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.

▲ amarcheschi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Claude subscription became non deterministic too

	▲	jrgd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I find the whole thing a bit sad but you made me smile. Thank you.

▲ dreamcompiler 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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."

	▲	adriand an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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.
	▲	selectodude 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Zitron is completely full of shit too though. I imagine they’re compute limited and so they’re moving towards price discrimination.

▲ parineum 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

▲ nemomarx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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Aurornis 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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parineum 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 a minute ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲ andrekandre 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

  > It's classic anticompetitive behavior.

well, "competition is for losers" isn't it?