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I'm a sys admin/devops engineer, and yes, storage is far more expensive then people realize.
This is the very definition of enshittification.
EDIT: To those downvoting:
Do you actually know what the definition of enshittification is? Apparently not.
It doesn't matter that the cost of storage is a real thing. They gave things of value away for free to grow their user base and to try and capture network effects. Now that they think they have that they are taking away ( or decreasing ) the free stuff of value they gave away.
The fact that storage has value is literally an important part of enshitification.
It wouldn't be enshitification if they gave away free stuff that wasn't valuable.
It’s not enshittification because it literally doesn’t follow the second part of your own definition. Needing to change your offerings because your internal prices increase is normal business. Enshittification literally is from companies offering stuff to entice users and then they realize they have nothing else to offer to businesses, so they remove features in order to sell them to businesses or to increase ads.
This was my core point. I don’t consider a business raising prices or gating features as a direct result of those features increasing their cost as “enshittification”. Stickers being paid, custom emojis, etc, that doesn’t cost Discord anything to provide, making that paid is enshittification; But if the feature itself costs the business actual money to provide, does everyone just expect them to eat that cost forever, in a lot of cases for absolutely no revenue from the users?
Calling out businesses for not giving stuff that costs them money away for free just, doesn’t fundamentally make sense to me. Why is it just expected of Discord that they pay to store all your large files? A lot of “freemium” services like GMail recoup some of that money by mining your email for data that it can sell to advertisers, or eating the cost in an attempt to lock you into an ecosystem where you’ll spend money. Storing files on Discord is neither of those things.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of services are enshittifying, and making their services worse so you spend more money with them— but adjusting your quotas and pricing to reflect your real world cost of business is not that. To frame it as though you are entitled to free compute and resources from companies that don’t owe you anything comes off as just that, entitled. The cloud isn’t free. If you want to use a service, you should pay for it if you can.