What is the actual difference?

As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.

I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.

Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).

The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.

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oofbey 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If discussions had a more modern UI with threads or something then the difference might be real. But AFAICT it’s the same set of functionality, so it’s effectively equivalent to a tag.

	▲	just-ok 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They sorta do: each comment on a discussion starts a thread you can reply to, unlike on issues where you have to keep quoting each other to track a topic if there’s more than one. It still sucks, especially since long threads are collapsed and thus harder to ctrl-f or link a reply, but it’s something.

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doctorpangloss 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions

imo almost all issues are real, including "non-issue" - i think you mean non-bug - "discussions." for example it is meaningful that discussions show a potential documentation feature, and products like "a terminal" are complete when their features are authored and also fully documented or discoverable (so intuitive as to not require documentation).

99% of the audience of github projects are other developers, not non-programmer end users. it is almost always wrong to think of issues as not real, every open source maintainer who gets hung up on wanting a category of issues narrower than the ones needed to make their product succeed winds up delegating their product development to a team of professionals and loses control (for an example that I know well: ComfyUI).