Ask HN: Hey Drew, why is Dropbox becoming so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hey Drew, why is Dropbox becoming so bad?

119 pointsan_opabinia45 comments

When you visit the Dropbox iOS app's PDF viewer there's a bright blue Open button. It shows "Open with... Adobe Acrobat Reader, Add Text or Signature" - it's an affiliate revenue scheme dark pattern that sends you down a totally bad path. It caught my mom today, a Pro subscriber and a doctor, and she was just trying to look at health articles with her patients. Not "sign up for an Adobe account?" as she worriedly said on the phone today.

It's rough. The app is full of crap like this, it's not the first time it's caught my mom - an educated person! There was smart sync (different than "selective sync") being toggled on by default on new installs, which was horrible. Files that don't open! Bad engineering, bad product design. There are the blocking notifications and prompts. The defaulting to show the Dropbox app instead of Finder. That's just in the last two months.

I asked Dropbox CS people to "disable product management." I joked in that thread that they were aspiring to be "anti-mom."

I liked Dropbox, it was basically perfect in 2012, it's why I pay for it so consistently, why I've gifted subs to people, why they keep paying, etc.

Drew, why are you ruining your product?

That aside, remember when Steve Jobs personally replied to people's emails? There is no process for a normal person to connect with a real decision maker at giant tech companies anymore. It's the most foreboding development in the tech industry. Delegating stuff like this to social media is bad management, and Paul Graham should be apoplectic that despite all of these dark patterns, Dropbox shares are still not trading above their IPO price. It's bad business sense, it's bad product. It's just bad.

As others have noted, I share your pain and am in complete agreement that Dropbox has gone from a must-have utility that was a core part of several key workflows to a steaming crapfest of monetization and upsell. I dropped my subscription to Dropbox, migrated everything that was easy and convenient away, and have not looked back.

I feel bad, sort of, to need to part ways with a tool that was once so useful and clever. OTOH, good riddance!

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.

:)

Jobs was right ... personal cloud storage is a feature not a product.

Onedrive 1TB family tier works well.

I think it is a product. The problem with our economy is that companies "need" to keep growing. What if Dropbox implemented sync and said "great, we are done". The don't need to keep growing their staff, and they don't need to keep adding big new features. The can add features that make sense, refine the UX and maybe do a bit of optimization with a tiny team.

This works if you don't take VC investment (from funds which want their stake to moon) and instead bootstrap (or obtain investment from an aligned stakeholder [1]) and maintain a controlling interest in the company.

Examples: Backblaze [2] and Basecamp [1]

Anyone can shoot to be a unicorn [3]. Takes something else to be comfortable with a daily grind (but a grind you enjoy), reliably yet without much fanfare meeting your customers' (mostly static) need.

[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-baseca...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074289 (/u/brianwski, Backblaze cofounder: "Finally, Backblaze is profoundly different than CrashPlan in that we never really raised any bank financing or VC financing. We're 90% employee owned, and there are no deep pockets. CrashPlan raised something like $150 million which comes with "pressure to grow fast or die". Backblaze is free of any such pressure, we own our own fate.")

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw language)

I don't see the problem with building new products, Google was just search in the beginning. The problem arises when you screw your original product by tacking everything else onto it.

What if Google turned into Yahoo.com?

Google’s core product is still essentially unchanged since its inception, for the most part, except for ads.

Uh that’s a REALLY bad example, given how much Google indeed HAS tacked everything else onto their core product. How many ads do you have to scroll past for the first real result? Are you certain the results are good, or are they skewed by some weirdness in your login, since they track all your searches now, to “personalize” (target) results (ads)?

Google’s core product was a text box into which you could type anything and get something useful in the first few results. That product no longer exists.

It still exists for me. There’s no comparable search engine at the moment, it’s still the best at what it does and the format hasn’t changed (except for ads, as I mentioned)

It’s still the same old list of links that has been enhanced to highlight the first result or the most recent news. Over 20 years that’s merely evolution.

Dropbox turned from invisible into its own app separate from the OS. Don’t you see how, comparatively, Google Search hasn’t changed?

give duckduckgo a shot for say one week.

I just don’t trust the results google returns.

Sometimes I still !g something but rarely get a better matching result.

I did and it's never good enough for me. I just re-did my last non-trivial search on ddg and none of the first page results were useful.

Yep like Google Plus and Google Video.

Companies neglecting their orignial product line is not a recent phenomenon.

Wrigley's started selling soap, and gifted baking powder with their orders. Their baking soda was more popular than their soap, so they sold baking powder and gifted gum...

Aside from the VC angle, without constant growth your product will likely end up failing to compete with some monopolist vertically integrating or diversifying into your market.

I feel inclined to agree. Dropbox additionally shoves all sorts of features I don’t want down my throat (no, I don’t want a password manager or hellosign integration, thanks) while depriving me of basic security features because they’re “enterprise” like password protecting a Dropbox file url.

The only part of Dropbox palatable nowadays is the desktop sync, which still is pretty invisible. I can’t even open .org files as plaintext in the Dropbox iOS app right now. The same app opens to a default pane not of my files but of Dropbox paper files, a product I’ve never used ever.

I renewed my Dropbox membership this past year mainly out of laziness: but not next. It’s fairly clear Dropbox doesn’t care for me as a customer.

It's been immensely annoying since it became an 'app' rather than a folder extension on macOS, and since they targeted business/enterprise.

I've just moved to iCloud Drive now they offer shared folders, but then I only share stuff with family members so this is straightforward.

Shame as I used to love Dropbox.

Add to this list the fact that there is no setting anywhere in the preferences (not even in the Windows registry) to turn off the "Your Dropbox is almost full! Upgrade now!" notification that pops up on my screen daily is just brutal.

That seems more defensible since it's a problem you need to deal with or risk data loss. The whole point of Dropbox is not losing your data.

I switched to SyncThing a couple of weeks ago. So far it is working perfectly for my requirements.

Companies seem to decline as the distance between customers and the engineering team grows.

Dropbox used to be great and blew all their competitors out of the water. At the time their syncing speed was incredible and UI great. Nowadays not so much because they have added non-core features and dilly-dallied on features that people don't really use.

We hear you. Lots of positive changes coming. The team is committed to improving the overall experience and providing that effortless, lightweight feeling once again.

Would love to chat anytime.

Timothy at dropbox.com

Is there anything more you can comment about those positive changes? I've been using Dropbox since 2012, would love to hear more.

I switched to Sync.com about 2 months ago, and it's perfect. The folder syncs. I can choose which folders to sync. Sharing works, and it's direct sharing through an app or as a link, and that's it. Sync.com is incredible for all the things it DOESN'T do.

Another good service to check out is Tresorit. I used Sync.com for a few years but switched over to Tresorit because it was cheaper (at the time at least), more stable for me, and has significantly nicer clients (and supports Linux + has great web access). The premium plan will get you less storage than Sync.com (at the current sale price, ~$10 month gets you 500GB vs. 3TB) but if you don't store huge amounts of stuff on cloud services, I'd highly recommend checking it out too.

Same here I have been using Sync.com for at least 2 years. paid subscription. No issues. It is nice to think that the Admins can't see my files... unlike dropbox.

How do you select which folders to sync? I don't like "Sync" or "Dropbox" folders.

Within advanced preferences.

It behaves exactly the same as Dropbox, so no possibility to sync outside that folder.

Oh I misunderstood your question, my apologies.

The answer is simple, trying to attract more users by adding more useless services. Just imagine how big/dominant they would have been if they full on focussed on their core business.

I agree...Dropbox was perfect when I first started using it, but it has gotten so bad. How can that be?

VC money and the returns that the investors expect. Requirements of meeting those returns means introducing more revenue-generating options, which means shifting the focus of the company away from the initial vision and towards making money. Hence the collaborative features nobody asked for and the affiliate links the OP mentioned.

Adobe Acrobat just won't die, and for some reason Dropbox gave it a very annoying lifeline, or vice versa.

It would be nice if Dropbox invested heavily in its own PDF viewer and allowed the user to easily opt out (or opt out by default) of things like Adobe or Microsoft integrations.

Financially, Dropbox depends on business users, so integrations like that (for e-signatures, Office integration, etc.) help sell it into businesses.

There was a story on Slashdot years before Dropbox was conceived describing how Ray Ozzie was going to build integrated shared folders into Windows. This was in the days when things like Zip drives were not yet obsoleted, and it seemed visionary.

So I was surprised and pleased when YC funded Drew because Microsoft never did anything with Ozzie's vision. Early Dropbox was elegant and simple, as Drew intended.

I think this is a case where adding Adobe integration is like how Adobe installs McAfee by default, etc. Referral programs to generate revenue because the freemium product is not generating enough to keep investors happy.

I would not be surprised if Drew was irritated that Adobe had to be bundled into the product.

But let's also note that Drew has been very pragmatic and hired neocon hawk and Iraq war architect Condi Rice for the board in an attempt to secure government contracts.

I think Dropbox did a great job with Sync and I like the filesystem extension idea, it just needs a bit more refinement. SmartSync has worked very well for me and I think turning it on by default is the obvious correct choice.

I started using Dropbox heavily when it first launched. Then in 2018 switched to using Synology Drive and when my Dropbox yearly subscription came up for renewal, let it lapse, staying with the 2GB or so of free space that Dropbox offers simply because it was easier to make my aging Mother-in-law understand a Dropbox link (which she used at her library) than a Synology Drive link.

Early 2020 my wife's Dropbox subscription was up, and we switched her over to Synology Drive for everything but kept Dropbox around for the few free gigabytes it offers.

This past week we got a new kitchen computer, and it was the first machine that we've purchased in a decade that did not get Dropbox installed on it. And probably in the next month or two, we're going to be quietly uninstalling Dropbox from all of our other computers too.

Goodbye Dropbox, it was nice knowing you, but beyond basic file sync, all the new bells and whistles have added absolutely nothing of value for our family but you sure love charging us hundreds of dollars of year to look after (poorly) a small amount of data.

Hear hear. Stop trying to convince me I'm a business while we're at it.

I found the price point for me, I'm a clever like that

I'm merely using Dropbox on Android to scan and upload documents without issues.

For big ass folders and files I use syncthing, tho.

It's ironic how the platform that became so popular because of its speed and simplicity has turned into this. I like it better when software is invisible.

While iCloud isn't as neat as 2012 Dropbox, it's better than good enough. I haven't reinstalled Dropbox.

Ditched long ago for 1drive. What were they thinking ruining a product that has no moat.

People just want to sync their "stuff". That's it. All the latest upselling, large UI changes and integrations drive people nuts and which is why everyone is leaving. Agree with everything mentioned by the op.

Dunno about their main product (never used it much), but Paper is awesome! Dark mode UI implemented super well!

Agree with this, it's a wonderful editor. I can see the enterprise/business features creeping into this product though now. The end is nigh!

Yeah I agree.. But I guess dropbox will ultimately turn back into the USB-Drive they wanted to be.

Yep couldn’t agree more. Dropbox just keep getting worse. However at least the iPad app seems to crash less often nowadays.

Weird, I love dropbox, I use it for a virtualized desktop and some sharing features.

Once they started changing their product like this, I moved all of my personal stuff over to iCloud Drive. I was already paying for it anyway. It’s maybe a bit pokey, but I never have problems with it.

I sympathize.

It’s maybe a bit pokey

That's exactly why I don't use iCloud Drive very much.

I recently copied something there from my laptop. A half an hour later it still wasn't visible from my iPhone. And I saw no obvious way to force a sync of any sort.

It's incredible to me that very very basic functionality is so poorly implemented nowadays. (This isn't Apple specific).

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