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
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.
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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.
You can blame them. That’s the point. Its the “customer is always right” culture thats the problem. Anyone should blame the individual who takes all the condiment’s at the fast food restaurant causing the store to start charging. Just like we can blame the people who forced the company to take this service away from us.
Now we all need to pay more for less because these people.
The sad thing is that the full quote is “The customer is always right IN MATTERS OF TASTE”.
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
What’s the company? I need to migrate away from Dropbox.
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.
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.
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
why the fuck would that matter?
Because it “hurt their bottom line” in some measurable way. Yeah I’d be pissed if I were a subscriber of this plan. But either you accept the caveats of using someone else’s infrastructure or you roll your own. ¯\(ツ)/¯
If you offer me “unlimited Hotdogs” and proceed to be offended by me eating infinite Hotdogs, you did not offer “unlimited Hotdogs”.
That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius.
That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius
🤣 Kudos for being the first to lobby that particular insult 🍻
They advertised a service, people used the service and it was as advertised, the service was deemed to be unprofitable due to usage, they announced the discontinuation of the service and no longer advertise it. I don’t see any mention of unlimited storage in any of their plans
https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
https://www.dropbox.com/plansAs long as subscribers to the unlimited plan retain unlimited storage through the end of the term for which they had already paid (which I didn’t see any indication, then DropBox is fulfilling the terms of the service they sold. And the last two paragraphs of the article seem to indicate that DropBox is indeed doing that
To help legitimate business users transition, Dropbox says that “customers using less than 35TB of storage per license” can keep however much they’re using plus an additional 5TB for five years “at no additional charge.” Organizations using more than 35TB will get the same deal for one year, but they’ll need to deal with Dropbox directly to work out pricing. As a baseline, adding 1TB of storage without adding additional users will cost either $10 a month or $96 a year.
New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you’ll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans. Existing users will be “gradually migrated” to the new plans starting on November 1, and they’ll be notified at least 30 days before the migration happens.
So I don’t think false advertising applies here.
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”.
Corporate bootlickers: OMG they’re actually using our unlimited service as if they were unlimited. THIS IS ABUSE!1!
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.
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…
Then it was never unlimited to begin with, wtf?
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
Eh… If you offer unlimited you have to live with unlimited.
Fuck these people but thats also on Dropbox.
Don’t use the fucking word unlimited if it has limits? Something that has a limit, no matter how high, is not 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?
“Abused”? Is it unlimited or not? I don’t see how as much as you need can be taken too literally. It’s either true or it isn’t.
