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.
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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They didn't mean unlimited use. They meant "sign up, forget about it and pay us forever".
Users: Use the product as it was designed and advertised.
Corporations: 
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
Then it was never unlimited to begin with, wtf?
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.
Don't use the fucking word unlimited if it has limits? Something that has a limit, no matter how high, is not unlimited.
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?
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 FF repeatedly. Store all the crap you want, just don't ruin it for others.
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...
"Abused" service they were advertised. Now it is misadvertisement.
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.
Eh... If you offer unlimited you have to live with unlimited.
Fuck these people but thats also on Dropbox.
Don't offer unlimited if you can't deliver unlimited. FFS
"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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The original article contains 354 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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.
Makes sense, and their implemented solution also seems reasonable to me.
Honestly they're giving existing users at least a year with their current storage capacity and plan.
Google gave like 60 days. Dropbox are handling this much better.
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.
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.
I agree, you should definitely move on.
Am I the only fucking rational person here
No, no I don't think so