Befuddlement
It is a common misperception that the worst possible outcome of a feature launch is the noise of crickets — and that, more than anything else, the success condition of a product announcement is some version of engagement or indulgence.
The worst possible thing that can happen with a feature launch is that it strikes fear and doubt into the hearts and minds of your active users.
This is because companies exist to both generate and subsequently capture value, and any change in their feature list is in some sense a declaration that their thesis of how and why they should best do that has changed. Most often, that change is horizontal or vertical expansion. Other times it is the dreaded pivot — and a customer's reaction to a pivot is almost necessarily negative, because it is an admission by the organization that its current course has been deemed a failure.
And other times — such as with the announcement that presaged this quick essay, in which Aqua, my voice-to-text app of choice, launched a sort of Tamagotchi-esque thingamabob — the reaction is just befuddlement. Befuddlement is not a reaction you want to engender in your users.
I imagine you might read this as an uncharitable response to what is ultimately a pretty silly and benign feature: something that maybe came out of a hack day or an intern project, a victimless experiment that will benefit nobody and probably not cause any new users to join. But my argument is that such a thing is, in and of itself, a negative signal. If you're spending your cycles (and your users' limited attention) on a frivolity, then it implies one of two things: either you have nothing unfrivolous to spend your time working on, or your definition of frivolity is so different from your users' that what used to be a fairly tacit understanding of mutual value is now suddenly up for grabs.