User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Why Fandom Evolves: A Look Ahead in 2017/@comment-10370-20170112143345/@comment-20644-20170112214200

I think this is a good opportunity to talk a little more about how products are developed (and there will be a blog about that in a few weeks). We use an iterative development process, which means that we release a solid version of a feature and then continue working on it as we learn more about it.

Discussions was released on a few communities in late 2015, and throughout 2016 we learned a lot about how Discussions was used and developed new features for the product based on what we learned. Giving it a wider debut back in September was the next step, because now we can learn more about how it's widely used and continue developing based on feedback and the data we get from how the feature is used.

If we did everything up front, then we're essentially just assuming we know everything about what everyone wants and how it will be used. By releasing it the way we did, we instead get to actually learn from how it's used. So I would tweak what you said&mdash;"Discussions is not ready to be released"&mdash;to instead say "Discussions is not ready to replace Forum." That much is true, and it's why it hasn't replaced Forum yet.

In regards to highlights:


 * "We’re working on a new Notifications system, and this will include highlight-type functionality that should be even more versatile than what we currently offer."

That can be found in the Discussions FAQ.