Featuring announcements and discussion questions for only one day misses the entire point. No one (to within rounding error) will see them.

The whole reason we feature these things is to ensure that they are visible to the community at large. Only the most highly dedicated members of our communities visit the site *every day*. This level of dedication is, in fact, so exceptional that we recognize it with a variety of badges. Featuring a post for only a day would mean that only this most dedicated subset of users see the announcement, effectively hiding it from everyone else.

Furthermore, these highly motivated users who visit the site every day are not who we're targeting with featured posts anyway (here I'm speaking of posts featured on per-site Metas; the global Meta may be different), since these highly invested users tend to read Meta anyway. **The reason we feature posts is to ensure that folks who *don't* visit the site and read Meta every day will still hear about and be allowed to share feedback on the topic.**

On Stack Overflow, when we have proposals to make major modifications to the tagging system (a process called ["burnination"](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324070/what-is-the-process-for-tag-removal-burnination), which implies a cleanup and retagging effort), we feature those discussion posts in order to ensure that the tag experts out there and others with a stake in the process will be sure to see them and, if they chose, provide their input. This input is extremely valuable to us as moderators, since we are not subject-matter experts on all topics covered on our site, and we want to know if what is being proposed would cause hardship or other inconvenience to the users who are actually providing answers to questions. In effect, it gives people a chance to say "no, don't do this" and/or to propose alternatives that we had not considered. **At an absolute *minimum*, we require that these proposals be featured for 36–48 hours, not counting weekends.** If they are controversial (*i.e.*, strong consensus is not immediately obvious), then we will leave them featured even longer.

On Stack Overflow, when we announce things like the results of moderator elections, changes to site features, and so on, we typically leave them featured for 2 weeks. I don't know if this is just a custom, or if it was formally enshrined in site policy at any point, but it is definitely the custom that the Stack Overflow moderators follow.

You might argue that this duration of featuring is unnecessarily long, but I regularly see users showing up at the *end* of this two-week period posting new answers/feedback, obviously seeing it for the first time. Plenty of people don't even see it after two weeks. Not everyone is deeply committed to the site: some people just use it as a tool to get their job done. Yet, we should not assume that these people do not care about the site. Their voices still matter.

And that's Stack Overflow, without question the largest and highest-traffic site on the network. On smaller sites, visits are going to be even more sporadic.

**For a company who claims to be concerned about inclusivity, [the policy proposed by Juan](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/342363) seriously misses the boat.**

By insisting upon unfeaturing [Madara Uchiha's resignation post on Stack Overflow](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/392889/i-am-resigning-as-moderator-on-stack-overflow) over the strident objections of the current moderator team, Juan has disrespected, in particular, Madara himself, but also the rest of the community who has tirelessly built, nurtured, and advocated for these communities over the past decade.

Salt is rubbed into the gushing wound by the fact that "thank you" posts for [Shog9](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342031/thank-you-shog9) and [Robert Cartaino](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342079/thank-you-robert-cartaino) continue to be [meta-tag:featured] here on Meta Stack Exchange. As much love as I have for both Shog and Robert, and as much as I'll miss them, I'll never be able to understand why they deserve more time in the spotlight than a long-serving, community-elected Stack Overflow moderator.