But times change and the cost of free tier users surpasses that of paying users. Should the company continue providing the same level of service for free tier users?
“Times changing” here seems to be the central trick to the argument.
What’s interesting about enshittification is that as the company gets more and more profitable there seems to be more and more excuses as to why these free features are so costly.
It’s very easy for a company to put out a statement that times are changing and that the free tier is unaffordable. Is that always true? Who’s to say?
I’m sure sometimes it is true but the doubt is why arguments like this will never go away.
Also, what other term than entitlement would you use for somebody gets something for free, is not promised that it will stay free forever, the free offering is cancelled or limited, and the user starts complaining?
What other term than incompetent would you use for a company that puts out a free product, attracts a bunch of free users, abruptly cuts access for those features and puts it behind a paywall, and then acts surprised when those same users complain about it.
If you want to make a business move go ahead, it’s your right, but accept the complaints from your user base you predictably pissed off.
While what you describe does happen (and are the worst of the worst examples of shitty unnecessary bullshit) LLMs are not algorithms we already had.
Things like ChatGPT/Copilot are novel tech. You might not like them, and they can hallucinate answers, but it is new.
The theory is that you will be left behind, not that your life is missing anything.
Picture the native Americans before colonialism. Their lives were going just fine, but then a money addicted hyper “efficient” type of culture appeared and they weren’t able to raise armies and build weapons at the rate necessary to keep their way of life.
If you + LLM can do your job more efficiently than you alone then by supply/demand your value as an employee is going down by refusing to adapt, and your salary will reflect your comparatively lower output than your peers.