Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#151

Post by Gene_Parmesan » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #85

Yeah, I had this new interface popup yesterday at random, same time as I got a notification that a file had been uploaded. I didn't click on the notification, Dropbox seems to have used this as a hook to launch the preloaded new application. WTF, Dropbox? I've recently unsubscribed from Dropbox Pro, in part because I was no longer using it that much and, mostly, because of the non-stop, incessant, annoying pleas for…

I'll never understand this impulse to hard sell your already-paying customers on more shit. It's like once these companies start facing adversity, they just can't help themselves from trying to squeeze things from people who are already giving them money. It lends this sort of 'captive-audience' vibe to the whole affair.

Like, sure, publicize your higher tiers, make their value propositions such that I might say, "Huh, actually I could use that stuff." But if that stuff is appropriately displayed at the time I originally signed up, I've generally already completed that value evaluation when I made whatever initial purchase I made. I already went through and decided what features I needed or didn't need, and selected appropriately. If I didn't want the extra upload bandwidth (or whatever) when I originally signed up, I probably don't want it two weeks later.

Getting hard sells from a product you already use is almost insulting in a way. I'm already giving you money -- with today's subscription models, I'm probably giving you money every month. But that's not enough for you? It totally changes my opinion of a thing from "useful product that does what I want" to "merely a means for its owners to make money." Those are two very different outlooks. The first is collaborative: they create a product that I find useful and provide it, thereby making my life better in some small way, and I benefit them by paying for it. The second feels almost manipulative, like I have to be on guard for potential marketing tactics that don't actually benefit me in any way.

Honestly, the only thing that these sort of 'push-notification upsells' do for me is they act as small prompts for me to reconsider my attachment to the product. Each time I get one, it makes me go, "Wow, this just keeps annoying me more. Do I really use this thing enough to justify this ongoing annoyance?"

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#152

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #142

mrlala wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break. OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff. We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reason…

Google File Stream ( https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7329379?hl=en ) is the bomb - many TBs of files in it, can not even count how many and it is fast and adaptive. If you haven't tried it, you do not know what you are missing.

What's up with them? They now have three applications to do file syncing? Google Drive, Backup & Sync, and Drive File Stream?

I've kept using Dropbox for all these years because they never confused people like this. There was a single app that gave you a folder that synced.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#153

Post by manigandham » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #117

manigandham wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users are already a tiny fraction to be worth the support costs. Adding multiple filesystems isn't viable.

It's not added ; it used to work and then they removed it.

Same thing, software isn't static and it probably wasn't worth the ongoing engineering and support.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#154

Post by 0_gravitas » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

tsegers wrote: post #141

0_gravitas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely understand why "normal" users wouldn't use an online repo (especially if they've never used git itself), but I can't really buy `git add ., git commit -m "sync", git push -u` being too inconvenient, especially when you can just alias all of those. Now if mobile phones are the main reason I can definately understand a bit more, but I do my best to minimize my usage of it anyway, it's mainly a messenger +…

That's still one action more than is required for using a synchronization service. The killer feature is not having to do anything at all. I save my file on one computer, and it's available on all my other machines, my phone and anything with a web browser without a conscious thought at all.

I wonder how hard it would be to make a folder that automatically pushes itself to a git repo whenever it detects a change in its contents, I've actually been thinking about that for a bit now. The optimist in me thinks it can't be too hard, could be a nice project to do someday.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#155

Post by thirdsun » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

While I’m not liking the direction Dropbox is taking I still haven’t found anything that rivals it as general purpose online storage and meets the following requirements:

- can be used as cloud backup destination - I use Arq[0] to backup a huge music library close to 1TB in daily intervals to my Dropbox. I have never used Dropbox‘ official app.

- since my music is located in a place of my , an external drive which might as well be an NAS at some point, I‘d need to be able to set the source folder for that backup/sync workflow. Moving my library to a special sync folder, like the Dropbox folder, isn‘t an option.

- I‘d also need be able to use that storage to upload and share large files for public download occasionally. S3 could certainly do that but I‘d prefer a simpler approach that allows me to quickly upload and share files from monile and desktop environments alike. Dropbox‘ mobile app and website work quite well in that regard. I don‘t want separate services for my backup and file sharing.

- preferably cross-platform, but macOS support and good browser UX is required at the very least.

- should be affordable, certainly not more than 10 bucks monthly for at least 1 TB. S3 pricing structure is too variable. It should be a flat fee.

Is there any worthwhile alternative to Dropbox that ticks all those boxes?

[0] https://www.arqbackup.com/

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#156

Post by bluecalm » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

mrlala wrote: post #91

bhouston wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!" > > No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs. This argument is a good one but it only covers the rise of Dropbox. We are now in a different era. Dropbox's functionality is now table stakes and not somet…

Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break. OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff. We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reason…

I don't know. I had ten of thousands of files once and wanted to delete them. Dropbox client hangs and then gives an error. API doesn't work with that many files, web version doesn't work either. I ended up writing a script that uses API call for every separate file and it took like 3 days to delete them all. I really don't think they handle many files well after that experience and wouldn't trust them if I needed really a lot of files in the future.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#157

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #96

speeder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards. It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies. It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition…

The vast majority of people didn't buy Sound Blaster cards for their advanced 3D sound rendering, though. They bought them to play sound at a level more advanced than a PC speaker, which is what most had at the time. Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card. I know I didn't, especially when working out what you're spending your money on - video cards were far mo…

Also because built-in cards had shitty Realtek chips. I remember fetching a Sound Blaster on my third PC just so that I could use custom drivers to bypass the Realtek chip and use a proper card with advanced DSP support.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#158

Post by braythwayt » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #129

papln wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows by default has cloud sync on Mac and iOS and Linux and Android? > macOS does as well. On Windows and Linux and Android?

Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have. For instance, the only thing I really need Dropbox for at this point is one shared folder with friends who use both Mac and Windows (which could likely be handled by Google Drive, and might even be able to be handled by iCloud Drive by the end of the year) -- and Scrivener, because its developer apparently can…

There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.

For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs.

The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues.

It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share.

IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers.

Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO.

IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#159

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #126

aero142 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like the “we’re all dead in the long run” version of right.

I don't think so. He specifically called out the fact that their entire product is eventually going to be a single feature in every consumer OS. And now it is. That hardly applies to every product/service out there.

The problem here is that the biggest value of that product is that there is one of it. We have three major desktop OSes and two major phone OSes, people have multiple devices - usually at least one running a desktop OS and one running a mobile OS. File syncing as an OS feature has significantly less utility, because OS vendors can't get their shit together and agree on a standard, cross-platform solution.

This is very much a "we're all dead in the end" observation. Any good enough product is gonna get killed by turning it into multiple instances of mutually incompatible features, in a war for market share that claims user's time and patience as collateral damage.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#160

Post by iamnotacrook » Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #65

navigatesol wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please go back to being a folder that syncs A simple, effective utility can't support a multi-billion valuation. Where else will the VC Ponzi dollars go?

Isn't the problem that most Dropbox users just won't pay for it?

I would have paid for something which worked properly on linux but back when I tried it it didn't. Now I just use google drive or gitlab depending on whether or not I care if anyone else can see it. It's not really worth a lot of my time, money or effort. I'm pretty sure that for many people just doing the same (giving people access by sending them a link via whatsapp/email) is enough.