6 ms·

The path to enshittification is getting shorter and shorter.

shuckles 3y ago
If "enshittification" includes "companies improving products but not making improvements available for free use by others", then it's a meaningless term.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  Enshittification means companies breaking the social contract they started with, and in some cases like openAI completely reverse it. You can't have "Open Weights models" as your tag line and just proceed to become exactly not that. That is enshittification by any standards.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    It's more about companies going from offering good value to their users, to extracting value from their userbase, and the changes to the produy along the way, as Cory Doctorow coined it. Put that way, is Mistrial changiy directions not releasing future models that? I don't disagree that this move sucks, but it's not like they just changed a secret setting so their model you're currently running on your computer is now secretly uploading your incognito browsing habits to their servers. They changed what they're going to sell/release, going forwards, but that's it. No users got abused here, from my POV, but maybe I'm not seeing it.
  - shuckles 3y ago
    No, enshittification as proposed as a term for marketplace operators or platform providers who slowly degrade the experience for dependent users in order to capture more of the value created. Mistral is not a platform; it's a technology vendor. You can apply words however arbitrarily you want, but it just makes them meaningless.
machdiamonds 3y ago
Not sure why people on HN can't understand that companies actually need to make money to survive.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  A systemic problem is still a problem.
- chadash 3y ago
  I won’t eat at that restaurant anymore because the chef no longer publishes cookbooks. Oh, you say he will tell me the recipe as long as I agree not to use it to open a restaurant across the street? Well, f** him that’s not good enough. He built his career learning recipes from cookbooks who learned recipes from other cookbooks. He owes it to me to publish his recipes and let me do what I want with them.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    The chef made his entire reputation by publishing cookbooks, and practically overnight pivoted from loudly proclaiming how important it was to share recipes to refusing to share anything and telling people to just eat at his restaurant.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Where this analogy falls flat, is the fact that I can take the "food", the model, and copy it an infinite amount of times, and use it to open my own, competing restaurant, who's food is as delicious as the original chef's. It'll differ some in presentation, but it's still gonna be a really really good cut of high end steak that was heated just right and melts in your mouth in all the right ways, without me having to put in any of the work it took to get there, which means my overhead is way lower. Suddenly, this chef has to compete with my fast food knock-off of their Michelin star restaurant. Some people like paying $400 for a meal for the experience, but it turns out more people just wanna be fed and are cheap, and can't or don't want to pay for the Michelin dining experience when the food is of equal quality in this tortured analogy. No one goes to the original chef's restaurant, and they go out of business. The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.

If "enshittification" includes "companies improving products but not making improvements available for free use by others", then it's a meaningless term.

newswasboring 3y ago
Enshittification means companies breaking the social contract they started with, and in some cases like openAI completely reverse it. You can't have "Open Weights models" as your tag line and just proceed to become exactly not that. That is enshittification by any standards.
- fragmede 3y ago
  It's more about companies going from offering good value to their users, to extracting value from their userbase, and the changes to the produy along the way, as Cory Doctorow coined it. Put that way, is Mistrial changiy directions not releasing future models that? I don't disagree that this move sucks, but it's not like they just changed a secret setting so their model you're currently running on your computer is now secretly uploading your incognito browsing habits to their servers. They changed what they're going to sell/release, going forwards, but that's it. No users got abused here, from my POV, but maybe I'm not seeing it.
- shuckles 3y ago
  No, enshittification as proposed as a term for marketplace operators or platform providers who slowly degrade the experience for dependent users in order to capture more of the value created. Mistral is not a platform; it's a technology vendor. You can apply words however arbitrarily you want, but it just makes them meaningless.

machdiamonds 3y ago

Not sure why people on HN can't understand that companies actually need to make money to survive.

Zambyte 3y ago
A systemic problem is still a problem.
chadash 3y ago
I won’t eat at that restaurant anymore because the chef no longer publishes cookbooks. Oh, you say he will tell me the recipe as long as I agree not to use it to open a restaurant across the street? Well, f** him that’s not good enough. He built his career learning recipes from cookbooks who learned recipes from other cookbooks. He owes it to me to publish his recipes and let me do what I want with them.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  The chef made his entire reputation by publishing cookbooks, and practically overnight pivoted from loudly proclaiming how important it was to share recipes to refusing to share anything and telling people to just eat at his restaurant.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Where this analogy falls flat, is the fact that I can take the "food", the model, and copy it an infinite amount of times, and use it to open my own, competing restaurant, who's food is as delicious as the original chef's. It'll differ some in presentation, but it's still gonna be a really really good cut of high end steak that was heated just right and melts in your mouth in all the right ways, without me having to put in any of the work it took to get there, which means my overhead is way lower. Suddenly, this chef has to compete with my fast food knock-off of their Michelin star restaurant. Some people like paying $400 for a meal for the experience, but it turns out more people just wanna be fed and are cheap, and can't or don't want to pay for the Michelin dining experience when the food is of equal quality in this tortured analogy. No one goes to the original chef's restaurant, and they go out of business. The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.