Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan thanks to abusive users | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan thanks to abusive users

theregister.com

29 pointsLinuxBender39 comments

To summarize: People using a mere 35 TB in an unlimited storage plan are abusive and must be using it for cryptocurrencies!

What a terrible article. This really looks like a PR piece for Dropbox. It lazily attempts to associate paying users with the unpopular thing of the day when they should be investigating corporate bait and switch tactics.

If a company is offering unlimited anything, then people will use that unlimited whatever. It's not them being abusive. Those people are using what they paid for. Nothing more, nothing less.

I disagree. Engineers will typically stick to the mathematical meaning of unlimited but I think there is *always* an unspoken social contract behind the word: be nice.

For example, if I sign up for "unlimited cloud storage", I take it to mean, backing up all my personal stuff, no matter how large it grows. If I have the world's largest collection of digitized rocks in 8K Raw and it takes up 2 million terabytes...well I think I'm being disingenous by using the unlimited storage.

Or for example, if a friend says "use my car any time you want"...will you really just steal his car and ship it to another country?

I mean...nothing in this world is unlimited for real. And I think it makes sense to say unlimited to mean: you can use as much as you like, but be nice.

> I mean...nothing in this world is unlimited for real.

Maybe don't call it unlimited storage then :D

Meh, I like the word. It means a typical person doesn't have to worry about going over the limit. For hacker-types, it often means "how can I use this up for myself..."

Just calling it the "15 TB plan" also means a typical person doesn't have to worry about going over the limit but lets the non-typical user know you don't consider 30 TB fair use before they bother signing up for your service and uploading all their data.

There isn't such a contract because it's not specified, there are a huge number of "socially nice" use cases well below 2 million terabytes, so the proper way out is not to lie that it's unlimited (and give more guidance on what "fair use" is)

I agree. There are certain cultures which I expect to abuse “unlimited” anything.

Do you feel the same way about all-you-can-eat buffets?

You cannot fill plates and then take them home. You cannot pass food out the window to your friends waiting outside. You can’t program a robot to collect food until you’ve harvested as much food as 500 median customers would eat.

"You cannot fill plates and then take them home."

If you're a fast runner you can...

Is putting 35TB in a dropbox automatically "abusive"? It sounds more like they're blaming legitimate customers for using their service because of a handful of abusive ones.

35TB is a lot but hardly seems 'abusive', I would have thought the threshold for that would be somewhere over 100TB.

It’s more than 35TB per license. Considering their lowest cost advanced team is 3 licenses that’s 105 TB across the team.

They also say 99% of their users aren’t affected by this so is it automatically abusive? I don’t know. But it doesn’t sound like they are blaming their legitimate users, just that 1%.

35TB is a reasonable amount for e.g. storing raw camera footage or other legitimate business needs. It's definitely not automatically abusive for 100% of that 1%, which means they're blaming at least some legitimate users.

It's them making excuses for users calling them on obvious bullshit advertising.

What a terrible article too. What the hell does "crypto creeps" even mean? If it's plaintext over 35TB, it's fine?

Everything either has a price or a dignity. Some things are okay to do, just pay for it. Some actions are not okay even if you offer lots of money. Dropbox is muddying two different things. They’re trying to shame unprofitable users who are enjoying a flat rate plan by associating them with cryptocurrency controversy. Instead of saying we want to advertise unlimited while still being able to refuse service to very heavy users, they try to say it’s only a small minority of “abusers” who are engaged in unsavory activities. They’re trying to use a “dignity” based argument when it’s unprofitable for them.

I’m at 14TB now. I shoot 4k (and even some 8k) video, and often send all the unedited clips to clients through Dropbox. Once it’s up there and I’ve suffered through the multi-day upload process, why wouldn’t I leave it up there as an off-site backup?

It wasn’t that difficult to get to 14TB either- that’s basically 14 3-camera full-day shoots when shooting in 4k.

You’re going to switch now? Or adjusting the workflow?

If it's not unlimited then don't call it that. If the company expects users to not do certain things, then state that in the contract. If you call it unlimited and it's not really unlimited and depends on what the company feels today, then it's just false advertising.

In my organization if I were in charge of contracts and pulled something like this, I'd be out of a job and my chain of command would be under review.

This is simply unprofessional.

unlimited means exactly that.

dont say it if you dont like the aftertaste.

lawsuits have occured over similar conditions ending in favor of account holders.

Dropbox could be in for some fun times.

Quite. s/"thanks to abusive users"/"thanks to an abusive provider".

No. That’s never what unlimited means. Unlimited means you don’t have to worry about hitting some arbitrary ceiling if you’re a regular or heavy user. It doesn’t entitle the top 0.0001% of users to use more resources than the bottom 50% put together.

i see. unlimited like this,

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/01/...

https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...

plus:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2015/01/tracfones...

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/14/google_free_storage_p...

Point us to any reputable English dictionary which contains your definition of the word "unlimited."

Yours sounds like the Newspeak definition, not the English one. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, unlimited is limited.

Nope.

Unlimited - not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.

Companies don't get to redefine words to their benefit.

> don’t have to worry about hitting some arbitrary ceiling

I find your comment interesting... And self conflicting. Let's us ask this question: is setting the abuse "tripping point" at a usage level of 1%, or 0.1% or 0.01% (heck, choose your favourite number)... arbitrary?

And a follow up question: Even if everybody was a genuine good actor (in an imaginary world where sins such as hate, fraud, stealing didn't exist) and was using the storage only for legitimate uses (for any definition of legitimate), would we still end with inequality between the storage usage... And thus, with the 1%, or 0.1% or 0.01% or "any arbitrary value" usage users?

And finally: have you considered that, perhaps, we are wrong?

> "you don’t have to worry about hitting some arbitrary ceiling"

Except now you'll be worrying about some unknown arbitrary limit, and hoping you never discover how much it is.

Article claims "now users are capped, starting at 15TB."

Why are there always these people, defending those who are taking advantage of them?

How is someone meant to know where they rank on usage or if they're even being abusive with a service billed as "unlimited" that they pay for?

Dropbox seems to have behaved pretty reasonably here. They're a company, they used to offer an unlimited plan. They no longer offer an unlimited plan. They're not doing that shifty "It's unlimited (except our terms of service define unlimited as X)". They're just no longer offering unlimited plans. They're not misleading anyone, and for anyone who does need the storage they can buy extra storage. I don't see why people think that Dropbox owe people this particular product class, in reality what is happening today is that the 99% of customers who were using the plan as intended were subsidising the 1% of customers who were storing the most and in a lot of cases were doing so in breach of the terms of use anyway.

I don't think the alternative (some bloke at Dropbox, manually going through every heavy user and deciding whether or not to ban that use case) is better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment

sanction all users, in response to a fraction of a percentile sounds unreasonable to me.

filter crypto methods would be reasonable.

"all the storage we'd prefer you to need" unlimited* plan.

* unlimited plan is limited

I mean, it's one thing to upload and use absurd amounts of cloud storage, but how do you get it out of there?!

If Dropbox has no egress fees like most cloud providers, then they're a bargain, but how long you gonna wait for 35TiB to come down your pipe? Maybe okay on an enterprise fiber connection, but wow.

Also, we recently saw Google Drive clamp down on people with absurd file object counts. Surely beyond 15TiB, people will have tons of individual files and folders too.

Maybe they can prepend the 'effectively' weasel-word. 'Effectively unlimited' covers 99.9% of users.

Maybe they should go with “Effectively unlimited some of the time depending on how much data you want to store, not too much, please be nice”. Or, you know, they could actually list the actual fucking limit.

What words mean* anymore in the era of marketing**

* Nothing

** T&C apply

shorter dropbox: how dare people believe what we say. they're criminal and 'abusive'.

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