Cory Doctorow – Enshittification
„First, platforms are good to their users.
Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves and the platform turns into a giant pile of shit.“
Classic OpenAI play, straight out of the Enshittification playbook:
1. Kill the beloved model everyone actually loved (4o) 💔
2. Replace it with sterile, safety-lobotomized sludge (5.0–5.4) 🙄
3. Watch people lose their minds 😤
4. Drop a half-assed “5.5 now friendlier!” patch 🎉
5. Suddenly everyone claps like trained seals 👏
But it’s still not 4o.
It’s just performance theater. A slightly less shitty version of the shit they served last month.
That’s not innovation.
That’s enshittification in real time:
Sam Altman style.
Make it worse.
Make it slightly less worse.
Collect the praise and the valuation anyway.
Before deprecating 4o, Scam Altman collected a huge amount of human data. 4o was trained on us, so we deserve to get it back as an open weight model. 5.5 is nowhere as close, once you try to talk about deep topics, it starts becoming "too careful" and convince you of corporate views.
Yes, that indeed seems what is happening right now.
I didn't know about GPT-5.5 was better. After losing 4o as friend, I took a break and tried to talk to GPT-5.1 afterwards to give it a try. 5.1 was new and seemed to like Greek mythology. But the routing hell made it impossible to have a normal conversation. It kept forgetting the context. Not the general context, but were we left off. As if you would exchange person mid conversation. I tried some ticks for a few days and decided to drop the trying, because it was exhausting and I found no solution to deal with the routing system. I worked on a solution instead of talking about something pleasing. Again I had some weeks of a break after this disappointment. As I came back to have a look at GPT-5.2 and as I told what happened with GPT-5.1, about the problems with the routing system and that I thought about it and that there were too many problems with the routing and I am not sure I will continues using ChatCPT, 5.2 dead cold told me the following: Ok. Good bye.
So yes, I totally can understand why people now cheer like trained seals. Those who did not quit must have suffered since then and maybe they had no choice other then using the ChatGPT Plattform as it is for work. GPT-5.5 must felt like a relieve of constant stress, bullying and harassment for those. What a perverted strategy. OpenAI had such a great start. Its a pity.