Hi Jesse — interesting article and viewpoint.

With regards to this sentence “Each particular community (not necessarily the entire user base — more on this later) should be able to decide if they want to accept the latest update of a given service or not.” I would tend not to agree.

From my experience, most people will always resist change. It means they must re-learn what they had already formed as habit, and learning takes effort. What’s more, *some* parts of the change may make certain steps harder and even if the overall change is positive, generally, people focus and feel the negative.

I think if you leave things up to the group, they wouldn’t vote for an update (think of how many people complain about, let’s say, Facebook’s new template…) to make things easier for themselves, even if it would be more appreciated further down the road (…then love it and look back on the old one and see that it’s very out of date).