I've used and paid for Dropbox for well over a decade. Other than the rare hiccup every few years (usually due to switching machines/OSes or whatnot), it's been rock solid and a true workhorse. I know there are many other options, including iCloud Drive which I use sparingly, but Dropbox is a service I trust. I hope it continues in that manner and they don't destroy their reputation with a woebegone "pivot to AI".
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#92I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service. On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen y…
>On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters.
Honestly that's what I love about it. I work on something on my desktop. Then when I go to my laptop, everything is there too. It's great. When I get another computer I can just enable Dropbox, walk away, and all my projects, notes, pictures, etc. will be there. I pay them some amount of money per month and it just works and I very rarely need to visit the website or even click on the icon in my toolbar.
Sometimes I read notes on my phone and it's kind of annoying that I can't search through text using their app, but I generally consider that to be a problem with Android rather than Dropbox.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#93As Steve Jobs famously told Drew Houston..."you have a feature, not a product."
Jobs was ultimately right in the end.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.
Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.
At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#95Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And yet, it somehow has significantly better conversations than most places online. Maybe on par with reddit 10-15 years ago. It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations, particularly for general tech.
Yes, although unfortunately the only problem with it, there's no way to contribute to older topics in a meaningful way. Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And yet, it somehow has significantly better conversations than most places online. Maybe on par with reddit 10-15 years ago. It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations, particularly for general tech.
> It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations
Yeah I used to learn so much across quite a few forums. Most of those communities are dead, dying, filled with bots or filled with people making shit up/just posting lousy jokes now. A lot of folks have jumped to Discord, which frankly, isn't for me, so feeling a bit lost on where to surf these days
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#98I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service. On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen y…
>On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. Honestly that's what I love about it. I work on something on my desktop. Then when I go to my laptop, everything is there too. It's great. When I get another computer I can just enable Dropbox, walk away, and all my projects, notes, pictures, etc. will be there. I pay them some amount of money per month and it just w…
I generally have not thought about how Dropbox spent its money until I visited the web interface, which has been redesigned for the tenth time over, and remembered that there’s still no way to see how much space your folders are taking up.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#99Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs
Don't forget CVS
I still use it for NetSBD source
I use FTP mirrors for various source code
I use FTP for moving files to and from mobile phones
I have never used Dropbox. That company made some people wealthy no doubt but that doesn't help me
I also use USB sticks extensively, e.g., primarily for booting computers, but also for data storage
I have broken a couple when using them in non-NetBSD OS but never lost one
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.
Important to note here that Dan has been for years asking people to understand this comment in the context of the time and circumstances it was written. It's not a dunk on Dropbox. It's not the "less space than a Nomad" iPod comment on Slashdot. It was helpful and constructive criticism for Houston's YC application --- very specifically the application itself. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&…
The "viral" point was a good one, and which they solved quite cleverly: as a student I got 10 GB for free, but additional 10 GB for each recruited person. Everyone at campus was on a recruiting spree for a while, to bulk up free storage.
Of course, that doesn't make them money. But millions of users that then had all their files there and kept using it when no longer students (so paying), and recommended it to their places of work etc.