Using what you're offered is considered abuse now? Huh...
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren't going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.
Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn't that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.
Oh no, a small number of my users are actually using my service the way I advertised it. Better change it
Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.
Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.
Absolutely! But I don't think that's the point of contention here. The problem is the "abuse" rhetoric, since it's not just incorrect but disingenuous to basically claim that the users did anything wrong here. They're imposing limits because they miscalculated how many heavy users they could handle.
Again, that's a completely reasonable move, but framing it as anything but a miscalculation on their part is just a dick move.
"Unlimited" is always a marketing gimmick, and they'll always contact you like "hey I noticed you're actually trying to use the thing you paid for you need to stop or we'll terminate you". Along the same lines: "Lifetime license" means 5 years, and "All-You-Can-Eat Pancakes means Four Pancakes."
I tried the all you can eat pasta at Olive garden once.
The first bowl happened.
The second bowl was in like one of those little soup cups.
They refused to come anywhere near our table after that except to slam the check down.
Fuck everything about Olive garden
I used to work at olive garden, it is true that we were told to give less on subsequent bowls (can't tell you how much was wasted where people ordered a second or third bowl and took like two bites) but not coming back around after... that wasn't something we were specifically told to do in my experience, probably just had a lazy server.
One thing is the unlimited soup and salad was like $6 and some people would only order water, get like 4-5 refills on soup/salad/water and then tip like a dollar. That is one whole table for an hour+ I could have had sat with someone else who wasn't being stingy as hell.
On the other hand, tipping culture sucks the company should just pay a living wage instead of the like 2.50 an hour they pay.
You nailled it in the last paragraph. It is important to not get angry at customers. It isn't their obligation to pay you a living wage. Secondly, the company chooses how much the meals are and indirectly how much they rent their tables per hour. If it isn't viable, they should increase prices.
Customers may be struggling. Could be their first meal out in months. The company invited them in with these cheap prices.
Tipping culture is like "hey, come in, eat cheap. Oh, and please pay our staff on the way out." You are an employer, not a table rental company.
In retrospect, all you can eat in a table service environment is just a bad idea all around.
This was back around 2000. We were young, poor, and hungry, so of course we were looking for value. It's not fair to servers to offer that.
I like what is it, backblaze where it's unlimited as long as the drive is connected to your computer
Weird way to justify their price increase. Offering unlimited storage to business users, and finding out businesses are finding ways to leverage that for profit... shouldn't have been labeled as abuse.. Rising to market incentives might be a better approach.
Some of these "businesses" are in fact chia farming and whatnot, though. I know the marketing language is always what gets people ruffled up in datahoarder, but this isn't exactly something I would consider as a legitimate business use and a single plot uses 100GB of space which can't even begin to be deduplicated. If your entire business resolves around making money as a result of storing unreasonably large amounts of data then the cloud ain't it and realistic data costs need to be factored into your data models. I'm actually a bit surprised that Dropbox responded so quickly to the influx of gdrive abusers.
For the average user, it would be substantially more cost effective and sustainable for you to invest in hard drives rather than paying Dropbox $100/mo to rent storage. Cloud providers will decide at any time to change the term of your agreement. The hard drive is yours until it dies.
How can you abuse unlimited?
Companies: yes.
SELFHOST! No matter how good the deal is, no matter how free or expensive it is, you can not trust a cloud service to last as long as you need it.
When the megaupload shit happened, I was using a smaller company to store my files and I had recorded an acoustic EP where I tried singing for the first time as a way to deal with a break up, I had it there in the thought it would be safe, I went to go download it incase something happened to them and they just shut down, no email, nothing.. not even the fbi raid image thing most sites got. They just bailed.
It's not the cloud. It's just some else's computer.
Sorry you lost that stuff. Did you manage to re record?
Too many people used the unlimited space that was offered. That is not abusing.
*used
"unlimited storage" was definitely a thing back in the day when the average high end user had a couple of TBs of data, but anyone using that now is just stupid. Full on stupid.
Average high end users can and do have hundreds of TBs now. Companies are entering into the PB ranges. I feel no sympathy for a company who is just now figuring this out. Yes it'd be nice to have unlimited storage as a user, but as a company there is no sense to the cost anymore, and they should have done this 8 years ago
This is probably a result of that dumb crypto currency that uses proof of storage and people were just using Dropbox for it
But I wonder: doesn't it need to be accessible to be read locally? If I mine like 1 petabytes of stuff, then I can upload somewhere else and forget about it?
Otherwise they could mine on a disk, then wipe, start again.
IMHO they found a scapegoat, everyone (me included) loves to blame crypto bros for anything bad, but I don't see how here can happen
Emulate a block device and reference it to the cloud api, unless im missing something.
Yes but it should be needed to read it constantly, otherwise it would download petabytes of stuff
And that mined file would be accessed slowly
That's... Not how that works?... You just need to show you have physical hard drive space on your computer. Dropbox doesn't magically give you extra storage...
There was an API floating around ages ago that let you mount a Gmail instance as a virtual hard drive and use it like block device. Dropbox does have an API for file access, so it's entirely possible to write a miner that talks to Dropbox and not your local drive.
Isn't it technically impossible to use unlimited space?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.
Dropbox says that these users were using "thousands of times more storage than [their] genuine business customers."
Dropbox also says that this behavior has been getting worse recently because other services have also been placing caps on their storage plans—at some point within the last year, Google also removed similar "as much as you need" language from its Google Workspace plans.
Rather than attempting to police behavior or play whack-a-mole with the people abusing the service, Dropbox has imposed a 15TB cap on organizations with three or fewer users.
An additional 5TB per user can be added on top of that, with a maximum cap of 1,000TB per organization.
New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you'll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans.
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Cryptocurrency ruins everything