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Comment by woodylondon | Hacker News Reader

The old age problem of having an open project where people don't understand what an alpha is.

You give this out to the world for feedback and people moan its not working.

I am old geek and back in the day you knew an Alpha was just for the playground to kick around - most likely will crash, worse case will destroy you PC but you have a play / provide some feedback and wait for the next release.

A lot of other projects do everything in the dark and do a big ta da at the end - and missed the opportunity for the community of "alpha" or "beta" testers to provide some feedback along the way.

Keep going - its added to my list to take look once in beta as I prefer to play in that playground rather than the alpha one these days.

I like the idea!

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It's the old-age disconnect between the marketing, the claims and the actual functionality.

For example, the title claims that it's a file explorer. However, someone in the comments shows that it fails at actually exploring files. Something which even an alpha project would not fail to do considering the claim.

Only when you read through the marketing copy and the comments, you realise that it's a hybrid cloud/local/cross-device Dropbox that creates a view of your files across systems/locations, and only once it's done that, only then can it do the actual file exploring. At least for now.

age old

Well, English evolves...

I personally prefer "age old". I was going for the same opening statement as the original comment :)

I was actually thinking about exactly this when I read the headline. Reading this is disappointing

you're not wrong but perhaps being a bit unfair.

the project page has that front and center, it's only really the submission title that's implying otherwise.

The title doesn't claim it IS a file explorer, it is an alpha version of something that aims to become a file explorer (for some definition of "explorer"). That's exactly the point of the OP?

I mean the title of this HN post is...

> Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer (github.com/spacedriveapp)

Then the github file about section says...

> Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file explorer, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem written in Rust.

Then the github page opens by saying...

> Spacedrive - A file explorer from the future.

And claims it offers...

> a free file management experience like no other.

So I think we can forgive people for thinking it is a file explorer!

Completely ignoring

> UPDATE: Spacedrive is under active development, we are in the pre-alpha stage, with builds occasionally released via GitHub actions, official alpha coming soon.

A file explorer that doesn't explore files in alpha is not a file explorer ;)

You'll have to check back when it gets to alpha then, since it doesn't claim to be there yet.

Yeah, but considering it says "this is a file explorer" a load of times, saying "it doesn't claim to be a file explorer" isn't right.

I think expectations broke as companies shifted from a focus on polished shrinkwrap to a ubiquitous race to market with continuous deployment.

For them, “alpha” and “beta” became ways to say “fresh out of the oven” and high profile revenue-generating products were proudly emblazoned with those words for years.

At this point, it doesn’t even mean anything. Half the internet is running on some 0.11.45-alpha of something or other, maintained by corporate engineering teams whose total compensation is in the millions.

It makes it legitimately hard for people to know what to expect and what standard to hold things to.

Time to wrap around and have -omegas. When that standard becomes the norm we can keep going backwards until -alpha, at which point we can use --omega and so on.

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