This isn't enshittification in the traditional sense, they haven't captured the market enough for that. They're just panicking because they're burning cash way too fast.

„Enshittified“ implies it was ever not shit.

Enshittification strategies only work if the product actually produces revenue and it grows along with market share. Unfortunately, even if market use grows, revenue from AI is not there. Even YouTube crossed the break even boundary before the start of ad enshittification and after the Google buyout. LLMs financial projections are starting to show that it will never reach enough revenue to cover costs, much less cover ROI into infrastructure and capacity. The math isn't mathing and investors are starting to get cold feet. So they either enshittify now or the capital soon will start vanishing.

Meta kind of did that with their VR stuff. They skipped the appealing to users part and build a bland, brand-safe, microtransaction-laden experience to sell to businesses assuming they could just use their size to force users to buy it.

As a mod for the Enshitification you hate to see Enshitification in any form.

As a mod of Fuck_AI, I'll make an exception in this one case.

COMMENCE THE ENSHITIFICATION!!!!

Which completely goes against my Enshitification mod mindset, but here we are.

So....nobody told me life was going to be this way.....

clap-clap-clap-clap

It'll be a macguffin that makes your life a little more convenient in some ways, but it'll cost the equivalent of a 1996 Honda Civic to use monthly and you have to smash your hand with a hammer to turn it on

This is the same business model that tech "startups" use, just at a vastly accelerated time table. Upend some existing market (in this case, several markets) by burning through cash at an unsustainable rate. Once your customers have been hooked, and/or the alternatives eliminated as competitors, you crank up the prices to try and make the business cashflow positive.

Basically what happened with Claude Opus 4.8