Comment by Esophagus4
3 days ago
The worst are the ones who say things like “OpenAI only has 5% paying users!” As if that’s a really bad number. That is the same ratio YouTube, the world’s largest media company, has. And ChatGPT has like 800m users after only a few years of existence.
And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…
Some people are really rooting for the downfall of OpenAI that will simply not happen, and their rage makes them utterly unreasonable.
> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…
Don't all those examples have network effects as a moat? As in, once the userbase is in, they lose quite a lot of value by switching to a competitor.
What value does a ChatGPT user lose by switching to a competitor?
Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users?
Do you really believe that in your heart of hearts? Or are you trying to be the HN comment contrarian?
> Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users?
I didn't say I believed that, I said that the reasons provided (for people to stick with it) were, to me, insufficient reasons.
The examples of people sticking with a product undergoing enshittification are not representative of the type of product that ChatGPT is. Those other products you mentioned had a strong moat - network effects.
Users had to stick with them, or lose their network.
AI Chat is, almost by definition, a non-network product. When you switch you don't lose updates from your friends, you don't lose subscribers to your channel, you don't lose your followers.
So, what exactly does someone lose when switching from AI Chat $FOO to AI Chat $BAR? Those saved conversations aren't exactly worth much, those "memories" that the Chat AI stored about you aren't worth much either (I was surprised at how many people thought those saved chats didn't contribute to the responses they get in the current chat).
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> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…
Enshittification only works for the middleman in a two-sided market, which is what those things are. LLMs are a commodity, so their path to monopoly profit is very different.
I will check back on this comment in a year to see who was right.
The only people that care about enshittification are a few crazies on HN.
Google has 90% market share.