alt Hacker NewsThe inline browser the agent uses that you can take control of or watch is awesome! This is something I built a lot of tools to do in the past year (including a similar inline UX/image + click pass through) but having it Just Work in a remote, fully managed client for free is extremely convenient and useful.
But… this feels like a UX that won’t last once a significant portion of consumers and purchases adopt it.
Either the network traffic is getting proxied through my client (effectively making each user a residential scraper for meta’s crawler) or it’s between meta’s servers and the sites, which puts site operators in a difficult position: if real customers are making purchases through this interface and throttling/blocking meta’s IPs makes you invisible to them and meta’s userbase, you don’t want to block that traffic.
But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
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Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.
Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.
I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.
Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…
I think ChatGPT work (web) uses the client browser for browser use, butn not sure. So it should be possible.
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> But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
> Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
I think this is a foregone conclusions. Traditional internet marketing is dead - including funnels and dark patterns.