I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of not doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick up steam.

I can't be the only person who notices this; pretty much HN post that features SO includes a litany of complaints about them. Even if the original post isn't a complaint, the top thread in the post will probably be a complaint, regardless of how relevant that is to the topic.

My point isn't that what SO is doing is wrong. It's that what they're doing seems to go against the wishes of the vast majority of the community. Jeff even links to a post of his that basically says "you shouldn't always listen to the community". So, when do you listen and when do you ignore? Advice that consists of "sometimes you should do X and sometimes you shouldn't" seems trivially true for pretty much any real-world X.