this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
2282 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59587 readers
2481 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Moreover, not to take sides with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, etc, but storing files costs money to maintain (there needs to be redundancy, every once in a while drives need to be replaced, they need to be cooled, etc), so we'd like it to be cheap, but doing all these things cannot be free for the hosting company.
This is not to say they are jacking up prices, but that it cannot stay super cheap forever.
Still, these services have been very handy so far, though I'm looking to see if the plan I have is still convenient compared to the competition
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
The media companies are ruining it for themselves by trying to squeeze more out of the users, which leads them not to stick with any of them.
Excuse me, but how would a tiny percentage of people profit off of this?! What is even the point if there are no shareholders to demand record profits year after year? /s
I still believe there's a huge markup though. Look at premium Usenet providers - they store something like 1200 days of the posts (minus DMCA takedowns) which I think run something like hundreds of petabytes of data. Yet they can provide the service, including transfer, for what has to be a niche market at rates around $10 a month. Presumably there's no "magic" or subsidies in what they're doing. Yet what they're doing is essentially what a big streaming service is doing.
Now you might say - well, yea, $10 a month - right around streaming prices. Sure, but you figure in the larger scale to spread the costs over. For Box etc, they're not even having the content costs that a Netflix would have (which I'll admit is a lot, and might well make up for the difference between just storage and transfer of Usenet) which makes them comparable in some sense.
Even if you say that well, Usenet gets multiple companies cooperating in their competition and storing the same data so they get some redundancy for "free", compare to backup providers like Backblaze at $7 a month for unlimited storage (unless you're on Linux, then f**k you, so I don't use them, but still). Or Jottacloud that runs around $100 a year for 5TB soft cap 10TB hard cap.
I still think there's a mix of a lot of markup, and people not actually looking much into competition - I know people who don't cross compare.