Ideas versus implementation

Posted Jul 20, 2017 15:48 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Ideas versus implementation by ovitters
Parent article: Ideas versus implementation

> IMO voting is meaningless.

"The worst form of government, except for all the others". Afraid you skipped some nuances between perfect and meaningless. What's your better alternative to scale and deal with an input much bigger that the bandwidth available? A mix of reputation and random sampling as on lkml?

(Note voting on bugs is obviously not 100% democratic, borrowing Churchill's logic only)

> The usual 'this has XXX number of votes why isn't this implemented/fixed'.

This is very useful for bugs BTW, a slightly different use case.

Ideas versus implementation

Posted Jul 21, 2017 5:12 UTC (Fri) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're going to use the example of democracy, then I'd like to remind that in a real-world democracy only citizens (== people with vested interest) can vote. This is IMHO the largest problem of voting for features: you need to somehow measure how big user of your software the voter is. Someone can be just casually checking it out and will vote for a feature that they thought would be cool to have, whereas a subject matter expert's suggestion will be outvoted because it's hard to understand by a passer-by. Also, due to 1-9-90 online participation rule you're risking having votes dominated by the hyperactive minority who has the time to be online, while the silent majority of your users will suffer.

Voting with dollars is somewhat better, but the best approach IMHO is identifying the most advanced/expert users of your software *yourself* and picking their brain. Also, periodic evaluation of your software against its competition - after all, you are also a subject matter expert so you should have an idea where the things are moving in your area. It's a hard problem, the essence of innovation, so you cannot cop out by "crowdsourcing" IMHO.

Ideas versus implementation

Posted Jul 21, 2017 7:19 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Is voting for issues and bugs perfect? No, obviously not.

Is voting just one super simple and cheap yet useful signal (among others) that you can filter and more generally handle in any evolving way you want? Yes.

Are a few people here overthinking it instead of a simple "trial and error" approach which is the essence of innovation? Yes, big time.