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I guarantee that every company that has ever marketed an unlimited service has internally raised this question. And the answer always is, "we'll just boot the

I guarantee that every company that has ever marketed an unlimited service has internally raised this question. And the answer always is, "we'll just boot the most demanding 0.01% of customers when necessary." This is a tried and true tactic, no one bats an eye.

harshreality 9y ago
Arbitrary and capricious. while (1) { for user in userlist { # Top .01% of users are abusive and we boot them if usage_distribution_top(user, .0001) { disable_account(user); send_acctdisabled_notice_to_user(user, "Excessive usage of unlimited storage"); } } sleep 1; } Hours later: "How have we lost half our customers? We only ever removed the top .01% for their 'abusive' usage of our unlimited service!" If the concept isn't clear to some people, the problem is this: You can't repeatedly cull the outliers — the top x% of the distribution — because by culling you shift the distribution to create more outliers. I'm sure businesses recognize that, intuitively if not explicitly in their planning meetings, and therefore cull rarely enough that it doesn't impact the bulk of users (in part due to influx of new users). So you cull the top x%... who decides what x is, and why, if you state in your promotional material that the service is unlimited? "If we set x to .001% and cull monthly, it'll help our bottom line. Those users are scum data hoarders anyway and we won't serve their kind with our 'unlimited' storage service." That should be lawsuit-worthy. Companies in this situation should be forced to specify a fixed usage limit (exactly what these companies don't want to do), or live with the outliers.
- bigdatababy 9y ago
  They create a kind-of-fixed limit. They don't create a running list of the top X% of usage and ban those users. They study their customers usage for some period and find the top X%, then translate that to a fixed upper limit. Then they punish anyone who goes over that fixed limit. If their customers or technology changes, they can re-calculate that number. As far as "unlimited": marketing is full of bullshit words that don't mean what you think they mean. Courts (no wait, its all company-paid arbitrators now) unsurprisingly favor the companies. When the Supreme Court sided with AT&T on the binding arbitation clause, no joke I got an email from Charter Communications the very same day the ruling was released that said they updated their terms of service to include binding arbitration.
  - harshreality 9y ago
    Then WHY NOT STATE THAT SEMI-FIXED LIMIT TO BEGIN WITH AND SAVE EVERYONE THE HASSLE OF TRYING TO GUESS WHETHER THEIR USAGE WILL BE ALLOWED OR NOT? If the limit is dynamic and periodically re-evaluated, then you run into the "there's always an outlier" problem. If the determination isn't dynamic, and Snake Inc. advertises its service as 'unlimited' instead of stating the limit, and then starts discriminating against users or tools associated with higher usage, and get a reputation of being a snake in addition to actually having an undisclosed cap, what then? They'll not only lose their high-end customers to other services (which apparently they don't want or they could have disclosed the limits to begin with), but as already mentioned they also hurt their reputation, because whatever the courts say, people are not happy when an unlimited service actually discriminates against high-usage customers.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  I agree when you say that arbitrarily kicking the top x% is bad, but the discussion of shifting the distribution is a red herring. It's trivial to compensate and use only the un-shifted distribution to make these decisions. It's bad for completely different reasons.

harshreality 9y ago

Arbitrary and capricious. while (1) { for user in userlist { # Top .01% of users are abusive and we boot them if usage_distribution_top(user, .0001) { disable_account(user); send_acctdisabled_notice_to_user(user, "Excessive usage of unlimited storage"); } } sleep 1; } Hours later: "How have we lost half our customers? We only ever removed the top .01% for their 'abusive' usage of our unlimited service!" If the concept isn't clear to some people, the problem is this: You can't repeatedly cull the outliers — the top x% of the distribution — because by culling you shift the distribution to create more outliers. I'm sure businesses recognize that, intuitively if not explicitly in their planning meetings, and therefore cull rarely enough that it doesn't impact the bulk of users (in part due to influx of new users). So you cull the top x%... who decides what x is, and why, if you state in your promotional material that the service is unlimited? "If we set x to .001% and cull monthly, it'll help our bottom line. Those users are scum data hoarders anyway and we won't serve their kind with our 'unlimited' storage service." That should be lawsuit-worthy. Companies in this situation should be forced to specify a fixed usage limit (exactly what these companies don't want to do), or live with the outliers.

bigdatababy 9y ago
They create a kind-of-fixed limit. They don't create a running list of the top X% of usage and ban those users. They study their customers usage for some period and find the top X%, then translate that to a fixed upper limit. Then they punish anyone who goes over that fixed limit. If their customers or technology changes, they can re-calculate that number. As far as "unlimited": marketing is full of bullshit words that don't mean what you think they mean. Courts (no wait, its all company-paid arbitrators now) unsurprisingly favor the companies. When the Supreme Court sided with AT&T on the binding arbitation clause, no joke I got an email from Charter Communications the very same day the ruling was released that said they updated their terms of service to include binding arbitration.
- harshreality 9y ago
  Then WHY NOT STATE THAT SEMI-FIXED LIMIT TO BEGIN WITH AND SAVE EVERYONE THE HASSLE OF TRYING TO GUESS WHETHER THEIR USAGE WILL BE ALLOWED OR NOT? If the limit is dynamic and periodically re-evaluated, then you run into the "there's always an outlier" problem. If the determination isn't dynamic, and Snake Inc. advertises its service as 'unlimited' instead of stating the limit, and then starts discriminating against users or tools associated with higher usage, and get a reputation of being a snake in addition to actually having an undisclosed cap, what then? They'll not only lose their high-end customers to other services (which apparently they don't want or they could have disclosed the limits to begin with), but as already mentioned they also hurt their reputation, because whatever the courts say, people are not happy when an unlimited service actually discriminates against high-usage customers.
Dylan16807 9y ago
I agree when you say that arbitrarily kicking the top x% is bad, but the discussion of shifting the distribution is a red herring. It's trivial to compensate and use only the un-shifted distribution to make these decisions. It's bad for completely different reasons.