I thought the SO web sites were essentially governed according to the communities needs and wants. Sure doesn't feel like it sometimes.
Wasn't it Jeff that said "We don't run StackOverflow... you do!"? That sounds like it's meant to be a pure democracy, not a monarchy.
I would like to request that votes determine whether features are done, and in what order.
A Stack Overflow designed solely by consensus of the masses would be, well... phpBB.
Seriously, a design by committee is a horrible design. Generally, all great products are the vision of a few people and you have to let those few people guide the product direction to keep it on track.
Soliciting feedback and feature requests from the users is a great way to bring in the ideas but, ultimately, it has to be the product designers who decide how to proceed. Otherwise, there is no central vision.
A vote is not a binding contract that the developers should follow blindly. Voting adds weight to the feature requests. The more people who like the idea, the closer the developers will take a look at it.
For those few requests that receive high votes, the developers will certainly take notice and either implement the feature... or not. But at least the voting draws enough attention to the issue to cause the decision makers to look deeply into the discussion and see what issue the users are really trying to solve... and, more importantly, whether it is Stack Overflow's place to solve it.
I would like to request that votes determine whether features are done, and in what order.
Well, I would like to request a pony!
Votes do strongly influence features we develop, and we try to complete as many of the high voted items as possible. Heck, see for yourself:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=status-completed&sort=votes
Now compare with declined:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=status-declined&sort=votes
However, it is unreasonable to expect that every highly voted request will be implemented. We don't always agree with the requests. Some people want us to build a big truck, while we would prefer to build a series of tubes..
I've already said it in a comment here
We don't run StackOverflow... you do. Except when we don't agree, of course
More seriously, I think that Jeff and co. know the following:
Also, another relevant criteria is how to define high voted. What do 10 votes mean on Meta? Does that mean that most people want it? Or just that a vocal minority wants it heavily? That's another thing to consider I wouldn't know how to solve, really. I've seen that features with 80 or 100 votes (which are most likely really wanted) tend to get status-planned and completed after a while.
Now, I've also already said that a public roadmap would alleviate some of this issues, making development more transparent and probably would make people happier. I don't know why that isn't being done though.
Because as much as "we" are running SOs, it's "them" who are developing.
Don't mix between the two
There are far more highly voted requests with status-complete.
The search shows 219 questions tagged with both feature-request and status-completed:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-request+status-completed
Compared to just 127 questions tagged with feature-request and status-declined:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/status-declined+feature-request
That doesnt even include questions that are marked as deferred or planned.
I would like to request that votes determine whether features are done, and in what order.
What is popular is not always a good direction to take the site in.
For instance, there are a fair number of people that would like to be able to respond to an answer - ie, threaded discussion, or threaded comments, but that would detract from the main thrust of the site - questions and answers.
While the users define the community Jeff and Co. get to define the interface. The community can suggest changes to the interface, but if it doesn't mesh well with the intent of the site then it's unlikely to be implemented regardless of the community desire.
That being said, if you were able to get your idea voted up thousands of times, I'd be very surprised if Jeff turned it down, and that would only require a small fraction of the community.
Lastly, if you can get them to implement your feature, implement it yourself. For instance, Jeff was very reluctant to make a meta website or a place to discuss SO for months. It wasn't until shortly after someone else took it upon themselves to start a discussion board that Jeff relented (not wholly for that reason, but it was a consideration) and created meta.so.
There are several projects revolving around monitoring rep/vote/etc changes in real time, and while they have created the users/recent envelope, these projects still flourish because SO doesn't provide as much detail as some people enjoy.
I expect someone to add some social networking features to SO - allowing you to 'friend' other users, see their real-time activity feeds on multiple sites, etc.
Once the SO api comes out you should start to see greater interest in having one site that aggregates all three SO sites, but tied in with your accounts to you'll only see questions from topics you're interested on in each site. Eventually the API will allow posting questions, answers, comments, and voting and some people will never visit so - they'll merely be using their individual aggregate interfaces.
As these services start, though, you'll see many of those features being added as native features to SO.
I do wonder how this will develop over time, though. As the site becomes older and in a sense 'stale', and more dogma develops, people naturally become more entrenched.
I just wonder whether what may be reasonable requests/ behaviours will be denied because of a growing institutionalism, rather than anything to do with the ideas themselves. c.f. The issues with Wikipedia as it's grown bigger and older.
Just speculation, but it seems that what usually happens.
