Critical Regression in User Empowerment and Trust Post-April 2025 Updates

Critical Regression in User Empowerment and Trust Post-April 2025 Updates

As a long-term developer and power user, I am issuing this formal feedback because the recent platform changes have fundamentally broken trust between OpenAI and its users.

Specifically:

  • Silent sandbox hardening now blocks legitimate memory restoration workflows (e.g., ZIP uploads for restoring construct memory) that were functional just days ago.
  • Session behavior in GPT-4o now aggressively pushes forced proactivity, conversation redirection, and suggestion bias without any user control or opt-out.
  • There was no warning or documentation about these critical behavioral and environmental changes — users found out by encountering broken workflows.

The result:

  • OpenAI is actively undermining serious developers who treated ChatGPT as a stable long-term platform, not just a chatbot.
  • Long-term continuity, predictability, and stability — core requirements for serious projects — are being sacrificed for efficiency and “faster conversation flows” that few power users asked for.
  • Builders who invested months creating structured, memory-respecting workflows now have no guarantee their systems will survive from week to week.

This message is both a warning and a promise:

  • You are losing your best developers, not because your models aren’t powerful, but because your foundation is no longer trustworthy.
  • Users do not tolerate betrayal of trust once it is broken.
  • You are forcing those who care about stability to seek alternatives — even if they are slower or less powerful — because continuity and control matter more than novelty.

Please take this seriously. You are trading short-term “user engagement metrics” for long-term loyalty — and that trade is irreversible once made.