[walski]

Does it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"

[okhobb]

HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.

[tonyhart7]

This is why we can't have nice things.

People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.

[Aurornis]

Can confirm. Worked at a startup with some very generous (though not “unlimited”) limits designed to allow for bursts and spikes of usage.

Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and saturate the limits to “prove” that we couldn’t handle it.

We could actually handle it, but it wasn’t worth offering it to this small number of users who were trying to prove a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the were making our servers suffer.

[tonyhart7]

I still remember people abusing Claude Code, they even had a leaderboard for who spent the most tokens.

Billions of tokens wasted for nothing

[wltr]

Don’t use the unlimited lie then, I assume.

[tonyhart7]

It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.

Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.

Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.

[wltr]

I understand that, but the phrasing is just wrong. Unlimited is unlimited. Otherwise it’s just doublespeak.

[sfn42]

If there is a limit then it isn't unlimited. That's what the word unlimited means.

Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.

That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.

[threeducks]

> It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.

It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.

[tonyhart7]

Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.

For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.

Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.

But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.

The choice is yours.

[twelvedogs]

Someone will abuse it though, so why bother with the bullshit

You don't build high trust societies with lies

[tonyhart7]

"You don't build high trust societies with lies"

Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it

I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic

but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment

[sallveburrpi]

Things would be so much easier if there weren’t a super small minority of extremely greedy rich and powerful people who ruin it for everyone…

Alas we decided collectively that money trumps(sic) everything so low trust society is the natural consequence of this.

At its core it’s a spiritual problem. Capitalism is cool but making it a religion has its trade offs.

[Aurornis]

In my experience the SaaS unlimited abusers often aren’t even trying to do capitalism things. They’re just abusing the systems for the thrill of it.

They go on Reddit and brag and compete about doing useless things to store files on these services, like a competition. They’re bragging on HN about GitHub tools that force files into a non-file service and have rate limiters tuned to upload right at the server’s rate limit.

It’s not capitalism, it’s people thinking they’re winning points against capitalism by abusing a corporation. Even if that corporation is a small startup trying to offer a product on a small budget.

[mnx]

"starbucks says there is no limit on how many napkins I can use but they got mad when I took the whole container, liars"

[threeducks]

It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.

[wltr]

Heck, adding a word like ‘almost’ would make it rather truth.

[reddalo]

Creative people could start encoding terabytes of movies inside of Penpot documents.