Comment by 2001zhaozhao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2001zhaozhao | Hacker News Reader

Apparently it's just an A/B test. Legit LMAO moment, speedrunning reputation destruction to your entire userbase just to test a question whose answer you can probably already guess.

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> For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected.

> When we launched Max a year ago, it didn't include Claude Code, Cowork didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it.

> Since then, we bundled Claude Code into Max and it took off after Opus 4. Cowork landed. Long-running async agents are now everyday workflows. The way people actually use a Claude subscription has changed fundamentally.

> Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this.

> So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users. We don't know exactly what those look like yet - that's what we're testing and getting feedback on right now.

> When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes. Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit.

https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare/status/2046724659039932830

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Personally I love how they have increased everyone's quotas to counteract the Opus 4.7 tokenizer change a few days ago, but are immediately regretting it and trying to cut off subscription users.

If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users. That's what GLM coding plan is doing and it works fine for them. Don't ruin your reputation with opaque messaging and hidden changes. Lol

> If the subscriptions are unprofitable, then just communicate honestly, raise the price or lower limits for new subscribers transparently, and grandfather in existing users.

This. Why do so many companies fail to get this? Anthropic's user base, in particular, is intelligent enough to understand their constraints.

I mean, if you look at the Claude subreddits, the general consensus is that Anthropic and OpenAI are money hungry corporate devils that are here to enslave all of us, and everyone should get unlimited everything on Max x20.

I think you may be overestimating the willingness of people to understand Anthropic’s concerns.

Reddit is a very small subsection of the Internet consisting mainly of basement-dweller radical leftist they/thems. We should not be taking them as a representative sample of the average Anthropic user.

Ironic that you are talking about unrepresentative samples while characterizing Reddit users that way. Reddit is a huge subsection of the internet, over a billion monthly active users. It covers basically all strata of western society you can think of.

They seem to count unregistered users in the D/W/MAU, but even so the producer / consumer of content ratio across social media still stands. What you read is a subsection of all visitors to Reddit, which follows the power law.

Are you counting the fakes and the bots?

Moreover, as sibling pointed out, content creator != visitor.

If Reddit was a representative sample of reality, all governments in the West would have been ran by gay race Communists.

I have to ask - are you a bot? You seem to be making some very strong and misinformed statements here. You can fixate on the number if you like, but calling Reddit homogeneously radical left or 'very small', is pretty stupid.

Thinking that Reddit has any resemblance to reality is what is stupid.

It's possible they don't know the actual costs. The one-time costs like hardware and training foundation models is huge. There's the ongoing costs like the PhD dudes they hire. There's the data they buy and decide not to use. There's the various offers under one payment plan - limited artifact hosting, cowork, image upload, Claude Code, Code tab on Claude. What about feature parity between the site and app? Who's working on all these?

tldr it seems really complex and by the time they've counted it they probably hired 40 new people for an unannounced feature.

big fan of A/B tests that dehumanize the consumer into some kind of money making lab rat funnel whose only purpose is to be experimented on how you can extract more money out of it

peak siliconbromaxxing

But they have red ethical redlines bs

While I feel the same way, this is nothing new at all. Basically every company does this and it's a totally normal way to test new profit models. Has been done for decades. People acting surprised here really need to get on with reality.

Stage 2 of enshittification. A necessary prerequisite to full enshittification is lock-in, so be on the lookout for it!

MS paused Copilot subscriptions because they don't have enough capacity. Anthropic is trying to confuse new users and literally don't want 20$/mo because they don't have enough capacity. Seems like there's a trend here. A lot of people in scaling threads were saying that capacity projections and DC buildouts were "fantasy" a few years ago. Not so much anymore...

What does it mean that they’re running a test? If you’re one of the unlucky 2% you need to pay more?

Usually A/B testing is just on the surface, and when you actually subscribe you get the "better" terms of the possible options.

Like, they're just advertising different terms to test how many people would still click on it and very likely start the subscription process, but after they click they go back to the usual terms. Changing the whole payment flow, account models and permissions in their backend just for a quick test is usually too much work.

But yes, basically, if you're B and not A, and B has objectively worse terms than A, then you're just unlucky. But this is the essence of A/B tests. They are done by basically every company everytime, because it's the most straightforward and simple way to test new terms or designs.

I don't think anyone is questioning the idea of A/B testing in general, but we are confused how it works in practice when you are advertising a service. Can you give me an example of this happening elsewhere? Or are you saying it's so normalized that there would be no record or news articles about it, and this only is newsworthy because "AI"?

I have never heard of a company intentionally advertising less features to only some of their customers to see if they'll still bite.

And we still have no actual confirmation that Claude is giving people who fall into that 2% of testers the full service, as opposed to the advertised one.

If it’s just a “test,” why did they update the documentation?

Actual lies - the documentation was changed.

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