Dropbox Shop Beta
dropbox.com
dropbox.com
Dropbox has been clearly making a move towards the enterprise space recently. Seemingly, for the standard reasons, better margins, bigger deals, easier revenue retention, etc.
This is 100% consumer focused. I have a very hard time believing this functionality will be around for the long haul. I simply don't see how this plays into the enterprise strategy.
I think there are many file types to “sell” other than photos. For example, my Fiance saw someone trying to sell a pre-made wedding planning excel spreadsheet.
Frankly this one of the few features they've added that I can understand the use of. Other than perhaps the way they've made it vaguely easier to 'ignore' a folder (though there's still at least 2 ways to do so, both somewhat inconvenient).
I don't anticipate businesses would be the primary purchasers of these digital goods. This seems primarily aimed at individual consumers.
> Even if content is otherwise permitted by Dropbox’s Acceptable Use policy, if it violates Stripe’s Restricted Businesses policy or PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, you may not sell, list, or promote it with the Seller Services. This includes pornographic material of any sort.
https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/shop-terms-of-s...
* https://www.eff.org/ja/deeplinks/2015/12/sheriffs-threats-ag...
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52543508
Take the second campaign linked. It went beyond advocating for the current law to be enforced and also advocated for cutting off morally reprehensible content (such as content that fetishizes racial slurs) from the global financial system. I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm saying that it's a moral judgement.
First of all, a slippery slope is slippy - that doesn't mean you have to slide down it. You can ban deepy objectionable content, without banning mildly objectionable stuff. As evidence, see any country in the world with functioning hate speech laws. There are lots of them.
Second, payment processors / platforms restricting or banning adult content predates the recent resurgence of nazism in america by decades.
Third, a bunch of platforms shutting down sex content in recent times has been driven by US laws like FOSTA-SESTA and not "cancel culture" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...
My position is that payment processors should not be the arbiters of what is allowed to be paid for by humans. I think that is your position too, but because you don't like the way I made my argument, you reply with a snarky and dismissive tone and treat me like I'm dumb.
That banks and other payment processors shouldn't be the rulers of the world is what we all must agree on and fight for if anything is ever going to change. As soon as you say "well in this case they should because I like when they do it to people I dislike," you are effectively saying that they should be all powerful, just as long as their moral compass aligns with yours.
As for payment company power - I agree they shouldn’t be the arbiters of what is acceptable - but you tried to link people asking them to stop taking payments for nazis to this like one lead to the other which is absolutely not the case.
My point is through well crafted hate speech laws and a functioning legal system we can have both - platforms that ban nazis AND payment processing that isn’t able to influence speech.
But should they have the choice of free association with whom they do business?
But I do lean towards "no" to your question, because if we say it's ok for them to choose who they associate with, we are implicitly saying it's ok for them to restrict any content they want. But ultimately, I don't know, and I just find it confusing that any regular person would argue for the rights of _banks_.
Idk what it says that there’s so many hammers looking for nails.
It was entirely up to people to disagree, not invest, lobby politicians and alter the laws, etc., at which point the companies wouldn’t exist anymore and they could then no longer invest in them.
It just simply wasn’t his/their job to police companies morally. It’s a bittersweet conundrum - I agree with him wholeheartedly, but also people can/should vote with their feet (money) and refuse to give these companies money if legally they are still allowed to exist and you disagree morally with what they do/stand for.
Unfortunately I can’t find the specific conversation I’m looking for, but the article [1] lightly touches on the subject. [2] is worth watching as he actually delves a bit deeper why tobacco is such a good investment for them how and governments have almost made the big tobacco companies bullet proof as an investment.
We see this all the time now across society - people love seeing western companies with rainbow flags, meanwhile ignoring a World Cup being held in Qatar in a few months under shocking morals, sponsored by same said companies, totally ignoring diversity, etc. because it’s a different market. Different markets have different morals and companies know/play to this. We should call these companies out for their absolute disgraceful hypocrisy.
Really you have two choices - vote with your feet and starve these companies of oxygen (money) wholly to force change, or lobby your politicians. Don’t expect morality from businesses. They only exist for one reason and one reason only - to make profits and return value to their investors. Look at how you can alter that equation and you just might change things for the better.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/20/terry-smith-at...
You’ll then say, well, it’s as long as it’s legal. And then you’ve outsourced your morals to the letter of the law, in which you’d be a dutiful Nazi in The Third Reich.
"It just simply wasn’t his/their job to police companies morally. It’s a bittersweet conundrum - I agree with him wholeheartedly"
And pawn off responsibility to consumers under the current system. I don't absolve people that say "it's not my job, I just follow the $." They still have a moral duty to help their fellow humans and not just chase the bottom line.
Can you give me an example of a country with functioning hate speech laws?
As a shopify user, you can already build such a system for yourself quite trivially. From the Shopify organization admin, click Stores. Click Create store. In the Store type section, select the purpose of your new store. In the Store details section, enter a name and an URL.
The purpose of my above comment is to add to the conversation by considering this development on the context of past community response to Dropbox product announcements
[1]: https://help.gumroad.com/article/66-gumroads-fees [2]: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/shop-terms-of-s...
Google Drive is _terrible_ with their "shortcuts", you can't have stuff that is shared with you on your local hard drive. It's been terrible for years.
OneDrive is mostly made for windows and iCloud for Mac.
I don't understand the hate.
I use DropBox a lot and quite like it.
I built a CMS for it and it automatically synced my markdown files on my mac with a linux box running on Vultr. I just save a file on my computer and bloop, my website is updated. It's been working flawlessly for several years.
I’ve been using Dropbox for years with difficult stuff, like Node projects with tens of thousands file. The sync works and it’s really quick.
- iCloud - simply does not work, trusting your files in here is a fools errand.
- Google Drive - They've change the name 6 times since I've started this comment, and each name changes requires a new download, and each download removes a feature I use. Need third party app for Linux.
- OneDrive - Not so bad, but need third party app for Linux.
I've tried many others like SyncThing (just terrible, people who tolerate this I give them my pity because it is not good software).
I wish Dropbox would just split of products into Dropbox Classic (A folder, that syncs!) and then this new fangled rubbish they keep building to diversify.
Maybe my use cases are too simple, but why did you find SyncThing a bad software? In my experience, understanding the setup was the difficult part, but that's to be expected when you're used to cloud providers managing that on their end. Apart from that, it doesn't work on iPhone or iPad, the syncs can take a couple of minutes, and that's all the cons I can think of.
The big pro for me is being able to sync files that an overzealous cloud provider might autosanitize without asking.
Regarding Google Drive on Linux, I've tried InSync and it worked so well with a combination of Dropbox+Google Drive+Google Workspaces that I bought the lifetime license. From time to time they do 50% offs, so it's even more attractive. Much better experience than the official Dropbox client.
Mobius Sync seems to do a reasonable job for me given the limitations its working under.
I have been using it non stop since it was available, and the best thing is that I've completely forgotten about it for years. It's happily churning in the background doing its job, updating itself automatically and not letting me worry about its existence, not a single notification window, and seldomly sending me emails about new services.
Google forsake linux, they already went through a client deprecation on mac, they bug me about getting permissions for the downloads folder they don't need, and it breaks sometimes I boot with an external drive connected, it's a chore to use their software.
I've tried to give OneDrive a chance several times but no more. Dropbox has been only reliable choice for three-four way sync for me.
“Microsoft 365 Family $99.99/year
Best value: Save 16% with annual subscription
Perfect for up to 6 people Up to 6 TB of cloud storage, that's 1 TB per person Premium safety features in mobile app”
SharePoint syncs via OneDrive, but offers better categorisation and integration with Windows Explorer and Office (“sites”).
I don’t think that the family plans offer tenant management.
Since the only way that DropBox makes sense as anything more than a “lifestyle business” is by focusing on the enterprise. The correct comparison would be what they both offer enterprise customers and not my comparison is on the personal side.
We have Dropbox on our phone so photos are automatically uploaded to it, this is great because we love sharing out pictures. If we were to do this with one of the other services we would have to mess around with photo permissions and 'share' them with the other person constantly. I got iCloud family thinking it would behave like a single folder the family could access but found out it's really just a bunch of individual iCloud accounts with a shared quota.
She can scan a document at home on the Brother scanner that automatically places the file onto Dropbox. I can immediately fill it out or sign it from my iPad remotely, and she will have the modified document waiting for her. This came in very handy when moving houses and having a bunch of paperwork to complete. I can't even imagine how this process would be on another cloud storage provider.
There have been many times where I just want to cancel my Dropbox subscription because the pricing and storage tiers don't suit me but I can't find a suitable replacement.
I appreciate them for being an independent company that is doing its own thing in a gradual way. The internet needs more of those. But it would be miserable if they became a major player with their existing contempt towards end users.
We use dropbox as a poor persons collaboration tool. About 100,000 files in 20,000 folders. My major complaint - when it gets stuck syncing a quit on the app and restart of the app solves things - so I wish they would do that internally to the app, just timeout and restart whatever is jamming things up.
I do like the app / folders scoped permissions. For apps that play well there is an apps folder, and the app just has access to its own folder in there. A nice integration point for apps to dump files to for users to look at.
Most users use almost nothing so for our use cases google drive has no marginal cost and I've been seeing what I consider positive changes to the google drive story (and maybe speed?)
What does this complaint mean? You mean Drive doesn't sync down shared files for you to use offline?
On my Chromebook the integration between local files, my Drive files, and Drive files shared by others with me is completely transparent, including local caching of files I've viewed so I can access them again offline, which furthermore includes the directory listings of "shared with me" with the cached and not cached files distinguished by bold or grey names. I can also explicitly mark Drive files as available offline, if I want to manage it manually.
As others have pointed out, their design seems to have gone downhill, I haven't visited dropbox in a while but I recall them having a very nice and clean design. Now it looks like someone's MVP that was put together in an afternoon.
Now I want to turn fonts back on just to see the design you are complaining about.
Every site looks Brutalist when you render everything in Courier Pro :)
Here's another example: https://i.imgur.com/Y4JLsmU.png
The down arrow means "download", so the side arrow must mean...."sideload"?
OneDrive probably has a >50m install base without any appreciable value add over Dropbox & Google Drive.
Microsoft Teams probably also has >50m user accounts without any appreciable value add over Slack.
Dropbox has distribution. Note, I am not defending / speculating on their ability to execute.
So, they're trying to build an ecosystem around their user's files, so they can both capture more files (growth), and create value from this file trove.
I understand their position, but they're also hurting their own user base who want basic file syncing by ignoring them (e.g. people who want a better Linux client, KDE compatibility, macOS M1 smart sync woes, etc.).
If they solely focus on file sync, there are other competitors coming fast, too (Google is cheap, iCloud is cheap, pCloud is European, etc.), but keeping the integration, performance and features moat is the only sensible strategy for them, at the moment.
(Possibly NSFW)
But the reason they did it is because they had hit a growth ceiling with their (mostly) engineer users.
So their new positioning was meant to attract a new audience and help the company grow.
This Shop experiment tells me their cloud storage growth has plateaud again and they’re looking for ways to tap into new markets.
I understood the reasons behind their redesign. Same product, different audience.
This Shop thing… not so much.
Same audience, different product.
I think HN at the time wasn’t against the guy so much (the opposite), but that whole incident pissed me off. I hope Dropbox can take away Gumroad market share.
On the other hand, Dropbox doesn't have anything like Gumroad's Discovery page, so if that's something that you think might drive sales, it might be worth paying Gumroad's higher fees.
They surely must have saw that there is a hole to be filled, but I find it a bit hard to see them surpassing Gumroad.
If I were selling something, I sure as hell would want to lock it down as much as possible, not like sell something behind weaponized share links
The cheapest Dropbox subscription is meanwhile $12 and overkill for most casual users. Maybe it isn't worth it for them to charge lower amounts on a credit card?
I was bummed, but for a publicly traded company its a little hard to argue with the logic.
I can parse the state of the files inside a directory pretty quickly with the inline icons, too.
However, I understand your woes. iCloud doesn't work as straightforward as other cloud providers, and makes its own decisions. On the other hand, I agreed with its choices so far.
- OneDrive because it comes with O365.
- iCloud Drive 2TB - integration with iPhones and the family plan
- Amazon Photo Storage - free with Prime.
- Google Drive - I still don’t pay it for. But when I run out of the free storage. I will just because of the photo search.
I use all of them for photo and video backups mostly.
Because I want to use less clients, and don't want to keep track of my files and let them rot. All of the files in my cloud accounts are backed up to local storage, but Dropbox is used to store a lot of files which were on my personal workstation. The reason is, I'll have a life transition and won't have this desktop machine anymore. Hence I need these files anywhere and everywhere.
Having a lot of cloud storage is nice, but mentally keeping tack of files is not.
As a side effect, I can ruthlessly delete files and remove cruft.
Hmmm. Only Fans can think of the ways that this kind of Hub might be used.
>And so he started trolling us a little bit, saying we’re a feature, not a product, and telling us a bunch of things like that we don’t control an operating system so we’re going to be disadvantaged, we’re going to have to figure out distribution deals, which are risky, and sort of a bunch of business-plan critiques. But then he was like, ‘Alright, well I guess we’re gonna have to go kill you, basically.’ Maybe not in those words, but pretty close.
They don't want to dedicate the necessary resources to keep their sync clients in top shape in recent times. That's kinda troubling.
I would literally pay them a buck as an annoyance tax each time I have to suck a file out of there, if they would make it painless to do via a browser.
Several people seem to expect that he would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother him at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.
Anyway, he's pretty satisfied with where life has taken him. He's certainly not going to sweat someone combing through his post history in a vague attempt to dunk on him.