Operating Costs

I understand that a fair number of Vocal creators are having trouble. I also see a correlation: these creators have approximately 3000 published stories. That’s a lot, even if they’re just text files, but when you add media, that file size grows exponentially. Anyone else ever get the “Your iCloud storage is full” message on your phone? Time to delete files or buy more storage.

Somehow, there’s a misconception about space on platforms. They don’t exist in some magical free space. They have operational costs separate from employee salaries, and servers and cloud storage are a big part of that. The more data that’s stored, the more expensive the storage is.

Three thousand media-heavy files could use between 500GB and over 2.4 TB of space. That’s a lot. 2TB of space costs an average of $40/month. That cost is before accounting for the costs of bandwidth, redundancy, backups, CDN, encoding, and platform overhead. Using that much storage on a platform that also generates income for the creators is more than a bit unrealistic.

Here I come with an unpopular opinion: everyone needs to take out the trash once in a while. I’ve only been here since July, and I’m already deleting files (taking out the trash). I see stubborn stances on this, a refusal to cooperate, and an insistence that Vocal magically run this platform at the size it’s grown to the same way they ran it when it was just a few thousand creators, and that can’t be done. There’s a difference between making dinner for your family and catering a wedding with three hundred guests, and there’s a difference in the operational and storage requirements for each. That metric applies elsewhere, even here.

I leave one question: is it bad enough to complain about it, or is it bad enough to do something about it? Delete some files, ffs. You’re not Ezra Pound, and no one is collecting every word you’ve written. Make some room for everyone else.