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Comment by ffpip | Hacker News Reader

Google is 100% running out of space.

Google Photos no longer unlimited - https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u...

GSuite no longer unlimited - https://9to5google.com/2020/10/08/google-workspace-drive-sto...

Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days. Before, it stored till you perma deleted - https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/09/drive-trash-aut...

Google Docs to be counted as storage space. it was unlimited for all before - https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

Guess the cloud's gonna start filling up soon eh.

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More like “tapping that lucrative subscription revenue” because they finally have enough people locked in

I remember the frantic meetings at Yahoo when Gmail killed the market for storage upgrades. They caused an immense amount of work (more so than affecting revenue and costs; the premium quotas at least in Europe didn't generate much revenue and the quotas were there more out of fear of excessive use).

A lot of adoption of Google services was driven by not having to worry about quotas. Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage in a way people have been unable to compete with them for years.

To be fair, current quotas are nothing like email quotas used to be.

You can store a very reasonable amount of photos in 12GB. Gmail is still practically unlimited to most people.

They don't provide tools for deleting data as easily as creating data, so users are bullied into buying storage instead of deleting trash.

No, but neither photos or e-mail sizes today are anything like what they used to be either. And remember the quota is the general Google Account quota, not separate to photos. I already have 8GB of other data in Drive.

Most of Googles products are also geared towards encouraging people to develop a habit of not deleting things, which creates a very different situation.

So while this may not be a big problem at the moment, we'll see. I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying, which isn't awful, but it's a question of when not if, and image / video sizes still keep creeping up.

That's with my photo-taking being at a far lower rate than it used to be when my son was younger. I'm not a very social person and don't travel much at the moment - a lot of people will hit those limits far faster.

> I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying

When gmail launched, I had to clean my old email every other week on all my addresses. A few years of normal usage before you have to remove old stuff is very reasonable.

My free Google Drive is even larger than my O360 one that my workplace pays for.

That's fine for e-mail. My photos are what I want to keep.

I tried using a google competitor because I didn't trust google. Even for money. They could not compete. How do you compete against essentially free.

This is why google needs anti-trust.

> Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage

Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?

Not to totally take away from your point (and interesting story) which is still valid. Just a reminder of what we've gotten for 'free' for so long often is a consequence of other business models working in conjunction.

As a side-note, training people to pay for things is great news for privacy-mind folks though. Just as a behavioural thing, that's always a huge barrier to starting a business that doesn't rely on data or ads.

  >Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?

You've just given me a horrible thought. What's the betting Google retains the free tier [albeit at a reduced level] and starts sticking adverts in amongst your photos?

A major reason people use Google products is because it is free. Subscriptions will not work out well when the user base is 7 billion people large

But is moving stuff or $5 a month cheaper? This is how iCloud got me. I pay $1 a month for space as I didn’t want to deal with figuring out what stuff on my phone I was willing to move or delete.

Or stop pack-ratting everything. How often do you go back and browse the photos you take. For me, it was "never" and I stopped taking photos. I probably take less than a few dozen photos a year with my phone, and I don't back them up because I will probably never look at them again.

I must have around 5000 photos in my archives and backed up to Google Photos / Amazon S3, etc. This includes old pre-digital ones from various family albums, which I've scanned. I have a strange compulsion to archive 'stuff' like this for posterity. Even though, logically, I know it's of no interest to anyone else apart from me and, after I'm gone and the 'rental' is not being paid on it any more, it'll all disappear forever.

Still, even though I very rarely look at any of it, I'm nonetheless comforted by the fact that it's in safe storage. At least for as long as I'm around.

Ironically, one of the few things that actually gets me looking at old photos again is Google Photos "This week X years ago" feature, that pops up in the mobile app. It's fun to bore the missus with such nuggets of info as "Did you know, this week 7 years ago, we were in <some place> visiting <some person>?"

At the prices involved, it will take years before not pack-ratting becomes a break-even operation.

I take photos every day and I look at loads of them. The biggest mistake I made in my early twenties was not taking photos. Every year since I started taking photos, it's been great.

But to each their own.

That's my cue to start self-hosting again!

Is it cheaper and better though?

You will need to setup redundancy if you use your own hardware, verify your client and server scripts, take care of encryption etc.

Also, syncing anyone from Dropbox to Onedrive can do. I like the photo tagging to be powerful when I am looking for old photos.

Hosting yourself is better than Google reading and disabling your account because you used a couple words that might violate it's TOS. I can't imagine a researcher trying to write a book in Google Docs about 1960's civil rights without tripping Google's abuse engines. It is creepy

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-rea...

You need redundancy with google too. I personally use google, but I have a home server that pulls my photos and emails via the google api. Then I backup that to a 2nd internal drive and the cloud. I use a time4vps storage server, if anyone is interested (https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881)

Depends how lazy you are!

I have a synology setup with a syncme app on mobile that I run every month or so to dump pics on home nas. I have a amazon glacier backup plugin on NAS that backup's periodically. thats it.

Even if the house catches fire I can still get my stuff out of amazon.

"Running out" == "Doesn't want to give away for free"

I don't see any limits on Google Cloud Storage any time soon.

> Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days.

To be fair I would consider this a feature. This is how I expect trash to work. Someone takes it away on occasion.

> Google Docs to be counted as storage space

Oh, I missed this. I wonder how they are counting it? After all as a user you don't really have any insight on how much space a doc actually uses. I guess they are going to create some metric?

> "Running out" == "Doesn't want to give away for free"

All these limits were placed within the last few months. It's definitely a company wide policy to reduce load from free users

> I don't see any limits on Google Cloud Storage any time soon.

It's paid.

> Google Drive to delete trash after 30 days.

It used to be unlimited. Now it isn't. Which is what people expected.

> Oh, I missed this. I wonder how they are counting it? After all as a..

Not sure, but they might just add up the space taken by individual files? They previously excluded docs and it lead to hacks like these - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271

> It's definitely a company wide policy to reduce load from free users

I agree that it's a company wide policy, but I'm not so sure it's to reduce load. It might just be that they want more subscription revenue and to reduce their reliance on advertising, which has current antitrust issues circling around it.

> Not sure, but they might just add up the space taken by individual files?

My point is that there is no "file" for Google Docs. They are some rows in a database somewhere. Probably some update rows and the occasional snapshot proto.

I guess it is no less arbitrary than a MS Office file, but since you can see the file on your disk you know the intrinsic size.

I'm definitely not saying they should give away the storage for free. But it is an interesting problem for how to count this in a user-understandable way.

>My point is that there is no "file" for Google Docs

They can add up the space shown beside the file name on Google Drive. Which is what users would expect

In my Drive all of the Google Documents have a dash listed in the size column.

Who throws things in a trash expecing to keep them forever?

Have you never used the Windows Recycle Bin?

> Google is 100% running out of space.

No, Google's decided that, in the language of their critics, they want users to be customers, not “products”.

No. They want users to become customers AND products.

The classical newspaper model then. Sell a paper and there in sell attention for ads.

> they want users to be customers, not “products”

Google will basically need to re-invent their whole business to do this and there are few signs this is where they are going. They still track the hell out of everyone. They still make the overwhelming majority of their money from advertising.

This isn't going to make Google stop being creepy Google. They are just trying to get some of their sideline projects to break even.

and who is gonna believe them that? now the customer is no longer not only the product but is also paying for that.

This worked quite well for (usa) cable for many decades. We can see it start from Google (and the *AAS sector) and end with cable TV!

Don't they make more by treating their customers as products (though i wouldn't call them customers because they receive no support, whether they pay or not)

How do they make money from giving their users free photo storage? I think the only path for that to be profitable was to grow the username for future subscription revenue.

You agree to have your photos analyzed and used in advertising.

They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of you.

> You agree to have your photos analyzed and used in advertising.

No, you don't.

> They sell the data to advertisers and make money off of you.

No, they don't.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...

“As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.”

As an advertiser how do I buy user data from Google photos?

Set up a campaign and target a particular group

Doesn't have anything to do with Photos data, since Photo, Drive, Gmail, etc. are explicitly not used as inputs for that.

I think it's less Google and more FTC; and at minimum, Google's desire to have a defensible position when the FTC comes knocking.

Big players do this to lock out competition. Give away a product or keep the price absurdly low until all the competition is wiped out. Then slowly start turning up the cranks to maximize profits.

And now Gmail is the largest email provider by far. Almost everyone else has been sidelined. Same for photo storage.

I don't think it's to do with that. I think it's just a reflection that google is a large company with lots of different products, half of which are providing de facto free cloud storage, despite the fact that Google has a cloud storage offering. Also, by pushing the storage limit to onto a single Google account (rather than individual accounts for each product) they can push you into their suite of products (if you're already using the app with a rainbow coloured box icon they can push you to look at those other icons: like rainbox coloured box, or other rainbox coloured box, and the rainbow coloured box with a squiggle)

YouTube allows free video uploads and ingests an incredible amount of content every day. Most of that content won't make any money, or just pennies, and yet they're storing it for free. They're not running out of space.

In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're ending the unlimited free ride. Most (all?) of the major photo hosting sites ended their unlimited free plans ages ago. Clearly it is not sustainable from a business perspective.

(I am not referring to the meme sites like Imgur who host images at a far lower resolution with a far higher compression ratio, which is of course useless for photos.)

For all we know, YouTube may be haemorrhaging money and they just haven’t figured out a way of charging for storage - yet.

YouTube generates $15b in revenue on ads, plus YouTube Premium memberships [1] and so the cost of storing and serving all of the data would also have to total in the billions, after paying ad revenue to creators as well as other costs. That could be the case, although if they were taking a substantial loss it's unlikely they would hold on for as long as they have.

YouTube also has the benefit of having monopoly power over its market - to their credit, no one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions. But since they have all of the creators already, and starting a competitor is extremely capital-intensive, there aren't any competitors at anything near their scale. For the most part the usual way to find other YouTube creators is YouTube, via their recommendation algorithm. There is a significant lock-in effect.

Since they have monopoly power, they should be able to find ways to monetize their platform, even if potentially contentious. They recently turned on mid-roll ads on all videos longer than 8 minutes (unless the creator opts out) [2] so it's not like they're out of ideas.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

[2] https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/youtube-mid-roll-ads-short...

I’m inclined to agree with you, but we simply don’t know because Google doesn’t report YouTube financials separately. They could still be taking a loss and subsidising it with general search revenue.

YouTube is very profitable.

Historically, YouTube was acquired circa 2006, it was bleeding money massively and in constant legal battle with the music labels, until things started turning around circa 2010.

I don't know if this is true or not, but I would guess that all of those combined pale in comparison to the storage space of Youtube.

It's a great reality check to replace "cloud" with "someone else's computer". Computers tend to run out of space. Then you either delete whatever you don't need, or buy additional storage, which costs money.

Google is running out of ways to keep up with revenue expectations, it's becoming quite obvious. Even Chrome has small ads at the bottom from time to time now, the desperation is quite clear.

> Chrome has small ads at the bottom

Congratulations, you've got malware on your machine. Chrome doesn't do that.

Nope, it has/had a line of linked text that promoted the new Pixel phone. Not graphical and definitely not malware. Was on the tiled start page a few weeks ago. An ad by Google, I took a screenshot, I’ll try to find it.

Edit: there you go: https://mobile.twitter.com/mittermayr/status/131381816260595...

(Don’t be confused by the background image, I put that there).

Ohhh. I thought you meant when you were looking at actual web pages, not just the Google start page.

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