Comment by parineum

15 hours ago

> 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.

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parineum

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nemomarx  15 hours ago

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?

  • Aurornis  12 hours ago

    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.

    • deaux  10 hours ago

      > 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.

  • deaux  10 hours ago

    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.

  • parineum  15 hours ago

    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.

    • Aurornis  12 hours ago

      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.

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