Most vocal users fallacy

When I was a junior PM at Tribuna, I was responsible for the community area of the platform - that is comments, blog posts, user profiles, etc. Naturally, this would put me in the closest proximity to the most active and vocal users of the app.

There was one guy, a Liverpool supporter, whom I remember to this day because a) he was one of the most well-known power users, and b) as a 23-year-old who was starting out, I was scared shitless of negative feedback to the updates my team was shipping. The Liverpool dude provided exactly that, and, I gotta give it to him, he was very fast. Here's his feedback when we released a new version of group chats:

"That's cool man, but it's still a terrible idea. It's just too much and it's not nice to use anymore, it's too much messing to flick between chats. I understand the techs put lots of work into this and I don't want to criticise but the whole concept is bad. Why can't you just have one extra chat room where admin select the topic for the day?

⁠⁠I'm not the only one who feels this way, {username} and {username} have both said the same and I'm sure as others come back they won't like it either. It's not very user friendly and when others start creating chats it'll become worse. 
⁠
⁠I feel this one is gone too far and will only be detrimental to the fan community. 
⁠
⁠Ya know me, I'm always honest and I hate it, it's by far the worst update I've seen yet and I've been on it since it was released in app store."

Here's what we did to receive this review: we moved away from the horizontal scroll at the top, and introduced a general menu of different group chats with two categories (pinned and not pinned):

I was quite sad to read such feedback, but I was also lucky to have people around who let me realize that:

1. people don't like change in general, especially when you're changing something they use every day. This is where the most vocal user fallacy really shines: since the most vocal users are likely your most passionate ones, they react to any change you introduce. And since they have their own way of interacting with your product (that could've been the same for years), any disruption of their routine is met with scepticism at best and with comments like the one above in most cases. What I should've done is take the feedback, say "thank you", protect myself from the different biases that immediately kick in, and evaluate the situation with a clear head. (For more thoughts on this topic I recommend the Take a deep breath chapter of Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson);
2. there are things that carry more meaning than an immediate reaction from a core user, such as the metric you're trying to move.

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The lad has obviously continued to use the app (even despite the threats to quit and never come back) and actually got quite happy, especially after we released one of the following updates that allowed core users to create group chats themselves.