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by willchen 2905 days ago
I think the +1 button was a really nice feature and something they should've done a while ago, but it's hard to draw the line.

If everyone contributes their pet UI feature (e.g. custom theme, use XYZ monospace font), then there will be dozens of features that only 0.01% of users use, but it increases the overall complexity of the product and maintenance burden.
1 comments
joelhandwell 2905 days ago
+1 button could work as voting system to reduce that maintenance burden too. Semi-democratic method can be introduced to merge most voted and looks good to MS.
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nemothekid 2905 days ago
The only thing that sounds worse than design by committee is design by democracy. Do you know of any successful projects that are managed this way?
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joelhandwell 2905 days ago
My words were not clear, I meant and edited to "semi-democratic" way. The voting is one indicator but I also believe strong vision and strategy of leader is the key to success.

And my point was not +1 button but splitting code into open source "Client side + Test-backend" and closed sourced "Production-backend". Backend can be composed of some interface and multiple implementation such as test impl and prod impl. Actually Github could be hosted in Azure and I do not care their backend as I go github.com anyway.

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