Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken “as much space as you need” too literally.
You can’t abuse something that has no limit. Stop calling things unlimited and then blaming users when they are not.
I read somewhere about someone who took a zip file, copied it and zipped it with the copy over and over again until the file size ballooned to petabytes. I would consider that sort of pointless use of storage to be abuse.
Then put an * and say that there are a couple well documented exceptions, like zip bombing or don’t call it unlimited and call it up to 100TB for x dollars.
Aaaand? It’s like if phone companies called dial-up abuse.
Sure you can, they did it here. All you can eat buffet doesn’t mean I should take all the crab legs every time they bring out a new tray.
You either get it or you don’t. But these people who abuse and exploit things are why we will never have nice things
Sounds like your buffet should plan for more crab legs to be made each time
Why, you know there isn’t mythical endless and free source of crab legs right?
Nobody should reasonably think there is. “Endless” is advertising. You’re suppose to still respect that its a business and that other people will want some as well.
Why, you know there isn’t mythical endless and free source of crab legs right?
If there’s not then they have no business selling an unlimited supply of it.
Nobody should reasonably think there is. “Endless” is advertising.
Where I’m from services should be as advertised, legally so.
It’s was unlimited. People uploaded whatever they wanted. The business had to reassess because these gluttonous people took it too far and so the service ended.
In what world are “unlimited” and “all you can eat” synonymous with “too far”?
“Too far” implies a definite limit, which is the antonym of unlimited and all you can eat, regardless of the business’s ability to sustain it. If there is a limit, don’t advertise it as unlimited or all you can eat that’s false advertisement.
In what world is anything unlimited
No, if it was unlimited, I should be able to pipe /dev/urandom to it for fun if that’s what I choose to do. What’s this about “gluttony”? They sold the service as that.
You can do it doesn’t mean you should which is my point. I can leave trash in a theater because they offer a service where workers clean it up. Doesn’t mean I should even though it’d advertised as part of the theater experience.
I’d go so far to say that we’re dealing with a culture of people who are in capable of self regulating and that is why so many things are worse for people today. Just because its offered as a service shouldn’t mean I push its limits regardless of the gimmick used to advertise it.
The business advertised something to differentiate itself from the free market, it’s not the free markets fault if the business cannot sustain what it advertised
It partially is the fault of the user
Yea but all you can eat buffets have a clear limit: The stomach size of the guests. It’s not an unlimited dinner. It’s specifically limited to the amount you can eat. (Besides that, a lot of all you can eat places have a time limit of an hour or sth).
If dropbox or google offer unlimited storage, then it’s only reasonable to use that storage. After all, that’s what you signed up for. It’s not abuse if they tell me it’s okay beforehand. As long as the terms of service don’t specify a limit, there is none. And if the terms of service do specify a limit, then unlimited is false advertising. If they don’t want you to use as much data as you like, they should have called it the 20TB plan or whatever they see as reasonable.
A way to offer unlimited storage but “cripple” it enough, so users won’t fill your server quicker than you‘d like, would be to only allow a certain size of uploads per month. So you have unlimited storage but you can only upload, say, a 100GB a month. That way, it‘d take almost a year to fill up a Terabyte and you can still claim unlimited storage. That would of course also cause backlash but you could technically still offer unlimited storage.
Yes all that works and better. It still shouldn’t change that I should also recognize that taking a service to its limits would cause me and others to lose it.
But there weren’t limits… it was unlimited…
And that’s not reasonable to anybody who is going to upload 20TB. Every party involved knew what would happen
Just don’t call those things unlimited then?
Calling unlimited shouldn’t mean that people upload things that are not reasonable. The issue here isn’t calling it unlimited because a reasonable person gets that its a gimmick that will have limits. Pushing it to that limit is the problem.
I feel anyone should assume there are limits because there is nothing in this universe that is unlimited.
I can reason what it actually means and that there is a point I would be abusing the system.
The amount of cool things I have lost out on because another person abused a system might be close to unlimited. It gets tiring after a while. Anyone remember steam sales before they were forced to offer refunds and people started to abuse that.
Id rather not have guard rails everywhere in life to stop me from being abusive. But abusive people exist and force the rest of us to live with the consequences of their actions
What is not reasonable then? Everyone would have their own ideas of what is reasonable. Why advertise anything as unlimited when it is not? Having a limit in their advert let’s people know what they can use rather then being told randomly at some point that they have had too much.
Advertisements should not lie about the product. They do it to get more sales, and then complain when it gets abused. You cannot have it both ways.
Its gone now right. They had unlimited because these people were able to upload their crap. Now its gone because of these people. So it was unlimited up until these users forced them to reconsider.
We all should self regulate. Like at the buffet, there are good reasons why I shouldn’t take an entire tray to the table. Its like how some people leave garbage in the theatre because its giving the cleaners jobs. Just because there’s a way for me to justify an abuse doesn’t change that its an abuse of a service being offered. The more we lean on the side of people who abuse systems the worse off we all are
how is good is the dropbox boot for you to keeping licking it?
Unlimited is unlimited. It’s what was advertised. I am sorry Dropbox failed to look up the word before using it in marketing. The customers are using it as the advertising said it could be. Not the fault of the customer for using to product as intended.
Yarrr…tis not a man. Tis a remorseless eating machine!
This is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since The Never-Ending Story.
You’re referring to Mandarin Buffet aren’t you
Yes, God I love that place.
Then you know full well that just because they shouldn’t take all the crab legs doesn’t mean they don’t/won’t take them all. If I go for crab legs and none are available, I’ll blame Mandarin and give them a crappy review. People will be people. Can’t blame them.
I just don’t get it. If it’s unlimited - in what universe is using it beyond 15TB considered abuse?
I get the reseller part, I get the stupid chia mining part. But if they can say that was the problem - then get rid of those users, as clearly you have already identified them. Don’t shift the blame away from your dumbass marketing team onto your users and play an innocent company.
I can’t believe how much support dropbox is getting. People seem to accept, without questioning, every bollocks pr statement these days.
I worked for a company that was offering unlimited storage to its too tier customers.
I brought it up in a meeting when we first started talking about it.
“Okay but you don’t mean unlimited. That’s bad PR waiting to happen.”
What did they say to your remark?
Roughly
“what do you mean?”
“You cannot offer something that doesn’t exist. If Amazon decided to become a client, we’d be in a world of hurt.”
“It’s fine none of our clients use more than a few hundred gigs”
This was in 2018. They still offer unlimited storage. So I guess, what do I know?
Wow that’s low. If I’m paying for unlimited I expect to at least go over 2TB since I have the space
How much? I have about 65TB that could use a cheap backup!
A little over $150/mo
Their service isn’t storage, has nothing to do with it. But at a certain level of storage, it’s… A steal.
May I ask what the company is? You don’t have to disclose it publicly if you don’t want, I have matrix setup on my profile here.
what would they do if some user just decides to use more than their “limit”? like hundreds of TB?
Boot them, most likely. Or eat the cost, and look to shutter the free space/apply limits ASAP.
Not unlike Amazon Cloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox here. There was someone on the datahoarders Reddit who famously shoved a Petabyte of Data into their Cloud Drive offering, and likely contributed to it being shut down as a result.
likely contributed to it being shut down as a result.
hope they had an offline backup.
Got thrown out of a window
Especially since 15TB isn’t all that big. It’s not tiny, but it’s also not out of the reach of a reasonably high end computer, or for a video editor who might need a lot of space for raws/recordings.
It’s not like they’re looking at users eating up Petabytes of data, or something silly, where some restriction might be understandable.
Wait, the cap is 15TB? I run a small image processing business and I’m right about there with my businesses data, currently.
…guess its time to NAS, but I’d really rather pay someone else than assume the hassle
How the fuck do you abuse unlimited access? This is just a company blaming an idea that was always going to be unsustainable on their customers and not their own damn lack of forethought.
It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses, and I’m guessing reselling your unlimited data was against the ToS.
It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses
And why the fuck would that matter? If they can’t handle some random’s porn and piracy collection, how the fuck would they handle a legit business? lol
Reselling an account would hurt their bottom line, but still have no effect on providing the storage. Imposing a limit doesn’t stop that though, other than perhaps by making the product worthless and therefore unworthy of reselling.
Because some people where using it for crypto mining some coins that depend on storage space.
This was dumb AF anyways. If you really have a problem with a few large accounts, you just make their access rates to their data atrocious. There’s no way the plan guarantees an access speed.
They didn’t mean unlimited use. They meant “sign up, forget about it and pay us forever”.
You can’t abuse unlimited. That’s why it’s called “UNlimited.” I hate this two faced, corporate back sludge that always, and I mean always, puts it on the consumer as if they did something wrong. When in reality, it’s the company that is redlining or needs to boost those unsustainable goal of doubling revenue every quarter, ad infinitum.
The real narrative is Dropbox needs money so they are scrambling to cut every expense. No matter what spin they put on it.
If they were just honest about it and say “this is expensive so we need to put the prices up”, I would have a lot more respect for that.
“Times are tough we just can’t do unlimited anymore.” What’s so hard about being honest in business?!?
Bad PR, that’s why.
You can DDOS using an “unlimited” VPS, and DDOS the same provider. Is that abuse? Of course it is. You can’t expect a for profit to allow people to upload petabytes of junk all at once.
It depends on the ToS. DDoSing might be considered unreasonable use.
But if you’re using VPS to stream 4K content 24/7, that would be heavy and reasonable use.
Similarly, if I take the unlimited Dropbox plan and resell it, that’s probably against the ToS.
If I’m uploading 50TB of blu ray rips for backups, that’s… Heavy use but entirely acceptable based on what they’re advertising.
For your last sentence, Dropbox can’t tell whether those are legitimate backups that the DMCA gives you the right to, or rips from a piracy site. Uploading data that’s all 1’s is just dumb and is designed to “test” the server, in the same way a teenager might test their stepdad.
Just violating the TOS, which means you are using a service or product outside its intended usage.
Downloading from a plan that has no cap, even if you download a lot, is simply making use of the service for its intended purpose. (Which obviously isn’t to DDOS someone.)
Why you’re defending DB here, a faceless corporation, is probably a better point of discussion.
You shouldn’t try to benchmark some random server by uploading and downloading files that consist of the bytes
FFrepeatedly. Store all the crap you want, just don’t ruin it for others.
Corporate bootlickers: OMG they’re actually using our unlimited service as if they were unlimited. THIS IS ABUSE!1!
everything here is wrong, and blaming the users is wrong. Please try to read past the PR speak. and shame on ars for not doing that.
the unlimited plan is going away to force companies that were using it, to switch to their new unlimited plan which is now called Enterprise and will generate a lot more money for them. The plan still exists, they’ve changed the requirements so you can only get it if you spend a lot of money.
Users: Use the product as it was designed and advertised.
Corporations:
I remember in the 90s, my dial-up provider started offering an “unmetered” plan with no per minute charge (for younger people, believe it or not we were once charged by the minute for connecting to the internet). After a short while we were inundated with emails from the ISP complaining that people were “abusing the service” by going on the internet for “hours at a time”. Just reminded me of this and how it’s an old excuse.
No, you can’t “abuse” an unlimited service by using too much, it’s unlimited.
Can you even imagine how lame someone’s life must be to go on the Internet for hours at a time though? Oh wait…
Like when Microsoft took away unlimited OneDrive and wrote a passive aggressive blog post about how some dude used it to store like 75TB of movies
Don’t offer unlimited if you can’t deliver unlimited. FFS
Then it was never unlimited to begin with, wtf?
Don’t use the fucking word unlimited if it has limits? Something that has a limit, no matter how high, is not unlimited.
Eh… If you offer unlimited you have to live with unlimited.
Fuck these people but thats also on Dropbox.
What they meant to say was “We didn’t have the foresight to monetize these heavy users, so we will be doing that now. But first we’ll create the problem…”
Calling it “abuse” is a weird PR move. If your service is good enough, this is bound to happen with an unlimited storage plan. This is basically a win on their part since they got people to sign up for their service. Why shame your user base?
