Technology

You can’t abuse something that has no limit. Stop calling things unlimited and then blaming users when they are not.

I just don't get it. If it's unlimited - in what universe is using it beyond 15TB considered abuse?

I get the reseller part, I get the stupid chia mining part. But if they can say that was the problem - then get rid of those users, as clearly you have already identified them. Don't shift the blame away from your dumbass marketing team onto your users and play an innocent company.

I can't believe how much support dropbox is getting. People seem to accept, without questioning, every bollocks pr statement these days.

How the fuck do you abuse unlimited access? This is just a company blaming an idea that was always going to be unsustainable on their customers and not their own damn lack of forethought.

Corporate bootlickers: OMG they're actually using our unlimited service as if they were unlimited. THIS IS ABUSE!1!

You can’t abuse unlimited. That’s why it’s called “UNlimited.” I hate this two faced, corporate back sludge that always, and I mean always, puts it on the consumer as if they did something wrong. When in reality, it’s the company that is redlining or needs to boost those unsustainable goal of doubling revenue every quarter, ad infinitum.

The real narrative is Dropbox needs money so they are scrambling to cut every expense. No matter what spin they put on it.

everything here is wrong, and blaming the users is wrong. Please try to read past the PR speak. and shame on ars for not doing that.

the unlimited plan is going away to force companies that were using it, to switch to their new unlimited plan which is now called Enterprise and will generate a lot more money for them. The plan still exists, they've changed the requirements so you can only get it if you spend a lot of money.

I remember in the 90s, my dial-up provider started offering an "unmetered" plan with no per minute charge (for younger people, believe it or not we were once charged by the minute for connecting to the internet). After a short while we were inundated with emails from the ISP complaining that people were "abusing the service" by going on the internet for "hours at a time". Just reminded me of this and how it's an old excuse.

No, you can't "abuse" an unlimited service by using too much, it's unlimited.

Users: Use the product as it was designed and advertised.

Corporations:

Like when Microsoft took away unlimited OneDrive and wrote a passive aggressive blog post about how some dude used it to store like 75TB of movies

Don't offer unlimited if you can't deliver unlimited. FFS

Then it was never unlimited to begin with, wtf?

Eh... If you offer unlimited you have to live with unlimited.

Fuck these people but thats also on Dropbox.

Calling it “abuse” is a weird PR move. If your service is good enough, this is bound to happen with an unlimited storage plan. This is basically a win on their part since they got people to sign up for their service. Why shame your user base?

"Abused"? Is it unlimited or not? I don't see how as much as you need can be taken too literally. It's either true or it isn't.

This reminds me of how Skype always had limits in the fine print of its unlimited calling plan back in the day when we paid for minutes on cellphones.

Or, y'know, how current cellphone data plans are only unlimited up until the point where you've used enough and then become "deprioritized."

Or how backblaze offers unlimited plans on Windows and Mac but not on Linux because Linux users tend to actually know how much storage they're using.

Companies have a number that is the profitable point for whatever unlimited plan they're offering. They just want to be able to advertise "unlimited" since that's what customers want and they hope people don't go over their "profitable usage" metric.

"Abused" service they were advertised. Now it is misadvertisement.

~~I always hated the term unlimited when it's not really unlimited. Is it really abuse if you're using it as intended?~~

Edit: I eat my words. People are assholes. I thought this was referring to providers of unlimited storage or bandwidth, only to say "oh, you've using it too much, so we're going to throttle you."

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.

The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was retiring its unlimited storage policy specifically because people were buying Dropbox Advanced accounts "for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage."

Dropbox also says that this behavior has been getting worse recently because other services have also been placing caps on their storage plans—at some point within the last year, Google also removed similar "as much as you need" language from its Google Workspace plans.

Rather than attempting to police behavior or play whack-a-mole with the people abusing the service, Dropbox has imposed a 15TB cap on organizations with three or fewer users.

An additional 5TB per user can be added on top of that, with a maximum cap of 1,000TB per organization.

New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you'll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans.

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My only concern about throttling it as 5TB for small organizations is that I could see that being a problem for freelance video editors. 8K video can take up a lot of space.

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