But what if I want a faster horse?

I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User".

To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your metrics and the VCs give you a treat.

These people don't care about the service and they're the worst users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.

Thank you for that term!

I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name.

The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base.

For example, VS Code had the opposite shortcut (literally with the arrow keys going in opposing directions) for "go back in search history" to every other editor ever made for Windows... but matching the Linux equivalent.

Similarly, they recently broke "cls" to match the broken(!) behaviour of "clear" in Linux because of basically just one or two Linux users complaining in a GitHub Issue ticket. Windows users weren't listened to, because they're already users, not potential new users.

The Tyranny of the Marginal User: why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

The implication here is appeal to a wider audience _at the expense_ of the existing customer base, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be a tyranny at all.

What I don't get is at some point the marginal user increase for a change has got to be smaller than the number of customers you tick off and lose by changing things.

Is the idea that all services converge on the same N billion people target audience who wants something almost entirely unlike the initial product? I feel like "marginal" doesn't really capture this nuance if so.

Existing userswon't leave when you tick them off, if you lock them in somehow (say, by having their social network all using your platform, or maybe by having previously sunk lots of time into curating a library of their favourite X on your platform).

oh, that's extra dumb, since there's no canonical[1] Linux desktop. that said they should offer shortcut presets, like JetBrains products. changing the default is just whack.

[1] oh, what the hell!? pun unintended, but now at least the name makes sense