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Comment by dvrp | Hacker News Reader

Yea, that’s what I used to think until I became a business owner in the generative AI world, and until other competitors and people in our space start doing sneaky practices that, verifiably, hurt your business and you’re forced to defend yourself. Including sending bot farms to your personal Instagram accounts and even those of your family and friends.

This mostly doesn’t happen in Business or Enterprise tiers, but in consumer is ruthlessly competitive.

Don’t hate the player and so on. We don’t like it particularly either.

EDIT: I maybe should probably put an aggressive coupon code, but even through Hacker News I’ve gotten email-spammed because of LLMs that do sentiment analysis and similar techniques. Such a tragedy of the commons if you ask me.

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> until I became a business owner in the generative AI world, and until other competitors and people in our space start doing sneaky practices that, verifiably, hurt your business and you’re forced to defend yourself.

As a serial tech entrepreneur with a few decades of hands-on experience both in my own startups and also spending some years as a VP / product group owner inside an F500 acquirer, you may want to think more deeply on this. A hidden downside of modern A/B testing analytics is how easy they make it to min/max short-term gains while masking delayed and second-order effects.

In this instance, no doubt the analytics show this bumps ASP in the short-term but those analytics can't show you the downstream impacts. These tend to accrue over time creating an overall drag on the business that you have no way to identify. A good case in point is how Adobe successfully min/maxxed their way to a large portion of their customers either not trusting (or hating) them. The brand damage is now likely irreparable. Do what you must to make payroll but you're on a slippery slope. Be careful you don't let 'any dark pattern is okay, as long as it's legal and works' become status quo. The consequences can accrue faster than you can exit.

Thank you for the constructive reply; I think you are quite right.

I’ll ponder about what would be a better growth strategy - even in turbulent times - while, like you say, we also ensure is done on a good financial base/cushion.

Thanks for taking the time too.

Worry not, we have enough bandwidth to hate both the players and the game.

Ngl that made me laugh

The problems you desribe are real and you should talk more about them in general, but 'don't hate the player hate the game' always comes off as a flippant dismissal. You have a good product, I think you can do better than that.

That's a bullshit excuse for this particular issue. No one is forcing you to employ this specific dark pattern regardless of how you claim your competition behaves.

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