User blog comment:Mira Laime/Introducing long-awaited Discussions updates/@comment-168424-20190329234624/@comment-20644-20190330181054

On the point about Council I can also say that the original MVP (Minimum Viable Product) state of the first Feeds alpha was, as Council made very clear, not viable enough. If you remember the introduction to Unification, you may recall that we said that, a few days after that blog was posted, we would be introducing a new feature… and then did not. Based on Council feedback (which should have been sought much earlier, but it was a whirlwind time) we canceled that alpha release and worked on Feeds for another 2 months before releasing it to about 14 test communities.

When we first presented Feeds to the Council, the alpha lacked theming and wiki content. Some of its features were lacking. There was a video rail module that was ultimately fairly pointless. The way that the Feed loaded was totally out of whack.

So we told Council we would fix all of that. We ended up over-delivering in some cases, which was an unexpected but welcome part of the development. We originally said we would have basic light/dark theming but were able to deliver theming unification in general across devices.

That took about 2 extra months of work, but it was well worth it because Council was 100% right. Their feedback helped make it better and it also took some of the pressure off in feeling like we needed to deliver a feature and show progress faster. Ultimately we were able to show it’s better to get it right than early, which all internal teams agreed with.

After the alpha release in December, continued feedback from Council made it so that, as SlyCooperFan1 mentioned, we took away the root subdomain redirect which would have been presented for all users. It was clearly a blocker for widespread adoption of the changes, and we came to feel that there were better ways to get more eyes onto Feeds that we can build into the feature.

We had hoped to be further along in Feeds development by now, but the Fandom/Curse integration took (what I hope is understandable) priority. It would have been nice in the short term to have had more progress by now, but a lot of the work we’ve been doing internally will be beneficial in the long term. And we’ll continue to develop Feeds.

Regardless of timeline, though, it’s a big step forward IMO and the Council has been a vital part of that process.

For some of your other points, like Just Updated, we can get specific details this coming week. I can tell you for now, in that case, that it's the most recently updated articles with X amount of content added. We didn't want to show articles that only had a typo fixed, but rather were given meaningful changes, but I'm not sure what that X is off-hand.