Comment by 4bpp
1 day ago
I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.
Yes, it's a kind of boiling the frog where instead of slowly cranking up the degree of enshittification you do it with the number of affected users instead. In both cases the goal is to avoid a critical mass of user outrage.
A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.
That's the magic of A/B testing. You get to send an entire "B" group into paranoia and upset about the change they didn't want/like while everyone in "A" gets to gaslight B that B isn't experiencing what they're getting and that it would never happen to A...