User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Why Fandom Evolves: A Look Ahead in 2017/@comment-1824169-20170111185209/@comment-20644-20170111190632

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

Discussions actually represents a new way of releasing products for us. In the past, we often put together a feature, it was mostly finished, and then we moved on to something else while making small tweaks here and there. With Discussions, we released a basic product towards the end of 2015, then spent 2016 studying how it grew on the communities it was enabled on. We then used that data and community feedback to continue making changes, which brought us to the point where we gave Discussions its global debut a few months ago. That's not the end of the process, it's just the next step. Now that it's in wider release, we'll continue analyzing how it's used, get feedback from the community, and make changes and additions to it.

Your skepticism over a process like that is understandable from your point of view. I think users are used to seeing an announcement about a new product, and then finding out that the product is mostly finished and won't change that much. Past releases would inevitably lead you to treat Discussions the same way. We get that and we know that. That's a big reason why, in 2017, we're going to be much more communicative about changes, bring communities into the process, and just generally make product releases a more transparent and inclusive process. There's going to be a blog about this testing method in the next few weeks, where we'll go into more detail on how it works.

We hope that, as we get further into this process, you feel that we're succeeding on that front.