[tikotus]

I hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion.

So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussions like that people go back to and would lose if they moved to another platform?

[fhd2]

In my experience non-technical folks quite dig the memory feature. For me that's kinda context poisoning as a service, but I know people that get value out of it (or at least strongly feel they do). Not sure how one would migrate that.

[otabdeveloper4]

> Not sure how one would migrate that.

Ctrl-C Ctrl-V?

[operatingthetan]

OpenAI will send you a download link of all your data in a zip file. You can feed it to Gemini or Claude or whatever.

[jcfrei]

It's one of those super easy things that 90% of the users just never do - like changing their default search engine, export their social graph, install ad blockers, etc.

[hereonout2]

I'm curious from the other direction, what are the conversations like if you feel they are easy to move?

Do you have the memory feature disabled? I have the feeling this in particular is doing absolutely loads behind the scene, e.g summarising all conversations and adding additional hidden context to every request.

I can start a new chat in the UI right now, ask it what my job is, what my current project is, how many kids I have, what car I drive etc. It'll know the answer already.

I think it's this conversation history - or maybe better yet if we think of it as this "relationship" - that people are saying is going to make it hard to move.

[tikotus]

I ask for code snippets, occasional recipes, translations... I don't have memory enabled. I start a new chat for each question. At times I ask things in different languages, if the question is tied to culture or location. If I notice I asked the wrong question, I start a new session instead of continuing the old one, so it doesn't try to merge the questions somehow.

I don't see any benefit in it knowing anything about me. Instead I'm usually quite vague to avoid biased answers.

[beAbU]

Regardless of whether there is value in chat history or not, for some people it is important.

Back in the day during the music streaming wars there were tons of "move your playlists from A to B" services. Streaming services could not hold on to customers because all their playlists were on there.

I'm sure that similar services will pop up for chatbots.

Also, you can always just ask your chatbot to generate a file with your chat history, given that it's all part of the context anyway.

[seydor]

yeah the 'sessions' approach is probably going to be deprecated. one continuous chat is where it's at , perhaps with some bookmarks on the side for easy access

or perhaps a thread-based chat like reddit or HN, where you can branch off an older conversation with yourself

[dyauspitr]

That would suck. I hate context being carried between conversations. I’ve had memory turned off since the start.

[Icons8]

Health data. That’s why they’re rolling out Chatgpt Health.