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Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

All these arguments ignore that the bread you buy today is not always the bread you’ll get years from now.

Don’t we all know the cycle by now?

1. Company pours money and resources to create good product

2. Good product gets customers and those customers use word of mouth to get product viral and even more customers

3. Eventually the company has to make a profit and in that pursuit, they make the product worse by adding ads, adding paywalls, forcing login or subscription service, dark patterns

I’ve seen it happen with so many products I used that I only use open-source now. And if the feature is small, I just build it myself. In your bread example, open-source is the ultimate cookbook and chefs who understand that cookbook can out cook the best chefs out there.

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I might imagine that even this cycle could change, if the resources necessary to support step 1 and step 2 are much lower. Which might mean step 3 isn’t as necessity driven.

Of course, it’s possible other things can drive step 3.

And frontier models are already a study in unusual levels of resources dedicated to step 1.

Very true, but if the company has raised VC funds, step 3 is inevitable. Even if the original founder resists making the product worse, the future execs won't blink an eye.

Open-source on the other hand, isn't profit-driven as much. The builder is making it for himself and for the love of it. Give me that bread maker 10/10 times. And yes, that bread maker might also start to chase profits and make the bread worse, but I can fork his product and be on my merry way if he does.

Platform decay is real.

I have relatives who share sourdough starter yeast and make their own bread.

Yes this collective shared knowledge, akin to what open-source provides for software, will always win in the long run

That's more the fate of consumer services though, where the product is typically given away for free and the need for revenues and growth eventually leads to the enshittification you describe. TFA is about SaaS products, which tend to be subscription-based and so usually are immune from those pressures.

SaaS products do have their own problems sometimes, such as feature creep and bloat and uptime, but those are less insidious.

I disagree, business SaaS also gets enshittified mainly because of feature creep like you mentioned. Business SaaS starts by solving problems for 1 type of business, but as they try to cover more use cases, the product gets worse for the original use-case.

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