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Comment by planb | Hacker News Reader

I understand the message this tries to tell but this is not how it will look. This is how dying cash cows look. This isn’t even dangerous, it’s just ugly and wouldn’t be used by many people.

The real thing will look like ChatGPT. It will even answer WAY faster, because every microsecond means real money. The answers will sound real. They will even be useful. But maximally engaging. Each answer will end with a clickbait follow up like: „Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies! Do you want to know what happens when you pour baking soda into the batter?“

I really hoped for that experience when clicking the headline.

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This looks like a vibe-coded promo for the service the parent is associated with, but what cracks me up is that not all this UI clutter is a part of the joke. For example, there are some incessant "chat with AI" bubbles that pop up in the bottom right corner that belong to the platform itself.

>Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies!

I think it will be even worse. Like, "Im having terrible pollen allergies - what can I do?"

Response will be very scientific sounding version of; You need some brand XYZ anithistamin , it will give the best effects, and the others you should only try if you low-key are looking to die.

It will pretend to have done "research" for you and will say something like "most recent studies (Madeup Author, 2026) suggest that the side effects of alternative brands are not well understood"

Yes and no. What many call "dying cash cows" are often doing just fine, it’s just our perception of it that make them want to die. An example: Facebook. Could be considered a dying cash cows while looking at its products but it’s actually a growing business. Despise what their products are, their lack of innovation, and them not being able to compete against TikTok or make the app that will replace it, their business and so their stock have been all increasing.

Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy.

I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.

Sometimes the big trashy company buys the better rival, and then trashes it.

Edit - just stumbled on this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

> Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy

AI service can be so sophisticated that most will not notice the manipulation.

Almost any online service has plenty of competition, but it doesn't prevent enshittification once one of them proves that you can squeeze more revenue out of users and get away with it. Netflix charges you the same as five years ago, but you now get ads. You pay for Amazon Prime and get ads. You pay for Spotify, but they now serve you AI music from fake bands to avoid paying royalties to humans. The end game is that all consumer LLMs have ads in the free / cheap tier.

And as other folks are saying, the whole point is that it's a different type of an ad: it's not an annoying pop-up or an unskippable video. It's a subtle recommendation that you don't even notice. High conversion rates, little fatigue... getter than all the cool characters smoking in films a while back.

> I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.

I mean literally every other technology sector has gone the other way, but i'm sure this one for reasons will be completely different. I mean of course, it just makes sense.

Zero switching costs? Maybe the way I use AI, where I don’t really need it to know about me and I just ask it knowledge questions. A lot of people seem to be trying to make it a friend who knows everything about them.

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