Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.

I interpret this as you saying that we need saving from the eventual predations of the shopping AI agent industry on helpless consumers. Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue? Any number of startups hungry for customers will be competing to provide the best version of the product that they can afford to provide, and will eventually settle into some fair equilibrium, absent the government picking some kind of winner or imposing binding price controls.

It's true that Uber used to offer outrageously good prices to acquire users, and nowadays charges what some people consider outrageously high prices ($80 to get me to the airport??). But a closer look at the economics of the situation reveals that the prices that rideshare services have settled on are the pretty-much-sane ones, accounting for the market value of the driver's time and uber's cost to develop and maintain the app. Why wouldn't the end result of the AI shopping agent market be the same?

> Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue?

Competition has a very poor track record of rescuing people from terrible but profitable business practices. It's more likely that they'll adopt those same practices themselves and help normalize them.

Why compete when you can simply form a cartel with your competitors and keep things roughly balanced, occasionally letting the small lead pass to someone else.

> Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue?

Why hasn't competition come to our rescue in any other product category or industry.

There will always be more money in selling out your customer base at every opportunity and as long "everyone" is already doing it "everyone else" will be at a disadvantage if they don't. Since shareholders demand endless growth and won't tolerate huge piles of cash being left on the table they'll eventually insist on it.

A company starting out looking to attract a userbase might be able to hold off for a while, but inevitably enshittification will start and then accelerate until we're all worse off than we were.

As just one example: when I first signed up for netflix it was $5.00 a month and there were zero ads. There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today. I can't even think of one without ads.

> There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today

In terms of price versus content/quality (subjective of course) ratio or just price?

Dropout is relatively cheap compared to others and completely ad-free. The most interesting thing is perhaps that they recently announced a very small price increase to keep up with inflation, but it was implemented in a way that would a) only affect new subscribers and b) only after a date a few months ahead, so current subscribers _and_ people subscribing within the next month or so would keep the current price.

It's interesting to see the number of people threatening to cancel their subscription just so they could re-subscribe at a higher price and then buy more merchandise just so they can give their favourite streaming service more money.

That kind of genuine goodwill seems out-of-reach for the larger streaming services, however Dropout is also pretty niche content-wise and even with their back catalogue it's nowhere near the seemingly infinite amount of video on the major platforms.

Because the competition is not about being the best business or providing the best value or doing what's good for customers or society.

The only competition under our current economic order is who can make the most money by any means necessary. Even and especially illegal or immoral means.

The market will never save consumers from unethical businesses because the market favors unethical businesses by design.

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