A post on r/ChatGPT is exploding right now, and it's worth paying attention to. Someone has planted a flag and cried out loud: enough is enough, cancel ChatGPT, let it burn. And the community is responding. Over 31,000 upvotes and more than 2,200 comments in a short time is not an everyday occurrence — even on a subreddit with millions of members.

This is, of course, a community source, and we're not talking about scientific documentation. But as an early signal, this is quite powerful noise.

So what's actually going on? According to research we've seen across Reddit, LinkedIn, and the OpenAI forum, the frustration is about several things simultaneously. Many users experience that ChatGPT has actually gotten worse — more repetitive answers, poorer context understanding, and the model refusing to do things it easily managed a few months ago. One user allegedly logged 54 errors in 90 minutes. That's not good.

Then there's the voice. OpenAI updated the voice experience around May 2025, and people hate it. «Cold», «robotic», and «soulless» are recurring words. The old «Cove» voice was apparently popular — the new one is not. And there's no way to switch back.

Paying users are starting to question whether $20 a month actually buys them anything that the free alternatives don't provide.

The Plus subscription feels weaker than before. Features that were previously reserved for paying users are now appearing in the free version. And the message limits — 80 messages every three hours on GPT-5 — frustrate people who pay precisely to avoid such limitations. OpenAI's own CFO has reportedly acknowledged a «softening» in engagement. That's a rather diplomatic way of saying people are leaving.

Competitors are ready to welcome them. Google Gemini has 650 million users and is baked right into Workspace. Claude from Anthropic has built a loyal audience among those who work seriously with text and code. And for those who want to go completely off-grid: open-source models like Mistral and LLaMA variants are constantly improving and becoming easier to run locally.

What does this mean going forward? Perhaps nothing dramatic — OpenAI has 800 million weekly users, and even if only 5% pay, that's a lot of people. But the direction is interesting. If even core users start to doubt, that's a signal that resonates. Keep an eye on whether this spreads to the tech press in the coming days.