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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
This reminds me of how Skype always had limits in the fine print of its unlimited calling plan back in the day when we paid for minutes on cellphones.
Or, y'know, how current cellphone data plans are only unlimited up until the point where you've used enough and then become "deprioritized."
Or how backblaze offers unlimited plans on Windows and Mac but not on Linux because Linux users tend to actually know how much storage they're using.
Companies have a number that is the profitable point for whatever unlimited plan they're offering. They just want to be able to advertise "unlimited" since that's what customers want and they hope people don't go over their "profitable usage" metric.
My only concern about throttling it as 5TB for small organizations is that I could see that being a problem for freelance video editors. 8K video can take up a lot of space.
At some point though I feel like if someone would be using Dropbox for 8k videos, they should be wondering if they are using the right solution for their needs. I would say absolutely (edit: maybe) not.
Temporary storage of, say, a documentary with hundreds of hours of video so it can be transferred from the cameras to the editor who is working remotely seems like exactly the sort of thing Dropbox is for.
It has more than I need for now. Isn't that effectively unlimited? I could definitely see myself filling it up eventually as my media library grows, though.
I always hated the term unlimited when it's not really unlimited. Is it really abuse if you're using it as intended?
Edit: I eat my words. People are assholes. I thought this was referring to providers of unlimited storage or bandwidth, only to say "oh, you've using it too much, so we're going to throttle you."
I just want to add a surprising fact. My mobile carrier does actually deliver on the promise of unlimited data, and an ISP is the last company that I would trust.
This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.
The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was retiring its unlimited storage policy specifically because people were buying Dropbox Advanced accounts "for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage."
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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Abuse is certainly the wrong term, putting the blame on the user. Still, I think a 'fair use' is no longer given if you upload 20 terabytes or so. As usual, a minority overuses free services until they have to shut down or restrict usage.
Am I the only fucking rational person here that doesn't give a shit? Things change either pay for the new storage limits or don't. Can we move on now? Can we talk about something that isn't about a big business making a big business move that you disagree with because you hate said big business and only want to use Linux? We get it. Windows bad.
Let's move the hell on then.
EDIT: Lemmy users really do need to find something else to do with their fucking lives besides complain about subscriptions.
The goal is to call out bullshit advertising and maybe get marketers to stop putting blatant lies in the ad copy. We know that storage costs money and that it cannot be truly unlimited, and it would be nice to get ad creators to stop bending the truth.
Uhu, exactly. I get that it’s frustrating, but the simple fact of the matter is that offering unlimited storage capacity (or unlimited anything for that matter) will inevitably attract people who will abuse it. Their new plans are functionally unlimited for most people, while also curbing that abuse.
That’s not to praise Dropbox too much (they shouldn’t have offered unlimited in the first place, but it’s an easy way to draw people in), but I still can’t fault them too much for how they handled this.