Castro Podcasts — Things I got wrong: Support.

Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request. If I did, by catering more to persnickety power users, we run the risk of alienating newer users who don’t know how things work. But our power users probably aren’t going anywhere, at least they’re a little harder to shake, and alienating new users is the death of the product.

This is exactly backwards. But I think the piece accidentally reveals a fundamental understanding that is very common to people who create software. The reality is that your power users are the ones who funnel new users to to you. Firefox never would’ve taken off without its power users; I personally got hundreds of people to use Firefox, many of whom never would’ve heard of it at all without my influence.

When they decided to kick their power users in the teeth for largely made-up post-hoc manufactured bullshit reasons is when that software began its long usage decline. The Mozilla clowns blame the power users (at least in part) for this, but in reality it’s those users who told them what would happen if they made the bad decisions they did. And they were right, as I’ve pointed out before.

Dustin’s counterproductive reaction — as it almost always is — is a power and pride thing. Power users are often completely correct about what would make your product better for everyone. But that rubs many creators the wrong way because it means more work, and someone else having at least some measure of de facto control, and that someone saw something that you did not. It means the software becomes less yours if you let someone tell you what would in fact work better for them. And many people (such as the Firefox devs) just enjoy having control over others.

I have nearly no idea what Castro is or what it does. It seems to be about podcasts, which means I’d never touch it. But Dustin’s contentions really misunderstand what power users offer in a software ecosystem, and what it means to alienate them.

For instance, I can tell that I’d never use Castro at all even if I were into podcasts because any creator who makes a point to shit on power users is one whose product I’d not even consider in the first place.