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Comment by Xavdidtheshadow | Hacker News Reader

> While we started as a storage company, we‘ve grown to be a hub to manage your digital life.

This line from the linked post is a great summary of exactly how I think Dropbox's product direction has taken a turn for the worse.

This is no sleight against the author (who seems to be doing great work; I enjoyed this read!) or the engineering team. Just like, the general direction of the company. This line also stands out:

> it had been a while since we delivered new value to our personal users.

I can't speak for all paying users, but the value I derive from Dropbox is how it syncs fast and "just works". I do _not_ find new value in popups and notification badges about features that other companies have already perfected (much like I don't need to go anywhere else for file syncing).

I realize I'm not representative of the userbase as a whole, I'm just frustrated.

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I would like to add that one of the reasons I’m a paying subscriber of Dropbox is because it’s independent of all the major other providers. Shared storage is a commodity provided by Microsoft and Google, and it’s important there is at least one major other provider.

Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows. Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.

> Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows.

I think everyone outside knows where it's headed, and it's either enterprise-ware (clearly that's what they're aiming for, as they literally rebranded the whole thing to "Dropbox Business", it's right there on the home page) or slow death probably ending in an ignoble acquisition. Too much investment involved for them to just keep delivering the same service that made them a household name, taking a small and steady profit.

> Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.

They're not all-but saying that, they are saying that, if you're a non-business user.

I wonder if we need to start treating failover systems more literally like insurance.

Your insurance company pays part of your premiums to another insurance company to cover them in the case of truly catastrophic events. It's called an underwriter. It's why State Farm didn't go under after Hurricane Andrew, despite the fact that State Farm had a wide majority of policies in the affected areas. They weren't just writing checks, they were cashing them too.

Instead of signing up for 3 different Clouds to make sure my data is safe, maybe my Cloud provider should be doing that for me. But that does nothing to address another concern (lock-in) and could very well make it worse, unless the "underwriter" also facilitates data transfer between clouds.

They'll just build their own regions and AZs, instead. You'd only get that sort of service from someone who didn't build their own cloud.

> I would like to add that one of the reasons I’m a paying subscriber of Dropbox is because it’s independent of all the major other providers.

If I remember correctly, it's using Amazon in the backend. So how exactly is it that it is independent of all the other major providers?

It’s not.

Wrong. European data center due to GDPR. Ever wonder who the cloud provider of that is?

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450280565/Dropbox-gears-...

Others are its own.

In terms of relationship. So that e.g. if you comment with too many emojis on a YouTube lifestream, you only lose access to your e-mails, but not your files.

That strong dependence changed with Magic Pocket:

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

> Shared storage is a commodity provided by Microsoft and Google, and it’s important there is at least one major other provider.

They should talk to Mozilla. An OS-agnostic, ad-free, FAANG-independent cloud-hub integrated in the browser...? YES-fucking-PLEASE.

This is exactly how I feel as well. I just wanted a digital locker that I don't have to worry about. Now these new features on top of everything just feel like bloat to justify the higher price compared to similar services. I did not renew my Dropbox subscription this year.

What did you get instead? Did you find a good alternative?

Not GP, but iCloud Drive works great. $2.99/mo for 200GB.

I generally like iCloud, but afaik it doesn't have the API integrations that Dropbox does (one of it's clear strengths)

So Mr Jobs said file sync was a feature, yet Apple sell it as a product...

can you properly use iCloud Drive on Ubuntu and Android?

I'm using OneDrive, mainly because I'm paying for office anyway. I was a dropbox user for a long time but once they kept pushing features I had no interest in I decided to switch.

To me that’s a bit ironic. You wanted a sync only product so you left Dropbox for... OneDrive and Office 365?

We get it. The simple truth is we need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace. We rewrote our sync engine recently to make things much more performant and we're working on shipping more value to users with fewer upsells.

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

FWIW you can turn off all the notifications in the preference panel.

(this sounds snarky but is not, I'm genuinely asking)

Which notifications option do I uncheck to stop from getting the popup asking me to upgrade to dropbox plus that I got this morning?

Click the dropbox icon, click your avatar, preferences, notifications for most in app notifications.

TBH the whole point of Basic is to be a trial sku so I don't know if you can turn those off. We do want you to become a paying customer :D

Call it Dropbox Trial edition then, not Basic.

How much would you have to charge me to make storage workable for you? I will pay it. I currently pay for Dropbox "Plus" (at least I think, I do not have the mental energy to follow rebrands or renames. I pay you money to sync my files, anyway).

Currently, I am wrestling with the fact that I just bought a new computer and the initial sync took 2 days for ~100GB stored (because there appeared to be per-file overhead and I have a lot of small files). I would not call this performant.

When this finally completed, I discovered that actually I had not downloaded all my files, because even though I turned Smart Sync off, Smart Sync is still invisibly turned on. I learned this when I went to prep for a meeting and my IDE hung for 8 minutes when one of my project folders had to Smart Sync in the background. Again, I have Smart Sync turned off.

What I learned was that in order to turn Smart Sync off, you should ignore the Smart Sync settings, and instead sign into Dropbox.com, click Settings, (again, ignore the setting on that page that says Smart Sync is turned off), and turn off "Dropbox System Extension", which is actually the setting that controls Smart Sync. Then reboot, sign into Dropbox again, and let it go through a sync cycle.

As far as I can tell this feature mostly benefits boomers who think cloud is magical infinite storage, at the expense of people who actually have enough storage and want to use Dropbox for what it was actually good at.

> How much would you have to charge me to make storage workable for you?

I think it’s not about the price you or I pay. It’s about living up to investors’ expectations. They don’t need to be “just profitable”, they need a massive cash cow and ride it out.

Storage is a commodity now, so no way to achieve it with that. They need more value-add, and apparently a “hub for your digital life” is what they decided it needs to be.

> We get it. The simple truth is we need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace.

In the marketplace or as a public company with a crazy market cap?

Which notifications option do I uncheck to stop being nagged to pay for Dropbox if it's close to full?

I don't know the answer to that. But if the Dropbox guys are looking for feedback then it was this nag message which finally made me empty everything out of Dropbox and move it elsewhere. Even after emptying, the site continued to nag me for a good month afterwards.

> we're working on shipping more value to users with fewer upsells.

Glad to hear, though I really wish you guys had stayed as a storage company. You're not going to replace all the apps that I use Dropbox to bridge too, yet your apps seem to do their best to keep me in your ecosystem. Please stop that.

I think where that's a losing proposition for them is that other ecosystems are more tightly integrated and generally a better deal, if that's what people want. Apple user with more than one device of any sort? $2.99/mo for the lowest tier of iCloud storage is a no-brainer, and everything will work with it, nothing to install. All-in on Gsuite and doing everything in the browser/Android/Chrome? Duh. No question what you use. Windows/MSOffice? I haven't used it but I bet OneDrive is pretty nice and well-integrated on there. Certainly they don't stop spamming you about it.

Those are what you pick if you want lock-in and bundled features. Dropbox and others are what you (used to) pick if you want to work cross-platform with a heavy focus on sharing real files, not tools. I think that's why the bundled tools strike so many as a bad idea: if we wanted that, there are more sensible options for it already. I get that they're kinda stuck trying it if they want/need huge growth, but it seems destined to fail, to me.

I appreciate like. Like I said, y'all are doing a lot of great work and I do want to reiterate that I appreciate you posting and being here to answer questions.

I just wish the need for constant growth wasn't the reality of tech companies in 2020.

Are you the guy (person) to talk to about feature/functions/satisfaction?

I've recommended or installed DropBox on over 200 SMBs over the last (close to a decade - I don't know how long specifically).

There are things you do great. There are some things you used to do great (or OK) but stopped. There are some not-great things. Compared to Google Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Microsoft One Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Box.com (which I have to use for some clients), I would prefer it if DropBox would simply solve for my technical and business needs (and I don't think, as an engineer, that they are that hard - I mean some of them you already did and removed).

I would love to talk. Please let me know if/how/when that could happen. If you are not interested, that is fine too. I am on the road for the next week-or-so, but just give me the sign, and I'd love to talk to you about your excellent core product.

EDIT: Oh! Ha - My email address is in my profile.

You're not alone. Overwhelmingly the most common reaction when the topic of modern Dropbox comes up, among people who pay attention to it at all, is best summarized as "ugh". I think the only thing keeping people on it is inertia. It hasn't quite gotten annoying/bad enough to be worth the time to switch to something else, but the trend is clear and has shown no signs of reversing.

Even their rebranding to "Dropbox Business" everywhere basically says "individuals and solo/small business people, please do consider leaving, we aren't doing what we started out doing and aren't for you anymore".

When you get a chance give this post a read, we're investing in our personal users now more than ever. The features we've announced are just the beginning.

I believe that individual teams believe that, and I believe that some decision-makers are interested in doing enough to keep from losing those users too fast.

Looking at the home page, though, it's very clear where the focus is. The only link I can even find to the Plus option is in the footer and it's not even clear it's not a business plan (truly, why would any of the plans on a site that brands itself entirely as "Dropbox Business" not be business plans?

Someone who didn't know otherwise would assuredly bounce off the site having ascertained there are no personal plans. That has to have been a deliberate choice. I guess it could be some kind of grievous mistake to have somehow entirely failed to account for someone interested in an individual plan visiting "dropbox.com" to find it, except it fits with the rest of the publicly-visible moves coming out of Dropbox.

Despite of what you have to say, most people believe that Dropbox has degraded the "value" it provides to the user. Why is that? They've been pestered by notifications (which can be turned off), annoying upsells, features that no one cares about and the folder has now become super ugly - vaults, computer back and passwords (they should be in a dropbox services folder), constant barrage of messages on phones to share photos, no way to export multiple photos to iOS Photos app, etc.

Please respect the honest opinion from the users and try to work with them and show empathy. I am not seeing that.

Well if you want to compete with Google Drive you should probably look into starting an email service with good integration for file sharing. Don't know if you do it already but since I don't really log in to Dropbox daily and I do to Gmail, haven't really looked into it. And the Gmail + Drive combo works pretty well although I heavily dislike the Drive file user interface (why it can't be more like regular file system interface?)

I use Dropbox only because it's easy to edit/add files from the file system (and I don't like Microsoft or Google enough to give their services a chance).

Roll Dropbox back five years, then send everybody in the office home, forever.

Yep. Aside from the relentless onslaught of popups pushing you to a business plan have you ever noticed while using dropbox.com the UI is designed so that the "download" button is completely hidden from the user. Theres some incredibly weird product decisions going on over there.

The mobile apps also thinks your primary use case for "Share" is to send someone a dropbox link.... when I'm trying to post the file to Instagram

Pretty sure you ARE representative. I'd love to see numbers on how few users actually use any of the other features. I'd actually pay more if Dropbox stopped with all the crap, all the way up to, and including the desktop app.

Just came here to say the same thing. I use Dropbox everyday and pay them my $10 and am happy with the service. I don't need anything other than a sync of the files I've selected.

This update went unnoticed by me, which is a good thing in my mind. I rarely use the web interface.

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