It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity. Who the fuck comes up with the idea that what services you get with your subscription are random? It's mind-boggling that some percentage of people visiting the website will be presented with an inferior version of the same subscription for the same price. I'm not even mad (despite my colorful wording), I don't use Claude, just impressed with the bold new territory being explored here.
Claude subscription became non deterministic too
I find the whole thing a bit sad but you made me smile. Thank you.
I think of enshittification as "we're making plenty of money but let's make more." In other words greed.
Based on how much money Zitron has reported that these companies are losing on every subscription, this feels more like they're just trying to survive. In other words "ohshittification."
> In other words "ohshittification."
Brilliant coinage, if it’s yours, congrats!
My take: it is not enshittification to raise the price for a product whose demand outstrips its supply. That is basic economics. There are alternatives, it’s not a monopoly. If you think it’s the best product, then pay more for it.
Personally I would be perfectly content if the price of Max went up a bit and Pro no longer worked for CC if it meant that Max was faster and more stable.
Zitron is completely full of shit too though. I imagine they’re compute limited and so they’re moving towards price discrimination.
> It is honestly truly fucking incredible how corps still find new, innovative ways to enshittify. Regular enshittification won't cut it, they have to exercise their artistic creativity.
I had a bit of an epiphany the other day thinking about these VC companies offering products to the public at unsustainable prices. It's classic anticompetitive behavior.
You imagine anticompetitive behavior to come from a monopoly because they can afford to burn money to drive competition out before they bring prices back to profitable but the whole VC burn is the same thing. People talk about it a lot without really saying it explicitly when they talk about moats. The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI have is money and they utilize it by offering products below cost.
The two companies are just trying to outlast the other one until they are the only one left.
So it's not really enshitification as much as you were previously getting the deal of a lifetime.
In physical markets we call this kinda thing dumping and it's often regulated. Maybe offering SaaS or compute at below profitable rates should be investigatable too, to avoid killing competitors too easily?
Dumping is typically used in the context of international trade.
There are some predatory pricing laws, but they're much more narrow than most people believe. There is no law requiring things to be sold for more than it costs to produce.
I think it's funny that these topics make people angry enough to demand that we make laws to force companies to raise prices. We'll stick it to these companies by forcing them to charge us more! That will show them!
Such laws would be very bad for startups and newcomers because they'd be forced to price their new product higher than established competitors who have economies of scale. It would be a nice handout to the big companies.
> Dumping is typically used in the context of international trade.
This is dumping and it is international trade. Maybe you don't realize it because you're American and have internalized it as business as usual.
The whole Silicon Valley VC industry and the majority of the net worth of SWEs on HN is based on dumping. "Burning VC cash" is transparently dumping, and it's squarely what the US big tech dominance is founded on. Amazon, Uber, Youtube, now LLMs. The huge majority of "success stories" of the last 15 years are based on dumping their product far below cost price, running at a loss for years until they dominate the market, and then jacking up prices/enshittifying/selling user data.
I didn't think Amazon engaged in dumping.
It took about 9 years of losses before they got profitable, which is the exact mechanism I talked about.
2 day shipping is dumping i guess
Yeah, that's where the realization led me too.
These companies probably need to be forced to at least try to price their products at a level that would be sustainable long term.
This happens naturally because no company can run at a loss forever.
I think it's funny that we're getting subsidized and discounted services and this makes some people so angry that the comment section is demanding laws that would force companies to charge us more.
Of course but they can run at that rate long enough to make it impossible for another company to compete and go bankrupt. Which is the problem.
Like I said, this is the iconic strategy of monopolies. They take their pool of money, move into a new market, lower prices below cost until local competition withers away then buy their assets at bankruptcy prices and raise prices to whatever they want. Those temporary discounts are designed to kill competition, innovation and choice.
VC subsidized prices are exactly as bad for the market as that. It's unclear to me if the intent is the same but intent doesn't really matter.
I'd also like to state that I'm not angry about it.