This is an obvious result but I think what really precipitates this move is the creation, and maturation, of tools like 'rclone'[1] that dramatically simplify inter-cloud data transfer and treating disparate cloud platforms as "dumb storage".
It's one thing to have some weird utility that nobody knows about and only runs on linux and stores your data as blobs in gmail[2] ... it's another to have a mature tool with a decent userbase and development community that you can point to actual storage ...
A reminder - there's only one cloud storage platform that has 'rclone' built into the platform.[3]
[2] https://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/
[3] ssh [email protected] rclone /local/file s3:bucket
When they changed that policy, they insisted it wasn't to save space, but I can't believe that. The mind boggles at the number of drives required (ballpark 1GB per hour, with a few million active streamers), especially with the popularity of Twitch exploding at the time.
What about their most popular / famous streamers?
Why isn't YouTube buckling under the same pressure?
Youtube is riding the long tail with ads. Hardly anyone watches past VODs on Twitch.
Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.
And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.
Microsoft tried with Mixer, they poached some Twitch stars and shutdown earlier this year. those stars just returned to Twitch.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-07/microsoft...
We'll see what happens after the impending antitrust litigation I suppose.
I believe (I'm not at home in this world at all) the streamers use Twitch for live streaming, then edit (or have employees edit) their sessions into 10-20 minute Youtube videos / series.
Basically, Twitch is losing a LOT of engagement to Youtube because of that.
You can more or less do whatever resolution you want, but the bitrate limits mean that 1080p is as high as you should go for the vast majority of content.
There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb
... and this is a mistake.
The issue is not whether you will tolerate loss-leaders or not. The issue is that you create an antagonistic relationship between provider and consumer.
It doesn't matter how nice you are (and the backblaze folks seem very, very nice) - this is a structural reality that will produce predictable bad outcomes.
Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but if your organization creates opposing interests - antagonistic relationships between the consumer and the provider - someone is going to lose:
"... 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."[1]
[1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...
If you sell unlimited, you're selling unlimited. It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's only antagonistic when they decide that "Unlimited" needs some asterisks behind it.
The business of selling truly unlimited might not be feasible or viable, but this is more a transparency issue than anything. If you're not willing to actually provide unlimited, don't say that you are. It's that simple.
It's hard for me to feel sympathetic to Google/Amazon for having to store someones 1.8 Petabyte porn collection because that's what they sold them. Clearly they've decided that selling unlimited doesn't make business sense, and that's okay. They're probably right!
But if you offer a product, you should be delivering that product. Anything less is gross.
If the business sells unlimited because it does not want the general consumer to feel constricted with online storage, then it is a benefit for the general consumer. When abusers of business products test the business' abilities, they ruin the business' chance of offering a great product that the consumer can find convenience with.
All-you-can eat buffet should be treated as such. But when a bunch of big college guys decide to hang out at an all-you-can eat from 8 am to 8 pm studying and eating, it defeats the product. It defeats the offering for others. And it takes away the experience of going to a place never having to worry about ordering more food than you can eat.
This ain't about feeling sorry for the business. This is about feeling sorry for the consumer. It is one abuser that hurts consumer. And that is bad economics for all people.
My issue is more that many things are labelled "Unlimited" but they aren't. They aren't even close. Cell Data plans are Unlimited* (Up to 15GB tethered, Up to 25GB at 4G speed, Video limited to 720P)
The thrust of my point is that if you say Unlimited, you should mean it. If that means nobody says it, I'm okay with that. They have a business to run and they should do what they need to to make it work.
But I don't think they should be able to get away with selling it as "Unlimited" when there are several fine print details to define what that means that are as hidden as possible so that you don't know what they are until you've been parted with your money and run up against the limits.
You cannot have the cake(advertisement of unlimited offer) and eat the cake(limit the unlimited).
I don’t think the capacity exists to continue serving “unlimited” storage long-term. Over time, the amount of free storage people use increases until you can’t sustain the practice. It’s just a matter of time.
The good bed is that paid storage is ridiculously cheap.
They also have a "Forever history" offering, which is essentially a plug-and-play integration with B2, priced at $2/month + $.005/GB/month for versions deleted more than 1 year ago.
However, you still need to rotate the data and Backblaze doesn't exactly make that process easy for this use-case. You need to go into the UI and manually select the data you want, wait for it to be packaged up, and then download and restore them to the proper locations. If the files were deleted you also need to mess around with the timeframe in the UI.
This sounds like a poor UI, but for their normal backup/restore users it's fine since you generally want to restore an entire device or you're picking out a particular file you need. This really only breaks down if the size of the device backup exceeds the actual storage capacity of the device, which is probably a rare-ish occurrence. But also, restoring from backup is something that should rarely have to be done anyway.
My point still stands: Backblaze is able to offer "unlimited" storage by making the backup/restore use-case easy, but making the "additional cloud storage" use-case tedious. This generally puts an upper bound on that "unlimited" amount based on how much local storage users actually have.
And the files dumped off to B2 are basically irrelevant to the "unlimited backup for $6" portion of the product.
And B2 is more or less fine for streaming. The bandwidth bill will be significantly less than the storage bill.
Or in other words, look at it more like 1c/GB vs. 6c/GB-year.
The fault is entirely on company side that do false advertising, not on the people that actually use whatever is promised to them.
It's obviously a marketing ploy, but the people who use so much stuff that they have to be cut off explicitly basically don't have any human decency, in this regard.
Almost every time a "free plan" or an "unlimited plan" is cut off (BTW, in life there is no "unlimited" anything, just use common sense), it's not because some random person uses 10-50-100% more than what the person offering it thought everyone would use.
It's more like 1000%-10000%. And that's definitely being a sociopath/jerk.
Data hoarders are jerks, for example, no way around that. There's almost no rational way to explain it, it's just an addiction.
Corporations offering "unlimited" plans with limits are lying, plan and simple. They should use a word that doesn't imply they're offering something that they're not.
No, I'm not going to come up with an alternative, that's not my job.
It is the same with Mobile plan's Unlimited Data. 20-30GB are fine. Carrier even put up with 100-200GB per month. Because that is the average Data used for Home Broadband. But when carrier said they stop providing services to said customers because they were using 500 or even 1000+GB per month you really cant feel sympathetic to those people.
Some argue why not just but an arbitrary number instead of unlimited. But consumer wants unlimited so they dont feel they are limited. I know that sounds stupid but it is the default consumer behaviour.
It's not sociopathic to have no empathy towards a for-profit corporation. Amazon is not a person.
Why do you think it's ok for company to offer unlimited services knowing that it's not really unlimited?
Shouldn't you be advocating for companies to be more truthful in their marketing?
That reminds me of:
Linus Tech Tips: I Hope Google Doesn’t Ban Us... - Abusing Unlimited Google Drive
I dig their channel but if they tried this out for anything more than the views they're crazy.
There's no cheap way to back up a Petabyte of data. If you find a loophole to do it, you can consider yourself one of the reasons it'll shortly be closed.
read "unlimited" as "cover 99.999% of typical client storage needs".
And if you say "99.999% of client storage needs", that's probably a bigger number than you think and it's hard for me to figure out what the number is.
Just use the storage as intended - for your daily needs.
Daily needs do not include a content mirror for pirate bay, or archiving every twitch stream in existence.
Use it in good faith, and if people think you're using too much they will send in a salesman, not the enforcing agents.
Sending in a saleman instead of an enforcing agent isn't much better if the salesman wants me to pay $100 a month.
You used the example of 100TB in another comment. I think 100TB would be a reasonable standin for unlimited when it comes to a single user. But would it be so hard to just say that somewhere? Maybe throttle uploads after that point? Instead you have one guy using 20TB per account and one guy using 2PB per account and they both get screwed by the change.
And then a small minority of users take to the literal dictionary definition - which one is allowed to, which gave birth to vast amounts on legalese on the wrapping bags of sandwiches - and start to scream "you're not truly >UNLIMITED< you owe me".
And then the provider - which assumed common sense - sees that the common sense is not to be taken for granted, and starts to spell more legalese and then starts enforcing limits which are now laid out but perhaps not enforced from the start, because it assumed that people would know how to read between the lines. But said minority doesn't know how to read through the lines and then starts to search for workarounds around the limits, forcing the provider to drop in even harder limits, which affects EVERYBODY because some people need to go through life with a fine tooth comb that exploits each little thing that they can.
So this is the difference between a high trust society and a low trust society - the level of hard enforcement of rules because people will try to exploit even the smallest thing.
If you treat your customers as morons maybe you should expect to attract morons?
Now I learnt that it doesn't matter if you do a fair use, strictly following the rules: some companies won't keep their word even when they charge what they thought was good.
And, of course, take a look at what the CEO is up next. It might be indistinguishable from a scam.
I think its a little less clear for ISPs where large amounts of data usage is normal for average users but in the case of storage, people dumping petabytes of data they don't even care about is clearly misuse. If the drink place stepped in to stop you after 5 drinks that would probably be false advertising.
Yes maybe Google was wrong about calling it unlimited and now they are fixing that by making it not unlimited. That doesn't change the fact that people were actually misusing it
An unlimited storage offer is intended to store as much data as you want. The difference is that there is a low natural limit to how much you can drink.
People aren't wrong for storing unlimited amounts of data in the unlimited amount storage space they pay for. They don't have to evaluate if Google's offer makes business sense for it, that's Google's responsibility.
If you offer unlimited and only give 2 drinks / person, you're lying, shame on you. If you drink more than 10 people combined, you're drunk with questionable social compass. When you take more than 100 or even 1000 people, then you are technically correct - the best kind of correct for a sociopath.
How do you know that?
Turn the tables; say that as a customer you agree to a company charging you an unlimited fee each month for a service. Do you think they'd charge just $1 because they 'know' you didn't mean all of your salary?
1. The letter of the service being offered
2. The spirit of the service being offered
Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here...
Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction.
But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.
A: "We'll store all your data, no limit!"
B: "Ok, here's all my data."
A: "Abuse!"
Doesn't really make sense to me.
"help yourself to the drinks" carts your entire refrigerator and larder's supply home
So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.
Similarly, if we reserve the word "unlimited" for things that are actually, y'know, unlimited, then the word again becomes more useful.
Flagrant disregard for commonly understood definitions of words when it's convenient to one's cause is a concrete example of a tragedy of the commons that makes a language less useful overall.
It sounds like you object to the standard usage of these words, which doesn’t seem like a productive position. Olive Garden isn’t actually going to give you unlimited breadsticks either.
Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.
Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.
I'm not talking about literal or pedantic correctness here.
The antonym of unlimited is limited. You're using some impressive mental gymnastics to justify advertising a product with one word while providing the opposite.
If the literal interpretation of whatever hogwash the marketing dept is spewing is obviously impossible then I posit that the companies who do so are deliberately misleading consumers for profit. That seems to me to be an open shut textbook example of false advertising. But then neither my job depends on not understanding this distinction, nor am I overpaid lawyer employed to a company engaging in these patently fraudulent activities.
Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.
So it's false advertising?
You want one term interpreted literally and the other figuratively? No.
If you offer something that you never intended to deliver is that not false advertising? It really doesn't matter how you go about denying the delivery. It doesn't matter that any given termination is legally in the clear. All that matters (IMO) is that you offered something when you knew up front that you were never going to deliver it.
And yes, the above would mean that marketing almost any service as "unlimited" would be false advertising. I do actually think that practice should be actively disallowed by regulators. I really don't think that having slick marketing terms is more important that having offerings that are truthfully and accurately advertised. A functional marketplace absolutely depends on the ability of participants to readily understand the services being offered.
Advertising a service that a supplier has no intention of providing is called fraud.
Similarly some software I wrote a couple years ago, that wrote a bunch of small files into a single S3 bucket caused a lot of grief at a 3rd party S3 like service because they never imagined someone would write a couple TB of data into a single bucket (actually it used multiple buckets but each one was a TB or two of <1k files).
CrashPlan lost some of my data some time in 2012/13, blaming it on how they work with Windows's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
I should have stopped my subscription there and then, but I continued subscribing for another 2 years, probably because I was anxious about needing something else that was in the file retention history.
It wasn't a very good service anyway — slow to upload, often stopping mysteriously, and requiring 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up.
https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Unsupport...
That means I've probably got a bit of duplication @ crashplan, but given the bulk of the data is a .jpg/mpeg dump from my cameras I don't care about the 5-10% of the archive which isn't compressed and likely has some duplication (the .git repos).
OTOH, crashplan isn't my only backup plan, so if they explode tomorrow I don't think it will cause me any grief outside of having to find another offsite/cloud backup solution.
(also as a further note, looking at my config log, it seems I need /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches bumped pretty hard just to keep it running).
It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.
>A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to.
Google owns their hard drive space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
>The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.
Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system.
The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective.
> Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource.
No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.
> The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government.
That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.
The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.
Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted.
The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.
Similarly, if you rent a hotel room, you have free access to common areas like the pool or lounge. Normally this works wonderfully, until a big party takes over the common space.
It was never unlimited storage to begin with ie. false advertising, just like a FUP is (what is "fair"? Just define the soft and hard limit).
If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. Maybe three years ago, there was a post by someone using Amazon’s unlimited free storage to store camgirl streams and had amassed a petabyte or so. Cloud storage companies all eventually learn this lesson, but depending on the size of the company they can prop up the free storage options for a while.
https://boingboing.net/2017/08/25/person-tests-amazons-unlim...