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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I'm reading this as a sign of strategic failure and decline.

ChatGPT is an interesting product - I like it for certain things - but after last year's PR scramble almost all the news out of OpenAI is a disappointment, with hovering hints of retrenchment.

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I still like it as a general search engine and everyday LLM over Gemini. Maybe I’m just used to the style.

agree it's becoming my new default search engine. But it is actively getting worse in a distasteful sense:

    Want to hear the one TRICK most people forget when doing X...?

Yes, every response ends with that. Why did they set it up that way?

To try and get continued usage. They no doubt A/B tested the shit out of this and saw it gets higher responses

It's quite transparently a trick to prolong engagement with the app, just as pretty much any internet product which aims to maximize the LTV extracted from the user base.

I would suggest to edit the default prompt to tell it to avoid engagement bait.

Honestly, it’s bait phrased but I’ve learnt a fair bit from those and end up learning a lot more from the session overall.

I far prefer perplexity for that. The fact that it always cites its sources is great. And it has a search bar widget for android, and search bar integration for firefox so its pretty easy to use.

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