4 ms·

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

by chrismeller 6y ago

arkanciscan 6y ago
That's my cue to start self-hosting again!
- actuator 6y ago
  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.
  - arkanciscan 6y ago
    Depends how lazy you are!
  - part1of2 6y ago
    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-reading-docs/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-rea...
  - pnutjam 6y ago
    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 https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881)
- DesiLurker 6y ago
  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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ffpip 6y ago
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
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  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.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    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.
    - Normille 6y ago
      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>?"
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      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.
vidarh 6y ago
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.
- dmix 6y ago
  > 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.
  - Normille 6y ago
    >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?
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  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.
  - gowld 6y ago
    They don't provide tools for deleting data as easily as creating data, so users are bullied into buying storage instead of deleting trash.

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

arkanciscan 6y ago

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

actuator 6y ago
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.
- arkanciscan 6y ago
  Depends how lazy you are!
- part1of2 6y ago
  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-reading-docs/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-rea...
- pnutjam 6y ago
  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 https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881)
DesiLurker 6y ago
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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ffpip 6y ago

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

MattGaiser 6y ago
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.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  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.
  - Normille 6y ago
    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>?"
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    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.

vidarh 6y ago

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.

dmix 6y ago
> 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.
- Normille 6y ago
  >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?
marcosdumay 6y ago
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.
- gowld 6y ago
  They don't provide tools for deleting data as easily as creating data, so users are bullied into buying storage instead of deleting trash.