from another thread) really smoothed things out. Viewing a page in discourse fires of a background request every 30 seconds or less. Expensive, but worth the real-time features the platform offers.
Now all I’m hoping for is that more GBs open up here, as well as classifieds.
Really can’t express how happy I am about the mobile accessibility of this site.
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Congratulations!!! What a great start. I appreciate the non-profit structure and commitment to being board-driven with people active in the community. It looks like discord provides a much better structure than reddit or GH. Glad to be here.
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I’m really liking what you have done with keebtalk, Norbauer! It seems like things are off to a really good start, the layout is refreshing and clean, honestly it strikes me as a really good intermediary option between geekhack and reddit!
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This sounds really impressive until you realize that I was like 2000 of those just hitting refresh to see what was new.
Haha. An enthusiasm that is greatly appreciated! However, I will say that a site like Discourse actually will tend to show considerably lower pageviews for the same or more activity compared to a site like GeekHack because it loads so much info via XMLHttpRequest rather than actually reloading the page (i.e., no pagination).
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Really good example of “Everything bad is good for something”. I’ve had a feeling that GeekHack backend is being really outdated and realizing there isn’t much of a way out, KT is probably the best thing that could happen to GH (IMO).
And about Discourse, it was getting really popular lately as a software and I gotta say that it’s the best you can get out there (great choice @norbauer!). Still, it’s not a traditional forum and it offers more of a chatty experience on a given topic rather than this structured approach we’re probably used to. It can even be chaotic at times (especially if you have newest posts as your landing page), but it indeed gives much better user experience overall. It’s all up to the moderators and users to keep it being nice, clean and usable.
Thanks a lot for making KT. This was the missing piece between GH and Reddit.
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Progress most often emerges from chaos.
Thank you for saying all that. I completely agree, especially with your last point about KT being a needed midway sort of place between GH and Reddit (which also means it’s not necessarily a wholesale replacement, nor is it intended to be).
I’ve felt similarly about GeekHack for years, but if it weren’t for the chaotic sale, I probably never would have had the impetus to start something like Keebtalk on my own. So I think in the end I think everything that happened at GH will have ended up being for the best.
Perhaps I’m being grumpy but I don’t understand all the butt hurt about the site name, infinite scroll, how Ruby isn’t the fad of the week, or whatever.
A community is formed from relationships - not software.
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This is actually what I have been saying a lot as well. Discourse doesn’t have full threading like reddit, but it at least has half an attempt at threading which is more than can be said for phpbb or whatever it is GH runs on. It has something vaguely resembling a voting system, but not pushed so hard that voting is the most important thing in determining what threads people see. The reddit system of time and votes determining where it sits on the “front page” which is all that most people will ever see doesn’t really work very well for some aspects of the mechanical keyboard community. It certainly works well for things like pictures and memes, but it doesn’t work very well for long-running threads like ICs and GBs and meetup threads.
IMO what @Albru said about KT sort of occupying a middle ground between GH and Reddit was pretty close, but I think most people either liked GH or liked reddit, and not many people really liked both (though many would tolerate the one that they liked less haha). KT sits in just the right part of the middle area where it pulls in most of the things I like about reddit, and most of the things that made me want to like geekhack, without any of the things that bothered me about geekhack.
I don’t know how it looks for someone coming from the other direction, but I imagine it would be a lot of the same, with KT pulling most of the things they liked about GH, without the parts of reddit that bothered them.
I really hope the community over here keeps growing, even if I do think reddit is still probably better suited for pictures.
Despite having using reddit on/off for years, I still don’t really understand how it works. It feels like a one off topic, for example, showing off a photo of something you owned, and then the topic get buried. And whatever conversation that was started is hard to follow and continue. It’s just a real mess and I am unable to appreciate reddit and do not understand its popularity.
Discourse and any other sane forum software, I get that!
Yeah this is pretty much how it works. Reddit is more… “live” than traditional forums, which is great for things like news and pictures and quick questions and things of that sort. The threaded conversations are really nice for heavily branching conversations, and especially shines when those conversations go way off topic.
Traditional forums tend to be better for long-running threads, as every comment bumps it back up to the top of the list. Technically this gives preference to controversial threads as those tend to be the most active… I don’t necessarily agree that that is always a good thing, but that format certainly works better for certain kinds of content. Meanwhile, classic forums don’t tend to have threaded discussions, which works fine as long as discussions stay fairly on-topic without much branching.
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and imo KT/discourse sits nicely in the middle.
This is where I don’t understand. If I have posted a comment, it’s extremelt difficult to come back to the conversation. One have to be active in a conversation and then it’s Inbox system will help you track the flow. If you are just following the conversation, you will get lost. Reddit is not for lurkers which also means there’s no attachment to a conversation.
I sort of agree with this. It definitely works better if you are active throughout the conversation just due to the way that posts and threads are fairly ephemeral. Following the replies in your inbox sort of squashes them into a more flatened thread, which is what you are more likely used to if you are coming to Reddit from traditional forum software, but typically a thread will have branched in so many directions that I need a bit more context than what I get from the inbox, especially in a day where I have been fairly active.
You aren’t wrong about getting lost, either. Especially in really big threads, I’ll often start down a chain that veers totally off topic and not really remember what thread or sometimes even what subreddit I’m in. I’ve been on Reddit for a long time, so it happens less than it used to, but on really big threads it is still pretty common, especially default subs like askreddit.
The nice part of the threading system from a readers perspective is that as soon as a conversation forks off onto a topic that you don’t care about, you can just collapse that discussion entirely. In a more traditional forum format, if donutcat starts ranting about how stupid USB C is I can’t just collapse his nonsense, I just have to sort of skim through it until the thread gets back on topic.
But, because the traditional forum format makes branching off-topic conversations difficult, they tend to be less common.
There are pros and cons for both, they are just different and different people prefer different formats.
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