I have an alternative view from a lot of commenters. This is a symptom of tragedy of the commons + data driven decision making. Product Managers (of which I a

I have an alternative view from a lot of commenters. This is a symptom of tragedy of the commons + data driven decision making. Product Managers (of which I am one) are focused on advocating for changes that benefit the users. Unfortunately, as scale increases it becomes impossible to just have conversations with users and extrapolate from that to a tastemaking decision. Instead we have two possible pathways as an app grows: 1. You make decisions by aggregate telemetry. This leads to a degradation to lowest-common denominator, and changing UI to drive statistical movement. 2. You make decisions by intense user research with a small subset of key customers. This leads to "enterprison" disease and if done too early in a company's lifespan, can kill the company from ever growing beyond effectively being an outsourcing partner for their largest enterprise clients. When you have 25 million users, you can neither have a conversation with all of them, nor can you please all of them, so you end up having to make the best decision you can based on the data available to you, and we all suffer in small ways, but hopefully benefit in larger ways. It's hard to understand for those of us (I'm nearly 40) who grew up working with technology, because the changes have happened in leaps and then suddenly in tiny increments constantly, like boiling a frog, but along the way the number of humans using the Internet and technology massively massively massively increased. The scale of the Internet today is unprecedented for any previous product or technology in known human history. Fundamentally, that means everything must either specialize and focus on a niche set of customers or it becomes driven by the tragedy of the commons.