Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

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Just in the way of feedback (and I might be really out of the loop/not your target market!) but here was my brain-in-action after I clicked on the link from HN:

"Hmm, this looks pretty... what is it for?

It has a huge area that says "click here or drag and drop to start uploading"... but uploading what? And why?

Let's scroll down and read the 'about'!: "Fast", "Compatible", "Encryption"... um... ok but WHY?! Is it personal file storage for me (Like Dropbox?) or is it like a public FTP server? Or something else? If I drag and drop my tax return there is it suddenly shared with the entire world? Why do I want this thing?! Back to the HN comments to find out more!"

Something like that anyway! According to the comments it seems to be more like a rapidshare/mega thing - and now that I get it I'll keep this site in mind for sure!

I guess it might be a cultural thing, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that it's something in the style of Mediafire/RapidShare/Hostr, before they all went to crap.

Err, Hostr founder here. Not sure if I'm happy that it was mentioned, or sad that it went to crap :P

To crap was a bit exaggerated, sorry. :P

Localhostr was great for a while for just uploading stuff without needing to bother with accounts or RapidShare's wait-a-minute-or-pay thing. It makes sense why you scaled back the free version (I can imagine that these services quickly get expensive to run..) and started requiring accounts. But personally that's the point where it was roughly equally annoying to upload to Hostr and my own server, and so the latter just made more sense for me personally.

Yeah, dropping anonymous uploads made my life so much better. I'm a solo founder of a side project, it's just not worth it.

Thanks for the feedback.

The upload box is the first and almost only thing that you see when you go to the page and the purpose is to make the process simple so that you don't have to click through to a second page in order to start uploading.

You do however have a point as it could be confusing for some new user who haven't uploaded files before. We'll try to add an info box or some additional text to make the message more clear, thanks for pointing it out.

guys, Rapidshare and Megaupload, once pinnacle of pirate file sharing, are now dead. (I miss them so much :))

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