[boothby]

To anybody who's been watching the tech sector with a critical eye for pretty much any period from the late 90s and onward, this is just the enshittification process. For most of OpenAI's existence it's been obvious, to me, that investors were burning insane levels of capital to build the market, and now that folks are locked in, you're seeing higher fees, ads, etc. Yet again, the user is the product; the investors want to siphon your data, attention and once you're hooked, money. And for companies like Microsoft and Apple, those hooks can dig deep.

[Incipient]

I'd call it a straight up "bait and switch".

[BearOso]

If you paid attention to the power requirements and amount of hardware being put into data centers, you should have realized that it cost them an order of magnitude more than you were being charged. To rework your analogy: they hooked you, now they're gonna see if they can reel you in.

[AntiUSAbah]

They can only reel you in if its worth it. I still can code.

And while i do not spend 200$ privat, in my startup we discussed this and our current mental model is, that instead of hiring someone new, we prefer to have more money for tokens.

This is easier for us and has a bigger benefit. The cost of a new / first employee is very high, a 200$ subscription is not. Upgrading that to lets say 400 or 800$ is still alot easier and if i can run multiply and better agents with that money, lets goooo.

[boothby]

I'm looking at education -- teachers and students, not terribly tech savvy, are being mandated to use these tools. And then comes the rug-pull. It was worth it, but now it's outside of their budget. Poorer schools / students can't stay at the cutting edge; richer schools / students can.

[AntiUSAbah]

You still get far with 20$ if you don't use it daily for lots of coding and thinking though.

And Gemma 4 and other open models can easily be hosted even for schools.

[jochem9]

Oh, I thought it was opium.

[Ekaros]

Let's call it for what it is dumping. Dumping things on market below cost of production. This should not have ever been allowed. RnD costs I can accept somehow. But in this case the interference should have always been billed for the real costs that it took to produce and pay off the capex.

[Gagarin1917]

“Enshitification” is just when unsustainable subsidies end?

Another reason to hate that word.

From a different perspective, you were granted an incredible gift from the companies who let you use their product on their dime. Hopefully you made the most of it when you had the opportunity.

[boothby]

No, it's much more than that. It starts with unsustainable subsidies, as Uber undermined the taxi industry with a ludicrous burn rate. And then, once everybody's hooked to the point that they can't imagine life without the product, you raise costs. And you iterate: raising costs, lowering quality, selling data, increasing addictiveness. Until everybody wants to get rid of it, hates every aspect of it, but is still hooked to the core product. I'm personally not using these tools, not using uber or Meta products. But I'm still using some Google products and it's hard to extricate them from my life now that I'm using them.

[Gagarin1917]

> No, it's much more than that.

Okay then this AI stuff isn’t an example of that even under your definition.