Death by a thousand cuts

When your favorite app changes things it’s a little annoying. Maybe a button you hit 30 times a day moves to a new location. Or maybe you’ve spent 10 years consuming Twitter via Tweetbot and now every morning for the past three days when you open the app it doesn’t work.

All the things on the whole aren’t bad, just a little annoying. But with each slice of pain the less I want to invest and spend time in your app. Do that enough and you lose users, maybe one or two at first, but it’s like a wave building steam growing bigger and bigger.

To me it has a lot of parallels to MySpace. Everyone used it, then no one. But it wasn’t over night, it was a slow fade as Facebook gained market share, then it was gone.