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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

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andybak

The main effect of slow rollouts on me is that I never use the feature. It goes like this.

1. There's a service I use sporadically or used to use

2. They announce a new feature that might potentially mean I'll start using it again/more

3. I read the post, log in and realise I don't have access yet

4. I completely forget this ever happened.

Surely all the effort that goes into announcing these things is a bit wasted ?

What happened to the a nice "Labs" switch to opt into stuff that's new and a bit raw?

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I can't speak to the reasoning for announcing before 100% rollout, but I can say that the slow rollout is for safety. That way if there's a severe bug, then we can catch it while it affects a small number of users, instead of all users.

Labs is more for experimental features that needs more beta testing before rolling out to everyone, rather than being the "first stage" of slow rollout.

That doesn't contradict the parent comment though. Engaged users should have an option somewhere to enable it, barely affecting the overall rollout.

It’s not about gating the new feature behind a flight, but not wanting to push a new build out to the furthest deployment ring before you need to.

I wish we could opt-in to get early access in the slow rollout. That way you get the enthousiastic users to promote the incoming feature and you get some tech savvy people to test it before it reaches out more people.

It is a bit odd how they do it in Docs. In Cloud, announcements happen when the feature has already fully rolled out. Note, this is separate from region expansion, which might be delayed for some heavy-weight features (like new categories of VMs requiring special hardware.)

Not announcing a feature in a collaborative environment would likely cause a fair bit of confusion when only some people see it.

Docs is supposedly a collaborative environment; without collaborative features, you're better off going back to Microsoft Word.

At least it's available to paying customers, that's not always the case.

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