Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

staysaasy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 146 posts

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#41

Post by GuB-42 »

There 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.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#42

Post by ghaff »

colde wrote: post #5
giantg2 wrote: post #2

It's not really a ponzi scheme. You're not investing (uploading) your images with an expected return on that investment.

Yeah, it seems closer to a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation. Where a few users deplete a shared resource affecting everyone else.

If 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.)

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#43

Post by tyu2 »

yokto wrote: post #35

There 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 beco…

Yep. 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.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#44

Post by imtringued »

giantg2 wrote: post #24
tomhoward wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - 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…

I 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?

The problem is that there is no overarching word that describes this class of "scheme". There are pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes, matrix schemes, unlimited schemes and so on. Everyone uses an example of this class of scheme and then say that X is "ponzi scheme like" instead of saying that X is an instance of "circular fraud" where "circular fraud" is a term for this class of scheme I just made up on the spot. Just invent a word for this instead of complaining.

>f an author isn't trustworthy or correct on this, then why should we listen to their other information in good faith?

The author is correct because of the word "like" in the title.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#45

Post by ghaff »

gravitas wrote: post #30
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I've done all of that and is what I'm trying to avoid.

The 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.

In 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.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#46

Post by anoncake »

Spivak wrote: post #38
anoncake wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they did not pay for their fair share of a limited resource but for an unlimited amount of it.

Can 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…

Unlimited 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.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#47

Post by pontus »

imtringued wrote: post #40
est31 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing wise, it's better for the business to market with "unlimited" than creating a limit, even if it won't affect 90% of the users. For users, it creates a different feeling of freedom, even if you never use that freedom.

If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.

A side note on this:

I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data).

In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges. As such, it's not unlimited storage even in theory. I know this is the point of such approaches, but I'm curious why there aren't more lawsuits to this effect.

Similarly when you get e.g. 10GB of data on cellular networks and are charged for each subsequent block, there's really no way to use your 10GB. You either have to stop just before you hit the limit, leaving some data on the table or you have to go over and pay for another block. Ideally the networks should use up all the data and then ask you if you want to purchase another block. Otherwise there's no way you can actually use exactly what you ostensibly pay for.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#49

Post by bayindirh »

oefrha wrote: post #18
redm wrote: post #3

I 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 subsc…

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

I follow r/Datahoarder for best practices and methods for getting my own stuff (like HumbleBundle or purchased eBook libraries) to my own local storage but, some of them really abuse online storage providers. I cringe sometimes reading all the posts.

Why on the world someone try to mirror nearly everything to somewhere like Scrat from the Ice Age?

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#50

Post by ghaff »

tyu2 wrote: post #43
yokto wrote: post #35

There 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 beco…

Yep. 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 resolu…

I 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.

Post reply on HN