Hacker News Reader

Comment by braderhart | Hacker News Reader

Not really sure why this is front page here. Dropbox is a sinking ship.

Dropbox is ycombinator alum. A ycombinator alum doing an IPO is worth bragging about on the front page.

For those of us not on your level, can you explain?

Dropbox has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Always eating resources, can't provide changelogs, and terrible customer service. File sharing services are a dime a dozen now, heck Nextcloud is free and does more than Dropbox. No one just uses Dropbox anymore unless it was forced on their phone through some backroom deal. If anyone tries other providers they wouldn't switch back, there is no reason to anymore. They have nothing valuable to offer at this point but they want to make sure to grab as much money as they can on their way down.

You're being incredibly mean-spirited in your comments.

More importantly, you're wrong. Lots of people (myself included) use and love Dropbox, and find it valuable.

You're not actually saying anything specific in your comment, just "it's not valuable". Do you want to offer actual criticism?

Just said.. it always eats resources, no changelogs, and customer service doesn't respond (even when I was a paying customer).

It just works everywhere it's installed, on every platform, and has a long history of doing so. For something as critical as what they provide, that's the most important feature.

What are their user / revenue figures like?

I have a few qualms with Dropbox... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I see this comment quoted a lot in a jeering way, but always just the first two points. Number one is a little silly, two has some validity, three is pretty correct (there was no way to pay for it!) And the commenter answers the response to it well.

Also 2007 HN looks like a very different kind of environment. Everyone's so polite! Comments happen over several days! It's more like a feedback on a design doc than a Twitter thread.

HN was a great place back then. I made many useful professional contacts, and had a lot of interesting and deep conversations. It was like (site that shall not be named) is today, except with a bit more focus on turning the tech into a business.

There were some subtle shifts, as front page posts started being more for people who think startups are cool, and less for people who want to figure out how to make their startup win. Then there was a big shift, as diggers fled to reddit, and redditors came to HN.

Now, HN is comparatively useless.

Little silly how? They literally provide no information about their changes. How many phones do you think they were forced onto? I guarantee you a majority of their subscribers are soon to join their OS providers native file sharing service, and for good reason. Google Drive provides an entire online application stack for third-party developers and a simple API. Google Photos is great as well, as it has the best object and face recognition software.

OneDrive actually does the same pretty well too, and integrates with their native Office Suite. There is really not a good reason to select Dropbox at this point, unless you are just working PR for them.

Because it's a YC start up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com