![[images/Why Tech Gets Terrible When It Gets Popular.webp]] **Creator:** Enrico Tartarotti · **Published:** 2025-05-21 · **Length:** 12:34 · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQLVgmhgtpQ) > *Why do great products we love turn bad the more popular they become? And why does this happen across the board in all industries? This is because of the law of the marginal user.* (from the video description) An explainer built around one hand-drawn chart: the number of people using a product on one axis and how much the company invests in them on the other. The description links the essay that inspired it, "The Tyranny of the Marginal User" on the Nothing Human Substack. LTX Studio sponsors the video. The auto captions garble a few names (the Arc browser appears as "Ark," Leicester Square as "Lester Square," Annapurna as "Anaperna," and the outro's "I'm Enrico" as "I'm Maro"); corrected names are used below. Chapter times come from the video description, with sub-section times from the transcript. ## 1) Detailed outline ### [0:00] The problem with popularity - The more popular the products you love get, the worse they seem to become, and Enrico says there's a named reason: **the law of the marginal user**. - Examples: **Google Podcasts**, the app he used, was killed after it got popular and added to the "Google graveyard." The **Arc** browser he's used for three years was set aside by its company to build something else once it got popular. **Facebook** went from what it was when he signed up to, three billion users later, a place "where content goes to die," full of AI slop shared by boomers. - That's counterintuitive: more users should mean more resources to improve the product. - He separates this from **enshittification** (revolutionary products getting pricier and worse as companies monetize). The marginal-user law is a different mechanism, and it ends up being partly the viewer's fault. ### [1:15] The product life cycle - Most mass products start as something specialized for a small group: - **Levi's jeans** were made for miners (Enrico says on the US East Coast; historically they're tied to Gold Rush-era California), and the rivets reinforced the stitches most likely to rip in mine work. - **Airbnb** stands for "air bed and breakfast," starting with beds and breakfast for attendees of a San Francisco design conference in 2007. - The **Rolex Daytona**, now an unobtainable status symbol, began because racers wanted to time speed and laps with a chronograph (he says in the 1950s). - **[1:59] The chart.** Users on one axis, company investment per user on the other. Products begin by serving a hardcore base of early adopters who deeply need the specialized thing. - **The North Face.** In London's Oxford Street or Leicester Square every January, an army of teenagers wears the same black North Face jacket. The brand was founded in 1968 by mountaineer **Douglas Tompkins** to make gear for expert climbers, and it's one of the few companies that crossed the gap to a much bigger crowd. It still makes hardcore gear and builds its brand on it, but most of its attention, money and ads go to Oxford Street, "not at the base camp of Annapurna." ### [3:07] Entering the love zone - The **love zone** is where a product breaks out of its enthusiast base and gets loved by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, with companies growing fast and fans who sometimes love it more than the original users. - **Fuji X100V.** Enthusiasts love its sensor, color science and specs. Enrico loves it because it takes great photos that need no editing and feels good to hold and use. The line sold out everywhere, mostly to love-zone buyers, not hardcore enthusiasts. - **Trying to skip the early phase.** Attracted by love-zone profits, companies try to jump straight there, which almost always fails. In 2022 **CNN** spent $300 million on **CNN+**, expecting millions of subscribers, and got about 10,000. - The rare exception: **Apple AirPods** became an instant mass product, but only because they were an accessory to the **iPhone**, "the most successful product in history." - In the love zone everything should be great: happy users, lots of them, willing to pay more so the company can invest. This is exactly where things go wrong. ### [4:40] The marginal user impact - **Google Search, 2015 versus today.** In 2015 the results page had handy links for time ranges and **verbatim** search (exact keywords). Those options still exist but are hidden under the **Tools** tab. - YouTube, Spotify, Instagram and Amazon all "became a copy of **TikTok**," which most heavy users hate. So why does it ship? - **[5:33] Sponsor: LTX Studio.** **George Lucas** couldn't sell Star Wars in the 1970s until **Ralph McQuarrie**'s storyboards and visuals convinced **20th Century Fox**; Lucas also pushed digital filmmaking early. Enrico uses **LTX Studio**, an AI video and animation tool, to generate storyboard visuals for a time-travel movie idea, and plugs its **LTXV-13B** model (claimed 30 times faster than similar models, trained on licensed **Getty** and **Shutterstock** content). ### [6:32] Prioritizing new users - **A hypothetical.** Your best friend starts a video-editing app (the captions render the name as "bitepiper.com") and you invest $50,000. It wins over heavy editors, breaks into the love zone with millions of professionals and amateurs, and its premium tier makes millions a year. - When you visit, he says he doesn't plan to grow: he's reached everyone who could use the app and will improve it for existing users. You, like every other investor, push back ("if you're not growing, you're dying"), and he caves. - **A/B testing.** Companies show option A to some users and option B to others, then measure engagement, which is why a friend's Instagram or Spotify can look different from yours. - An auto-generate-simple-videos feature for people who've never edited annoys love-zone users but wins at acquiring new ones, so it stays. - Long-requested buttons for new 3D effects confuse newcomers, engagement drops in the test, and the feature gets buried in an obscure menu. - As a product grows, a larger and larger group that doesn't really care ends up driving decisions for the people who do. ### [8:41] The downfall of platforms - **YouTube Shorts.** YouTube has one of the most loyal fan bases and could have built community features or fixed its messy homepage. Instead it built **Shorts**. Love-zone viewers (Enrico included) find them distracting, but casual viewer **Kyle** watches them, so Shorts win the A/B test, and so does a second row of Shorts. - **[9:38] Kyle is the marginal user.** Kyle will never join the community, become a creator or pay for Premium, yet YouTube changes the product for him because he's the user they haven't acquired yet. Facebook doesn't care about its 3 billionth user, only the 3 billionth plus one. - **[10:00] Kyle has zero tolerance.** Google's verbatim and time filters, and its **Advanced Search** page "stuck in 2007," get neglected in favor of features for the marginal user, who won't tolerate the tiniest friction, won't pay and won't engage meaningfully. - **Instagram control feature.** A hypothetical feature that gives you more control over your scrolling fails its A/B test because Kyle is outraged by another button. - **Sales and marketing.** The company's attention spike on the marginal user is also where sales and marketing live, since their job is converting Kyle. - **Consumer versus B2B.** Consumer products get "dumber and dumber," while business products do the opposite. As a product manager at his last tech company, Enrico kept getting messages from salespeople about a big contract with "Kyle Incorporated" that hinged on one button or feature. B2B software becomes "a complex mess of a thousand toggles," each requested by a different Kyle Inc. - This explains our nostalgia for products before they abandoned their love-zone users to cater to Kyles. ### [10:48] We are all the problem - "Kyle is you. Kyle is also me. We are all Kyle." Everyone is in the love zone for a few products and a Kyle for everything else. - **Jacob Collier** lives in **Logic Pro**, while Enrico dabbles in music production apps and will probably never pay for them. The simplifications that annoy Collier every time he opens the app are, in effect, Enrico's fault. - **[12:13] Outro.** Teases a follow-up video on fixing what he calls the biggest problem in social media today (picking up the Instagram example) and "the biggest secret behind all the apps you use every day." ## 2) Things mentioned ### Tech products and platforms - **Google Podcasts** (discontinued; the "Google graveyard") - **Arc** browser (its maker shifted focus to a new product) - **Facebook** (3 billion users) - **Google Search**: 2015 time-range links and verbatim search, now under the **Tools** tab; the **Advanced Search** page - **YouTube** (Shorts, two rows of Shorts, the homepage, YouTube Premium) - **Instagram**, **Spotify**, **Amazon**, **TikTok** (everyone copying short-form video) - **Apple AirPods** and **iPhone** - **CNN+** (2022, $300 million spent, about 10,000 users) - **Logic Pro** and music production apps in general - **LTX Studio** and the **LTXV-13B** video model (sponsor; licensed Getty and Shutterstock training data) - **Flask** (flask.do), Enrico's video collaboration tool ### Physical products used as examples - **Levi's** jeans with copper rivets (built for miners) - **Airbnb** (air bed and breakfast, 2007) - **Rolex Daytona** chronograph - **The North Face** black jacket and mountaineering gear - **Fujifilm X100V** compact camera ### Design and business ideas - Law of the marginal user, and the essay "The Tyranny of the Marginal User" (linked in the description) - Enshittification (contrasted, not the same thing) - Product life cycle chart: early adopters, the gap, the love zone - A/B testing and engagement metrics - "If you're not growing, you're dying" investor pressure - Consumer products getting simpler versus B2B products accumulating sales-driven toggles - Hypothetical video-editing startup and the "Kyle" persona - George Lucas, Ralph McQuarrie storyboards and early digital filmmaking (sponsor story) ## 3) Biographies ### Enrico Tartarotti Italian-born YouTuber, designer and entrepreneur whose channel covers the design, psychology and stories behind tech. He's building **Flask** (flask.do), a video collaboration tool, and in this video draws on his time as a product manager at a previous tech company, where salespeople kept asking for one-off features to close deals. He mentions having lived in London for the past few years. ### "Kyle" Enrico's made-up name for the marginal user: a casual person who barely uses a product, has no patience for complexity, will never pay or engage deeply, and yet drives product decisions because he's the next user to win. "Kyle Incorporated" is the business version, the prospective customer whose contract depends on one more feature. ### Douglas Tompkins American businessman and conservationist (1943–2015) who co-founded **The North Face** in 1968 and later Esprit, then spent his later life buying land for national parks in Chile and Argentina. Enrico cites him as an avid mountaineer who first built gear for fellow experts. ### George Lucas American filmmaker who created Star Wars and founded Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic. Enrico uses him in the sponsor segment as someone who used visuals to sell an unlikely idea and pushed early digital filmmaking. ### Ralph McQuarrie American concept artist and illustrator (1929–2012) whose paintings and storyboards for Star Wars helped persuade 20th Century Fox to back the film and defined the look of the original trilogy. ### Jacob Collier British multi-instrumentalist, arranger and producer known for dense harmonies and multitrack videos, and a multiple Grammy winner. Enrico uses him as an example of a love-zone user of music software like Logic Pro, in contrast to his own casual use.