So there's this pattern I've observed in the last few months in regards to big companies(tech or otherwise) which seems to have become more and more clear recently.
If a product/service/offering has a large enough userbase, the userbase can be typically split into a "power user" and "casual user" category, no matter how niche the segment may be. For example, the set of people who own high end gaming PCs are already power users relative to the average computer user. But even in the gaming PC niche, one can classify people into power user or casual user in the context of Gaming PC owners.
So if you can split a userbase into casual and power user, and a product has a large enough casual userbase, the company responsible for it can get away with making (often objectively) bad decisions that hurt customers but maximise profit and still get away with it.
I've noticed so many examples in so many different spaces of this sort of thing happening. To name a few(some of which have already been extensively discussed on HN):
- YouTube and removing dislike count, and making the UI worse on mobile by not showing resolution directly when changing video quality
- Minecraft and Mojang/Microsoft introducing terrible new rules that censor all minecraft servers
- the Call of Duty franchise and releasing expensive games that a vocal part of the userbase is not happy about(also recent controversy about shutting down servers for old games)
- Reddit and Twitter(API, the new paid "verification" nonsense)
- Twitch and their new rules for content creators(although those were reverted and are being replaced after massive criticism and threats by popular creators to leave the platform)
- Nvidia and their awful pricing for consumer cards(yet they're still selling just fine, despite massive criticism)
- So many AAA games released in 2023 that have atrocious performance and yet receive tons of preorders and sales
- Netflix and their new password sharing rules
- Microsoft and pushing ads directly into their OS in all sorts of areas
What's common between all these cases is the casual part of the consumer base seems to outweigh the power user consumers by a lot to the point where even if power users are not happy, the casual users are more than enough to make the profit trendline steeper regardless of backlash.
However, on the contrary, the Rust foundation has received immense criticism of their recent drafts for trademarks etc. and it may actually greatly impact their final decision because the amount of programmers that are "power users" are likely far more than "casual users" and their critique actually holds weight(of course it's not an apples to apples comparison still).
What seems to be the trend is that despite backlash from a vocal minority, the anti-consumer decisions that solely exist to benefit shareholders seem to go through anyway, and the community moves on after some time and it's almost as if nothing has happened(which is the reason why I'm not hopeful for Reddit to change their new stance either). But if a product has a high % of power users, then this sort of thing becomes far less feasible.
Is there a name for this sort of pattern? And have we ever seen situations where products with a massive casual userbase actually lost tons of users due to anti-consume decisions in modern times?
