How do I know if I should move forward with something that was discussed on meta?

Question

About a month ago I asked How should we handle questions about game completion time?.

There were two answers, which had fairly different approaches. One, which I proposed myself, was to close a lot of these questions as dupes of a more general "How can I find out how long a game is?" question which we'd create. The other, proposed by OrigamiRobot, was to close these as off-topic.

Currently it stands at 20 votes for mine versus 8 votes for OrigamiRobot. So my solution is in the lead, but does that actually mean anything? I don't know if that gives me license to go ahead and implement my solution.

My question here isn't specifically about the Game Completion Time issue. I'm just using that as an example of the more general issue with meta discussions like this. How do we know when something has been "discussed enough" that we've reached a decision about what to do? Should I just start VTC'ing those as dupes and trying to drum up support from 4 other people to close, and if we get the 5 votes, yay, we win? Should OrigamiRobot do the same thing with VTC'ing as off-topic? Are other people who disagree with both of us and think that status quo is fine just going to vote to reopen them?

This isn't the first time I've been confused about how discussions on meta actually drive site policy, and it probably won't be the last. In general, how do I know when it's okay to move forward on something? And what if the vote had been closer, like, say, 20 to 18 instead of 20 to 8?

Update: Per some discussion below which seemed to basically say, "Well, sounds like you have good support, so go ahead and do it", I went ahead and did it. End result: Lots of downvotes and eventually closed. Which makes it sound like either I should not have moved forward, or the process is simply that we must try and sometimes (often?) fail. Either way, it seems to prove the point that it's very hard to know if the result of a meta discussion should translate into an actual policy change.

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Update #2:

I want to discuss a bit what seems to be actually happening, because I'm not sure whether or not it's the best overall policy.

Here is the general sequence of events that has occurred.

1. Some issues from a certain class of question bugged me, so I raised the meta topic about it.
2. The discussion a month later seemed to have stopped at ~20 votes for my solution, and ~8 for OrigamiRobot's solution.
3. I didn't know how to move forward. I opened this meta question about how to move forward.
4. Some users indicated they'd like to see mods take a more active role in shaping policy, but the mods would prefer this community handle it.
5. Discussion in the comments leads me to believe that really the only way to move forward is to try it, and see what happens. I feel this is not a great approach for reasons I'll elaborate on below.
6. I create the umbrella question. It doesn't prove terribly popular, initially getting a lot of negative votes, but eventually ending up slightly positive.
7. It gets 5 close votes as NARQ.
8. It gets 5 reopen votes and is reopened.
9. Per yx.'s suggestion, I ask RavenDreamer to merge it with a pre-existing question that mostly covered the same ground.
10. Yx. and I both cast votes to close other completion-time questions as dupes.

We are now at the point where a bunch of questions are sitting with two close votes. Maybe that will fizzle out and they won't be closed. Maybe they'll get 5 votes and end up closed. Maybe they'll all get 5 reopen votes after that and get reopened.

This is, essentially, the problem. It feels as if we're hashing this problem out via Close/Open votes. I feel this is a pretty poor way of deciding on an issue, but it seems to be the only avenue of approach that exists. I particularly dislike it because it has the side effect of appearing to indicate that only users with 3k+ reputation and the ability to cast close/reopen votes have opinions that actually matter. The votes in the original meta topic are in many ways meaningless, because if you don't have 3k rep to back up your opinion with close votes, it doesn't really have an effect on the actual outcome.

Is the only option we have duking it out on the main site with our close votes? At what point am I supposed to know I shouldn't pursue my issue further? At what point should opponents know that they shouldn't act against it further? Is there any other way we can reach a consensus?

Answer 1

You've discovered why Athenian democracy doesn't work :P. On the internet, the minority often doesn't accept the majority ruling. And as we know from civil rights, majority rule is not always a good thing.

I believe SE is, and works best as, a representative democracy. As I said on your other post:

[P]olicy isn't formed unless the mods step up and say "this is how we're going to proceed".

I think we need our elected reps to weigh in here and tell us how they want to move forward on this.

On smaller SE sites (Android specifically) I follow a more lax process, but people tend to agree more there as well. As everyone knows we have a tremendous amount of argumentation here and I think we could use some strong guidance coming from a position of authority.

Answer 2

There are times when the community reaches consensus on its own, and in most cases this is the right way to do things. I don't think it's a good idea for moderators to step in and try to set policy, except in serious situations.

When it comes to policy that changes a vast swath of questions, or best practices on the site, we should have a more extended, structured discussion. Even then, what moderators are tasked with doing is mostly moderating the conversation and making sure things don't get out of hand. We're not here to declare policy.

In most cases, I think it's fine to go forward with a policy that's been suggested, is feasible for the community to enforce, and consistently higher score (relative to other solutions) on meta. The design of the site is such that we can almost always go back and revisit old decisions to see if they still hold true.

The chances of failure in this process are certainly not zero - meta voting is cheap and easy, and only a small percentage of the people who visit the site actively participate in meta. Sometimes something that sounds good in concept doesn't work in practice. Don't be afraid to fail; failing's OK! Or to put it in a gaming context, Losing is Fun!

If a new wave of policy on meta is making you upset, post your reasoning and a different solution. I've seen meta threads that were months old come to life with new discussion because the existing policy didn't make sense or was out of date. In fact, that's what I'm doing here - I don't like this proto-policy, and I'm suggesting my alternative.

Having moderators come in, at their discretion, and say "this conversation is over, and the result is X" isn't beneficial in most cases. There are a ton of policy threads on meta where the community reached a consensus and agreed to uphold it without anyone throwing authority around, and that's the way I think it should be.