This is merely our latest effort to link the two sites. Previously, the main site had a TidBITS Talk link in the Get TidBITS menu, and the TidBITS Talk site had Articles and Issues links in the nav bar. This discussion was what prompted the latest approach.
I’ve never been all that perturbed about the linkage because article comments are appended to the articles themselves, which is the primary goal. Someone who’s just reading doesn’t even need to know that the Discourse site exists as a separate entity.
Those who do want to contribute get bounced over to Discourse, of course, and once they’re here, they’ll see the general TidBITS Talk discussions as well, and Discourse will ensure they continue to be alerted to new stuff. We mention TidBITS Talk enough in articles that I’ve always assumed people would find it if they wanted, and I have no inherent goal of growing TidBITS Talk—it can grow organically. It goes up and down, but we’re hitting roughly 200,000 pageviews per month on TidBITS Talk alone now.