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Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme
- cipherboy 6y agoIs a like -> is like a? Like never appears in the original article.
- giantg2 6y agoIt's not really a ponzi scheme. You're not investing (uploading) your images with an expected return on that investment.
- colde 6y agoYeah, it seems closer to a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation. Where a few users deplete a shared resource affecting everyone else.
- iamacyborg 6y agoUnsurprising really, there's some fun example on Reddit's Data Hoarder sub. And stuff like this https://www.vice.com/en/article/a33j5a/a-redditor-archived-nearly-2-million-gigabytes-of-porn-to-test-amazons-unlimited-cloud-storage https://www.vice.com/en/article/a33j5a/a-redditor-archived-n...
- anoncake 6y agoExcept that they did not pay for their fair share of a limited resource but for an unlimited amount of it.
- Spivak 6y agoCan we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up. Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of the service that you don’t have to worry about it. If you cat /dev/random into your unlimited storage provider 24/7/365 you can’t really be surprised when they ban you.
- anoncake 6y agoUnlimited literally does mean unbounded, not "we don't tell you the limit". You cannot abuse a service by using it for its intended purpose. Storing data for possible later retrieval, even exabytes of data, is the purpose of a data storage service. Storing large amounts of random data merely to waste space might qualify as abuse. But that is a) a strawman as far as I can tell and b) it isn't always possible to tell apart random and encrypted/compressed data apart anyway.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 6y agoPersonally, I'd prefer that companies not use terms that can't be literally true and that obviously must have some limitations to guard against someone who wants to upload data--e.g. high res video--to the cloud constantly.
- salawat 6y agoNo... Because that isn't unlimited. Period. The limit in your case is when you decide "usage crosses into abuse of the service". Which means there is no communication ahead of time to the user what behavior to avoid. Just admit all people want is to be able to ride the gullibility of people who aren't as picky about language as the people who actually give a crap about clear communication. What businesses want to sell is a conditionally vague statistically multiplexed service level, and I'm willing to bet most don't even go out of the way to let the User know what they're overall footprint within the scope of the entire system is, which is info they'd need to manage usage patterns themselves. It's the hallmark of manipulative language.
- im3w1l 6y agoThe difference is that there is a common understanding of what unlimited breadsticks means. If you asked people what a "reasonable" amount of unlimited data storage meant, you'd get answers all over the place.
- ghaff 6y agoIf it were, hypothetically, come percentage of new users who were consuming most of the resources, it would still be just as big a problem. (In fact, maybe more so if a changing pattern of use suggests that your pricing model is no longer profitable.)
- tomhoward 6y agoSure - the title is crafted for rhetorical effect not literal accuracy. But it's comparable, in the sense that the "returns" for earlier customers (ongoing provision of storage service) are funded out of the contributions of later new customers, and when the supply of new customers runs out, the returns can no longer be funded and the system collapses. Edit: Also not that the phrase "is a Ponzi scheme" is often used in opinion pieces to describe all kinds of business and economic models that are not literal Ponzi schemes: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22is+a+ponzi+scheme%22+-what https://www.google.com/search?q=%22is+a+ponzi+scheme%22+-wha...
- giantg2 6y agoI think accuracy is important. If an author isn't trustworthy or correct on this, then why should we listen to their other information in good faith? I think it's not just new users. It's also new content/files. Existing users uploading more pictures can also generate revenue, right?
- tomhoward 6y agoIt's a metaphor or analogy, which is a perfectly commonplace and legitimate form of argumentation. > I think it's not just new users. It's also new content/files. Existing users uploading more pictures can also generate revenue, right? Well, no; if it's an unlimited usage plan, then there's no more revenue from existing users, but they become more costly to support as time goes on, making the system ever more unsustainable and destined for collapse.
- giantg2 6y agoIt's only legitimate if it's accurate and presented as an analogy. The title of "Unlimited is a Ponzi Scheme" is not worded to be an analogy and isn't accurate. "there's no more revenue from existing users" That's not what the article says. Existing users can create revenue. The cost could outweigh the revenue depending on the amount stored. If it were solely about new user adoption, then it wasn't presented properly in the article: "They make money inversely proportional to how recent you stored the thing."
- redm 6y agoI launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006. While it is true that data accumulates as time goes on, it's not as big of an issue as described. Older data tends to be smaller, for example, photos were lower resolution. That is compounded by the fact that storage is getting cheaper. For example, the price for a 500GB drive in 2006 is the same as a 14TB drive price today. If your getting the same subscription dollars, it suddenly becomes cheaper, every year, to store legacy data. In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work.
- FpUser 6y ago>"I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006." Oh hello there. Best wishes and hope life is wonderful for you. The company that saved me big bucks on Amazon S3 fees that were absolutely insane. Yet the same company that completely ignores requests to fix disappearing files that remain in disappeared state despite re-upload.
- sleavey 6y ago> In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work. How do you handle such users at MediaFire?
- orisho 6y agoIt appears MediaFire is no longer unlimited
- redm 6y agoThere's nothing you can do other than move away from unlimited storage. The model, as the OP states, works well initially, however over time, "power users" emerge to want to make use of unlimited. The only choice is to remove unlimited storage as a fixed subscription fee. You may have metered billing (unlimited storage but you are charged per GB) or to do away with unlimited storage all together. Keep in mind, that change is great for the business and 99.9% of the users. The business saves money on resources, and those resources are re-invested into the other 99.9% of users. Edit: grammatical error
- Waterluvian 6y agoDoes anyone have any good suggestion on an automated way to back up my entire google photos collection? Currently I use Google Takeout and then upload a ton of zip files to a backup like Backblaze. But it's tedious as heck and has me maintaining scripts to manage it. Which is the worst because I touch it once a year so I forget everything. I'd pay money for a business that handles this. I just want my photos safe from a Google tantrum, but I don't want to do the work.
- concerned_user 6y agoJust a simple google search on terms "github google takeout photos" gives a link to a script https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper plenty of other projects to use or get an idea for your own. Even if you are not a programmer writing a python script is not hard. The backblaze part you can automate with rclone or 10's of other commercial software or any from this page https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html
- Waterluvian 6y agoThanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.
- gravitas 6y agoThe organization and data which is in that takeout is a complete mess of years of design changes from picasa -> photos, empty folders, duplicate date folders, hidden old crap from your Google+ account (like banner pics) which you can't see anymore to delete, just stuff everywhere inside those zip files. $0.02 if you ever have to actually deal with them, add time to first normalize what you unzip.
- ghaff 6y agoIn all fairness, organizing old photos in general (especially scanned in pre-digital ones) is pretty much a horrid task in most cases. I'm dealing with it right now and stuff is linked to all over my hard drive, dupes in different formats at different levels of quality, limited metadata, etc. New stuff suffers from there being just so much of it--much of it repetitive--but at least it's in some semblance of order.
- worldofmatthew 6y agoStorage keeps getting cheaper. A $5/month income per user should allow at least 1TB of storage. If they use unraid (at 20% redundancy) than more like 1.7TB per user and that is not even going into them using used hardware (Not the HDDs but servers) or shunking HDD's which could allow over 3TB per user.
- ddorian43 6y agoWhat is "unraid" ?
- colejohnson66 6y agoSoftware RAID and virtualization. You install it, (optionally) RAID drives together, then you can assign cores to certain OSes and do PCIe pass through (among other things). Basically, it’s a GUI for VT-x, but runs “below” your OS, not “above”.
- jariel 6y agoIt's a hustle but not really a Ponzi scheme.
- crisper 6y agoYeah definitely more of a hustle than a Ponzi scheme. I would maybe call it a long slow bait and switch?
- jariel 6y agoYes, Bait and Switch is the right term. The author is trying to allude to the positive business sentiment of an every growing base which fuels the hustle until there are no more takers, but it doesn't quite work I think because it was always costing and losing money. With Ponzis, you need cash from ever more investors to payout previous investors.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoMissing one fundamental feature of a ponzi scheme: the transfer of value from the victims to the entity running the scheme. Folks have occasionally claimed without evidence that photos are being used to train nefarious machine learning models. But in fact the free tier of storage has simply been that: an entirely free halo product.
- taeric 6y agoAt least for internet bandwidth, it is more like an insurance scheme. You pay more than you probably need/use. Such that the seller gets to price in the risk for them that you will actually be a heavy user. And, like insurance, if you are actually a high cost user, you are probably SOoL. :(
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoI think all these analogies are quite leaky. There is a very simple rule that can be used to explain situations like this, without any awkward analogies: don't expect to be able to indefinitely cost a company much more money than they make from you.
- taeric 6y agoI don't even really disagree. But I should be able to expect that they can't advertise what they can't deliver.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoI don't know why you would expect that. There is copious evidence that, over time, the signal from advertisements and statements decays. There are a few companies that still follow policies they put in place decades ago, but it is the unusual case. Moreover, "unlimited storage," of course, does not mean unlimited storage forever. Nobody and nothing can give you forever. It means there is no limit presently.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
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- mrkramer 6y agoBut isn't Google so profitable they can afford to lose money offering unlimited storage because that way they will attract more users than competing services.
- yokto 6y agoThere is an exception to what the author is saying: make the cost of adding data for the user exponential (or at least non-linear). This is what Crashplan does with their unlimited backup model. It's unlimited, but at some point (number and size of files to keep track of), your computer will be limited by its processing capabilities in a manner that you can only solve by throwing more metal at the problem, which becomes uneconomical for the user. (Source: the internet, I can't remember where, but might find it when I'm back on my computer)
- tyu2 6y agoYep. Customers are inherently limited all on their own, they do not stay customers for too long, do not consume unlimited resources and so on. Unlimited storage, especially of photos, is probably the most self limiting service there is. How much photos customers can upload or download is limited by storage they have, bandwidth to the servers, willingness to wait for photos to be uploaded and downloaded, camera resolution, time spent on taking photos, on viewing them, etc. I suspect even getting to a TB of remotely stored photos is almost impossible for an average customer.
- ghaff 6y agoI usually shoot in raw format and my Pictures directory is just a bit over 1TB. That's with about 70K photos in my Lightroom catalog--which reflects much but not all of the contents of that directory. My total cloud backup to Backblaze is about 4TB. That said, I generally agree. I certainly don't represent the consumer just snapping photos on their phone which probably represents "average" today.
- rognjen 6y agoWhile in general I understand (and agree to an extent) the sentiment it's nothing at all like a Ponzi scheme.
- GuB-42 6y agoThere are several things that compound that - Storage price decreases near exponentially, while data usage also increases near exponentially, meaning that new data will always make the majority of your usage, no matter how long you and your users have been in place. - On Google scale, your are bound to have a lot of redundancy in data. Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it. And large data provider often only store one copy of the data internally (with necessary backup). It is controversial for privacy reasons, but that's a way to deal with a large number of users using a lot of data. - There is only so much a user can produce. For example, if you are dealing with eBooks, you can probably put all text only eBooks humanity have produce on a single hard drive. So no problem going unlimited here. For pictures, unless you are constantly shooting, you are not going to produce terabytes of data. 100 GB is actually an awful lot of data, and few applications produce that much, for most people, only video is on that scale. So it means there are natural limits. Also, unlike with a Ponzi scheme, there is actual value being produced. People pay money for a service, they don't intend to get their money back. There is no real reason for the system to collapse.
- neogodless 6y ago> Chances are that what you have in your Google drive, someone else has it. I can't speak for anyone else, but I find this odd. Anything that is not unique to me, and can be downloaded again - I try not to have any copies of it taking up any of my space, local or in cloud storage. What I care about most are unique possessions - my (personal) photos, spreadsheets and documents. These are things I keep copies of both locally and online so that either could fail, but they still exist somewhere.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago>> 100 GB is actually an awful lot of data, Absolutely not. It's about 10-15 average photoshoots (for arbitrary RAW image size of 25Mb) and no place for processed images or anything else.
- jamiek88 6y agoYes but that’s not typical. What’s typical is grandmas shitty jpegs
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago> There’s no free lunch in this world unless you’re willing to run around to different dumpsters to get it. I'm stealing that one.
- anodari 6y agoI think AWS, Azure and GCP are not reducing prices to the same extent as storage capacity expands and this makes it difficult to offer more storage to my users.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- taeric 6y agoI'm hitting this with internet. So frustrating that for most places "unlimited data" is about 20 gigs.
- tomcam 6y agoBut that’s like saying you are frustrated by auto companies because your car isn’t free and doesn’t last unlimited miles. Don’t you normally pay for things?
- taeric 6y agoWhat? I paid for an "unlimited" plan. With a family of six on it, we are past the limit in less than two weeks. Would be akin to getting a monthly bus pass that cuts you off if you use it four times a day every day. Sure, it is more than most people use, so surely unlimited bus use for the month should just be two trips five times a week? :)
- fuzxi 6y agoNo, it isn't like that at all. Software doesn't translate to physical analogies well, but a closer analogy is saying that he's frustrated because his "Unlimited Miles" gasoline actually only lasts for 100 miles, then he has to buy more.
- taeric 6y agoThis probably translates well to electric vehicles. If you got one that was an "all day" battery, but only if you limit it to two hours of driving. Probably works for a lot of commuters. Quite cumbersome for those it doesn't work for.
- Can_Not 6y agoIf the auto company promised unlimited miles then set up road blocks after 20 miles of usage, then it's exactly like you said, minus the random implication that he doesn't pay for things like the unlimited we are talking about paying for.
- FiddlerClamp 6y agoAnother Ponzi-like scheme: "Lifetime."
- zubspace 6y agoI think lifetime can very well work if done right, but not at zero cost for a user. You need a healthy business with guaranteed sales. FL Studio [1] is one example which does it right. After buying a license you get lifetime free updates. But they offer different editions and plugins which are not free. So first, they get users hooked with lifetime updates and in the long run this will probably work out for them, because some power users want more in the long run. On the other hand, services which are free and suddenly transition to a subscription based model annoy me to no end. The last time I experienced this was with a free e-mail hoster called Migadu [2] which killed it's free plan this year. [1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/ https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/ [2] https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-happened-to-the-free-plan https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-happened-to-the-free-pl...
- fuzxi 6y agoEven worse when a service with a paid lifetime license transitions to a subscription model. See: Cerberus [1], a Find My Phone style app. Luckily I'd migrated to the built-in Android equivalent before I got the email that my lifetime license was expiring. [1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/21/cerberus-paid-lifetime-license-expiration/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/21/cerberus-paid-lifet...
- cityzen 6y agoA guide to scaling enterprise SaaS product and engineering teams, from $0 to past $100M ARR BUT we won't tell you where we work or who we are. Am I missing something here? It's easy to give out advice anonymously and I don't really see anything in here that is groundbreaking.
- ndmdkr0 6y agoThe entire fiat economy is a Ponzi scheme Previous generations bought in only to have their pensions legislated and gambled away. Oops! Trump was making moves to enable the same gambling with 401k’s earlier this year (easily Googled). Ephemeral value can be wiped away with legislative overhauls. We’ve done this over and over, by bailing on every ephemeral value store, from Greek and Pagan gods, and eventually stocks and Wall Street (barely a couple hundred years old, I’m sure it’ll stand the test of time, ok, sure).
- chpmrc 6y agoHow is it a Ponzi scheme if any photo uploaded before July 2021 will still be stored for free? In such a scheme the last N people to join lose their "investment". In this case any new user could easily upload their entire library before then and have it hosted on Google's infrastructure (theoretically) forever, for free.
- rsync 6y agoI wrote about this back in 2009: https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-services-vs-rsyncnet.html https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor... ... and the key concept is aligned interests: "... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions." When you are doing something important you want your interests to be aligned with your provider. If you pay for every bit you store, your provider will enthusiastically enable you to store as much as you can. Your interests are aligned. If you're paying flat-rate unlimited, the relationship is an antagonistic one and the provider will do all manner of sneaky, underhanded - even outright hostile - things to stop you from storing more bits.
- The_Colonel 6y ago> ... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions. This looks like a good theoretical point, but I don't see how it holds in practice. What would be practical examples of this happening? (assuming POV of somebody not intentionally abusing the system) > If you pay for every bit you store, your provider will enthusiastically enable you to store as much as you can. Again, good point in theory, but I'm not sure how this works psychologically - flat rates bring peace of mind and allow easier budget planning. I still remember how internet browsing in dial up days were sort of stressful.
- rsync 6y ago"This looks like a good theoretical point, but I don't see how it holds in practice. What would be practical examples of this happening?" The example given in my original blog post: "the more you upload, the more we throttle you. The little users don't bother us and the big users eventually just go away" "Again, good point in theory, but I'm not sure how this works psychologically - flat rates bring peace of mind and allow easier budget planning." Wouldn't you get more peace of mind knowing that your provider was working hard to support and enable your use-case ?