January 15, 2023

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.

![](https://ericlbarnesblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/screenshot-2023-01-15-at-10.32.22-am.png?w=744)

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.

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