4 ms·

Very few people were actually using the unlimited plan (1% only had more than 35TB, and a lot more than that) and those that actually used the unlimited part we

Very few people were actually using the unlimited plan (1% only had more than 35TB, and a lot more than that) and those that actually used the unlimited part were mostly abusers. Running file hosting is not an easy business

scblock 3y ago
So don't sell something you can't deliver.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Isn't this announcement doing just that, by saying "we can no longer deliver this thing, so we are no longer selling it"?
denysvitali 3y ago
You can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers" :)
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  Of course you can. Unlimited buffet might charge you if you leave a lot of leftovers too.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers" Colloquial versus contract. It's sold as unlimited, because for most people, it is. Similar to how salt and pepper at restaurants is practically unlimited, even if you can't demand they hand you all the salt in their kitchen. In practice, marketing as unlimited to suss out the use distribution before capping it where it becomes uneconomic seems to be a valid strategy. (The fraction of users curtailed plays into perceptions of fairness.) With that framing, this story has no bad guy.
  - arsome 3y ago
    Can't say I've ever seen a restaurant advertise "unlimited salt".
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Can't say I've ever seen a restaurant advertise "unlimited salt" Neither do they advertise their lack of food poisoning. It's baked into the concept of a restaurant. Unlimited != infinite; it's a fuzzy boundary, and that is okay.
      - georgyo 3y ago
        I don't think you made your point any better. You're talking about unwritten AND unverbalized social contracts. Entering a restaurant that has salt on the table is nothing like me entering into a written agreement for unlimited salt from a salt distributor.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Entering a restaurant that has salt on the table is nothing like me entering into a written agreement for unlimited salt from a salt distributor What in Dropbox's terms of service do you think they're violating with this move? Buying unlimited storage for common use fits into the paradigm of the not needing to be stated understanding on what unlimited means to a reasonable person. If you want to get more precise, the terms and conditions specify that Dropbox may, at its discretion, take various actions.
        SahAssar 3y ago
        If I buy "unlimited salt" from a salt provider then I expect actually unlimited salt. If I buy a meal from a restaurant and that restaurant provides complimentary salt on the table I do not expect unlimited salt. Selling something as unlimited at a fixed price is clearly stupid unless there is a limit on the speed of the consumption (like the salt provider saying that you can have unlimited salt at a maximum rate of 1kg per hour or so). For something like dropbox it is even more stupid since every unit of product sold will increase their running costs.
- chickenpotpie 3y ago
  You definitely can if they're blatantly not using the product as designed. If I offer "unlimited pdf storage" and then people start encoding petabytes of videos as PDFs, that's abusing the system. Dropbox for business is for business documents, not for crypto miners
jbverschoor 3y ago
That 35T is easily paid for with their license
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
"Unlimited" anything is frequently taken as a challenge. If you were to create an anonymously writable S3 bucket and go on Reddit or something and say "hey everybody, store as much of whatever as you like," it'd take about 5 minutes for you to get a billion dollar bill and an arrest warrant. When GMail announced its gigabyte email thing, it took like two weeks for somebody to create gmailfs. And then you have the bad actors that say "unlimited" but declare fairly reasonable actors as cheaters, like Comcast.

scblock 3y ago

So don't sell something you can't deliver.

sanderjd 3y ago
Isn't this announcement doing just that, by saying "we can no longer deliver this thing, so we are no longer selling it"?

denysvitali 3y ago

You can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers" :)

wodenokoto 3y ago
Of course you can. Unlimited buffet might charge you if you leave a lot of leftovers too.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers" Colloquial versus contract. It's sold as unlimited, because for most people, it is. Similar to how salt and pepper at restaurants is practically unlimited, even if you can't demand they hand you all the salt in their kitchen. In practice, marketing as unlimited to suss out the use distribution before capping it where it becomes uneconomic seems to be a valid strategy. (The fraction of users curtailed plays into perceptions of fairness.) With that framing, this story has no bad guy.
- arsome 3y ago
  Can't say I've ever seen a restaurant advertise "unlimited salt".
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Can't say I've ever seen a restaurant advertise "unlimited salt" Neither do they advertise their lack of food poisoning. It's baked into the concept of a restaurant. Unlimited != infinite; it's a fuzzy boundary, and that is okay.
    - georgyo 3y ago
      I don't think you made your point any better. You're talking about unwritten AND unverbalized social contracts. Entering a restaurant that has salt on the table is nothing like me entering into a written agreement for unlimited salt from a salt distributor.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Entering a restaurant that has salt on the table is nothing like me entering into a written agreement for unlimited salt from a salt distributor What in Dropbox's terms of service do you think they're violating with this move? Buying unlimited storage for common use fits into the paradigm of the not needing to be stated understanding on what unlimited means to a reasonable person. If you want to get more precise, the terms and conditions specify that Dropbox may, at its discretion, take various actions.
        SahAssar 3y ago
        If I buy "unlimited salt" from a salt provider then I expect actually unlimited salt. If I buy a meal from a restaurant and that restaurant provides complimentary salt on the table I do not expect unlimited salt. Selling something as unlimited at a fixed price is clearly stupid unless there is a limit on the speed of the consumption (like the salt provider saying that you can have unlimited salt at a maximum rate of 1kg per hour or so). For something like dropbox it is even more stupid since every unit of product sold will increase their running costs.
chickenpotpie 3y ago
You definitely can if they're blatantly not using the product as designed. If I offer "unlimited pdf storage" and then people start encoding petabytes of videos as PDFs, that's abusing the system. Dropbox for business is for business documents, not for crypto miners

jbverschoor 3y ago

That 35T is easily paid for with their license

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

"Unlimited" anything is frequently taken as a challenge. If you were to create an anonymously writable S3 bucket and go on Reddit or something and say "hey everybody, store as much of whatever as you like," it'd take about 5 minutes for you to get a billion dollar bill and an arrest warrant. When GMail announced its gigabyte email thing, it took like two weeks for somebody to create gmailfs. And then you have the bad actors that say "unlimited" but declare fairly reasonable actors as cheaters, like Comcast.