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Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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…

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).

I just can’t imagine anyone really bothering to switch, tbh. Even for a less enshittified product. For a better product, sure. Like if Google hadn’t rolled out Gemini in Search, ChatGPT would’ve crushed them. But not because of lack of ads in ChatGPT, because it was a better search product.

Google Search doesn’t have a network effect right? And people still tolerate their ads… they have 90% marketshare.

People still tolerate Netflix and Hulu ads right?

I think the only people that really care about enshittificafion are a few HN commenters and not broadly represented in the population.

Even at my company, our testing shows no drop in usage as we roll out ads.

> Google Search doesn’t have a network effect right?

In this specific case it does :-

1. People go to google because it is more likely to have the result they are looking for[1],

2. So, people can't search elsewhere, because the network of sites are on google and they lose that if they switch.

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[1] Well, until recently, anyway. Still, sites prioritise and optimise for Google search ranking above all other indexes.

> 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.

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