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Comment by kraig911 | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox my one critique is can you please make it affordable again. I just can't justify the cost as there are cheaper services out there. I don't care about PDF signing etc. I fear OneDrive/Google Drive are eating you lunch because it's a hard sell to be competitive against them price wise.

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I left Dropbox when they added (and preemptively enabled) a checkbox that shared your data with them for AI training. I refuse to do business with a company that will just unilaterally invade my privacy like that. They can make it as cheap as they want, I'll never go back.

Selling data is always the last play for all businesses that have data.

Either you never give it to them in a way that can be sold (e.g. fully encrypted), or you expect them to sell it when the leaders need to increase cash flow.

Citation please, about Dropbox training models with customer data?

I think this is what people are talking about? RE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38684252

https://help.dropbox.com/view-edit/privacy-settings-dropbox-...

> “For eligible accounts, […] The Third-party AI toggle is turned on”

I just logged in and checked and don't have the "Third-Party AI features" tab, but I only have an old free account and am probably not at the tier where this appears.

That feature doesn't train the model on customer's data though, unless I'm missing something.

I agree it's annoying it was enabled by default in places, but I'm trying to either correct the incorrect "for AI training" part, or find a citation that shows they are actually doing AI training with it.

The article Lammy linked is indeed the correct one. When that bit of news came out I checked my account, and it turned out that Dropbox had added and enabled the toggle without my consent. I was a paying customer mind you, I paid like $120/yr for my storage. After they pulled that crap I started working on setting up Nextcloud hosted in a VPS. It's more expensive, but Dropbox permanently burned my trust when they did what they did.

did you manage to catch it before they started the policy?

Exactly!!! I stopped being a customer when they lost touch with their customer base. They decided to become something else, adjust plans however they thought, introduced useless featured and all these while riding the money train. I feel sorry for those being laid off, it’s not immediately/directly their fault. It’s the management and the product responsible that should take the blame.

Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

It's been a product for 17 years.

Not when your competition are consumer companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple.

I'm on Google One at $100 per year, getting more services than Dropbox can offer with their $120 plan.

Maybe they have a future in enterprise sales, but they are outcompeted even by Zoho in consumer space

I'm responding to the person who quoted Steve Jobs by saying Dropbox isn't a product, it's a feature. 17 years is a really long time on the web, and Dropbox has not only been a product, but a successful publicly traded company for most of that time, during which so many other "real" products have risen and fallen. The fact that you subscribe to Google One doesn't tell me anything, except that Google created a product to compete with Dropbox, which is also a product.

A product thats getting its lunch eaten by products that have dropbox as a feature

A feature of what? Surely Jobs didn't expect a feature of Windows, OSX, Android, Linux, and ChromeOS to all seamlessly interact with one another.

I don't doubt that Jobs might have seen Dropbox as a feature that Apple could have implemented across the Apple ecosystem, but that's a pretty limited view of where the value of Dropbox lies.

Why is iCloud different? For the Apple ecosystem, interaction with Mac/iPhone/AppleTV is all that matters. Which is why I don't subscribe to the garden. But it's a reasonable perspective of Jobs that doesn't conflict with this statement.

But it's a reasonable perspective of Jobs that doesn't conflict with this statement.

That's what I'm saying. From Jobs' perspective it was a feature for Apple, because Jobs believed only Apple devices matter. For everyone else that's a pretty limited view of the world that doesn't really apply, and measuring Dropbox (as a company) by that standard is nonsensical. It should be obvious that there's value in sharing files more widely than just within one ecosystem.

It's a product that I was willing to pay for (until I required native E2E encryption). _iCloud Drive_ is a feature, mostly — aside from the fact that you still have to pay for it to be useful, so kind of still a product.

Steve Jobs was wrong about many things, and this was one of them.

People bring up the old naysaying comment about DropBox from some HN user years ago like it was a bad comment.

Maybe people like bad products, and make bad products rich all the time?

You can make a good product and go out of business, sometimes through actually no fault of your own too.

I agree, Dropbox is a feature - and it shouldn't be a product.

OneDrive/Google can afford to take a loss on you, they are effectively selling you storage at a loss. Dropbox can not do this.

you're not a target customer anymore.

they need $$$ from enterprise, everything else is a distraction.

I stopped using them when they refused to work with valid windows paths - to wit, files and folders with emoji in their names.

Now I pay for google drive instead.

Funny how Hacker News spent the past 15 years laughing at anyone questioning the viability of Dropbox as a business, but then after two years in a down market half the site is begging them to be cheap again.

What's the matter? You like the sound of that crusty, slow Linux NAS that this site has derided for years?

>You like the sound of that crusty, slow Linux NAS that this site has derided for years?

Honestly, it's a lot more enjoyable than I expected. Internet enabled, easily expandable (my setup is 5TB), can quickly setup a plex server for media, and can easily up/download any files needed from anywhere I have connection. And I feel I only scrathed the surface of potential. One of the more useful investments I made this decade.

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