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Comment by jl | Hacker News Reader

Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to <insert something incredibly time consuming, annoying, and non-trivial> instead!"

I genuinely laugh every time at that comment every time this gets reposted, as if 99.99% of people wouldn't run away if they read 'curlftpfs' and 'mounted filesystem'

HN had a higher percentage of people at that time that would've considered that to be a reasonable alternative to Dropbox.

Hacker News used to be for hackers.

Thanks for this comment and the one about ftp. I also didn’t see the difference between Facebook and MySpace. It’s hard to understand the money side of reality until you are older and have seen some things.

Even funnier, using cvs (LOL) or even svn over effing unsecure FTP was already wrong at the time.

(Oh and of course it was the most voted comment, the 2nd one had more legitimate concerns)

Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

I think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively got out of the way of their users and exposed the underlying function with a little impedance as possible. It's always important to remember that the goal isn't for users to use your product. The goal is for users to get the value your product delivers. That sounds obvious, but a lot of product development teams forget that. Both Dropbox and the original iPod seem to embody that distinction.

As for your "nothing I can deploy on my own server" comment, checkout syncthing or Resilio. Both take a bit more doing than a simple Dropbox install, but I've found syncthing to be pretty bulletproof once it's configured and I've heard a lot of people prefer Resilio.

There was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was superseded by touchscreens.

I don't believe you. firstly rotate the wheel to adjust a level (i.e. level of menu selection highlight) is literally how volume knobs have always worked. secondly clickwheel was in the iPod for 5 years? 8 years? in all the time you never figured out how to use it?

I think it is a reasonable comment, even in hindsight. It didn't dismiss the idea completely like CmdrTaco did, it just offered three criticisms of the business plan. All three points are real issues that Dropbox faced. They obviously dealt with all of them successfully, but there was no guarantee that any company in the space would deal with those issues successfully.

> Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

Well... https://syncthing.net/

No iOS support that I can discern. A deal breaker for me.

https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102

ownCloud is also similar and has an iOS client.

Ha-ha, but for every one where the criticism turned out to be wrong, how many are there where the criticism was spot on? We laugh at things the HN Dropbox critique and the Slashdot iPod critique, but without people there to criticize and point out potential pitfalls, we’re all just patting each other on the back and telling each other how awesome everything is. Is that how good ideas grow?

When you have a success rate of 10%, blindly dismissing everything gets you 90% accuracy, but it's not particularly insightful.

Show HN threads tend to get both constructive and mindless criticism. I don't think it's wrong to point out the unhelpful kind of criticism.

Point of order, the iPod went no where until they added syncing with a PC - something everyone point ted out as being necessary on launch.

I recall having the same basic response to http:

"Why would anyone want to keep downloading the same content over and over again when you could just ftp it to your machine?"

Stallman still does this doesn’t he, give or take an email step.

Who said, "Why would you do this?"

Man the comments on this. HN gold.

It would be a fun experiment to put comments like this as quotes on the "Add Comment" page so you had to read them while typing your own comment. Might make people take a second or two extra to reconsider.

I remember this post. One of many "show HN" posts that have hit it big. Congrats!

> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

lol

I don't think that comment is necessarily unfair. Dropdox does charge for the service if a user wants over 2GB. I think the more questionable comment is that first point:

>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

That is the epitome of not getting it.

I'd love to hear from Drew on what pieces of advice from that ShowHN discussion actually affected their thinking for better/worse.

But they aren't profitable (and never were), right?

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