We are sunsetting our community features, in order to focus on expanding features and content coverage for our library of interactive courses.
On July 2, 2021, the community section was removed from Brilliant. We also stopped accepting new explanation submissions on Daily Challenges.
As a small team, we must focus on the efforts that make the largest impact toward achieving our mission of inspiring and developing people to achieve their goals in STEM. It is clear that focusing on our interactive courses is the right path forward, and we'll continue to expand and enhance our interactive course offerings for years to come.
Probably! We remain fervent believers in the power of community to provide motivation and support in someone's STEM learning journey. We will likely launch community components alongside our interactive courses in the coming years.
We are opening up our course authoring tools to vetted creators as part of expanding our interactive course offerings. If you're interested in being a course author on Brilliant, you can sign up for more information here.
Email us at support@brilliant.org.
Some community members have formed a Discord to keep in touch. While this Discord is not directly affiliated with or endorsed by Brilliant, we wanted to share that link to give folks a way to keep in touch.
Since 2014, over 100,000 problems have been published by over 10,000 people from 130 different countries. Throughout its history, the Brilliant community has been one of the largest and most active communities of people sharing, solving, and discussing problems and puzzles across math and science.
However, our guided, interactive courses are overwhelmingly the way that STEM learners want to use Brilliant to achieve their goals in STEM. Since their launch in 2017, usage of our courses has rapidly accelerated, and is now >15x the usage of community features. Over that time, the number of community contributors has decreased >80%.
While it might be hard to see on the surface, maintaining our community features is quite complex - with the ongoing work and maintenance ranging from authoring tools, to moderation, to content discoverability.
We've also received consistent feedback for several years that the community experience is confusing or intimidating for most users, who have joined Brilliant in order to advance their goals in STEM by learning a particular topic in a guided way.
This does not diminish the impact our community has had on learners around the world - and, in turn, the likely disappointment discontinuing community features will bring many of you.
Many of us on the Brilliant team were ourselves early and avid members of the community, and continued to participate during our time working at Brilliant. We've felt the immense joy of sharing puzzles with problem-solvers around the world, the satisfaction of solving a hard puzzle late at night and sharing a solution for others to learn from, and the occasional frustration from trolls and erroneous reports.
As a small team, we must focus on the efforts that make the largest impact toward achieving our mission of inspiring and developing people to achieve their goals in STEM. It is clear that focusing on our interactive courses is the right path forward, and we'll continue to expand and enhance our interactive course offerings for years to come.