I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get “the new ribbon UI!”

The answer was never, incidentally.

This is what I keep saying. If I thought my kids’ teachers were evil indoctrinators trying to force an ideology I definitely wouldn’t want them to have a gun, and if I thought they were trustworthy enough to have a gun around my child I’d be totally fine with them making any and all decisions about what else they were going to do in that classroom.

Of course, not being an insane person, I actually want them to not need a gun at all and also for them to have the freedom and resources to teach and stock their classroom as they see fit.

Ahh, right. I’ve made the classic mistake of thinking my usage was normative.

Interesting. We don’t upload many pictures, either; though admittedly I hadn’t thought about it, and that probably doubles my total.

I’ll have to check my math again. But are people uploading more than that? On my friend server, with 50 people, we’ve had about a dozen uploads all year, and they’re all pretty small PDFs and images. Everything else is rich links.

“Storage management is expensive”

It’s really not, though.

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ETA: I stick by my premise and my conclusion (storage management isn’t expensive, and it’s probably a Nitro thing), but my math may be wrong and my usage is apparently not normative. The costs are probably not so negligible, but I would still assume they aren’t as low as they want us to think.

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Discord has 200,000,000 MAU. If every single one of them uploaded a file every month (of pretty much any size) and Discord tossed it into an AWS S3 IA bucket, it would cost them $500 to store that data. Their total S3 bill for storage would be five hundred US dollars. Storage is dirt cheap. AWS doesn’t even charge per gigabyte on that storage type, it’s so cheap; they charge for downloads.

So, ok. Let’s talk downloads. If each of those files were 25GB and downloaded twice (probably an underestimate, but not everyone is uploading files, so I’m going to make the completely unfounded assumption that it’ll all shake out), it would cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which, ok, that’s much more significant than $500. But Discord made $575 million last year—so the S3 download costs would be 0.03% of their total revenue. They probably spend 2-3 times more on coffee.

Storage management is emphatically not expensive.

My guess? They just saw that the higher upload limit was eating into their Nitro subscriptions.

So this is true (and increasingly so recently), but a lot of that overhead is technically unnecessary for the message to be sent and received; a lot of it is information about transmission and DKIM validation, spam protection, sender verification, etc; and then a TON of it is HTML for display. For a known receiver to send a message to a known recipient, I believe that a text-only email that’s cryptographically signed for identity validation could potentially be a tiny fraction of the size of a big huge HTML email.

This is the thing. Remote work as an option helps everyone. Lower costs for the employer, happier employees, the people who do want to work in an office have a better time because it’s less crowded, the people who need to care for kids or parents have an easier time…it’s entirely a win for everyone.

Except real estate companies, and therein lies the problem.