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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

I have a few qualms with this app: 1. 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.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. 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?

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Your first point is almost a meme at this point - so many products can be written off as pointless with the statement:

> As a [type of tech person], [product] is completely unnecessary as you can easily build a similar system yourself by simply combining [tool A] with [tool B] and [tool C]. It's so simple!

I'm not disagreeing with your point, but it misses the point that often the benefit of using a particular product is that you don't have to build it yourself, not to mention the other benefits you could get from using the exact same system as somebody else (e.g. sharing Postman collections).

My comment is actually from the dropbox announcement many years ago. It actually is a meme. lol

Has this sarcastic rejoinder actually held up, though?

"Dropbox’s stock falls as it struggles to squeeze more revenue from existing customers" - https://siliconangle.com/2023/02/16/dropboxs-stock-falls-str...

Given the comment was made 16 years ago, I think so.

16 years ago it was plausible to say Dropbox was going to be a massive success in the future. Now we're in the future we know it wasn't.

Classic HN response–"This is trivial to build"/"I could build this in a weekend".

Setting valuation aside, clearly there is some non-negative value prop for some set of users who don't want to build everything themselves (as evidenced by the fact that they have a non-trivial number of paying users).

This is a meme from the dropbox announcement.

lol. /r/woosh on me. In calling out the meme, I became another meme.

"I am become pedant, destroyer of discourse."

haha. All good.

Here's the comment if you're curious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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