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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

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Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#251

Post by dpark »

ethbr1 wrote: post #250
dpark wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit was an also-ran to Digg for half a decade. They literally were not the first mover. Meanwhile, Claude Code very much has a first mover advantage that Anthropic is trying to entrench and capitalize on. > Plus its product utility scaled with user count. Which should mean it’s more impactful for Reddit to lose a set of engaged users. The value that Reddit brings to its customers is directly proportional to how ma…

Digg (or Slashdot before it) wasn't Reddit in the same way that HN isn't Reddit: aggregators vs community discussions. 2/4chan or BBSs would have been the previous alternatives. What was the scaled pre-existing topic-divided community-moderated discussion space? It's difficult to say Claude Code has first mover advantage when these discussions are littered with people talking about their alternative preferred toolcha…

Digg and Reddit were basically the same product addressing the same market. When Digg imploded, their user base largely moved to Reddit. HN was also explicitly created as a Reddit clone.

Reddit did not have community discussions originally. That came later (but before the Digg exodus).

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#252

Post by tom_m »

ojosilva wrote: post #28

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the…

Claude Code isn't a good as the other tools. The models are the attractive part about Anthropic. I love Opus 4.5, but won't ever use it with Claude Code. Ok... never is strong...I won't use it any time soon. It has a long ways to go. Might get there, we'll see.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#254

Post by tom_m »

Here's one thing I'm a little nervous about, because it doesn't make sense to cut off distribution channels.

Anthropic should be profitable from the inference alone. That's their product...but they (like others) aren't.

This makes some sense now why they want to control usage/distribution. I bet they have a very good chunk of subscribers to Claude Code who aren't using their credits. So they probably don't have any chance at being profitable without this. Not a great place to be.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#255

Post by tom_m »

nikcub wrote: post #117
ojosilva wrote: post #28

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the…

> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now. They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user. Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copil…

I think their only profitable horse is Claude Code. That's the reason for the control.

But that means they lose on inference. Which isn't good.

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