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April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

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71–80 of 181 posts

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#71

So many people today are still harping on the security aspect (Not ~ free ~ software, you don't own the servers). How does that matter at all when selling to a large consumer base? How many customers of dropbox know what those words mean? Like so many commercial offerings you could built it from source and get some hacky scripts going on your own but 99% of the world isn't going to do that.

Regarding specifically the "free software" statement, It's a holy war. One where I'm on the side of the religious zealots, for once. The special extra fanatical wingeing about big software like DropBox not being free comes from seeing the founders as smart people who have a base ripe for promoting your (my) view (that free software is just plain better for the world), and if they just saw it our way, maybe things wou…

Thats fine and I understand the advantages to open source.

But if you're in the business of selling software (especially to end users and not b2b) like many people here claim to be, that isn't a valid concern or argument against a business model.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#73

I'm still not using Dropbox. I absolutely detest the idea that I'm relying on a 3rd party for a feature that I consider should be built into every modern Operating System. At the point when OS vendors relinquished to the Web 2.0 Cult their responsibilities for such features as easy filesharing, the world lost something. Absolutely, its great that people can share files this way. But absolutely, its terrible that it r…

I would love a simple integrated file hosting solution built into OS X, where my computer is actually the host instead of iCloud. I think, though, that the lack of high upload bandwidth for almost every Internet consumer makes this less useful today. However, if a big OS would actually develop and ship it, perhaps we'd have users demanding greater upload bandwidth and help push forward the idea of the "person as Inte…

>I think, though, that the lack of high upload bandwidth for almost every Internet consumer makes this less useful today.

How do your files get uploaded at high speed to Dropbox right now?

And after all, upload bandwidth is quite arbitrary - again, its the marketing people in control when the technologists should be, actually.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#74
Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might want to use them.

After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using 100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files. Ok, fair enough, perhaps there are technical limitations meaning indexing >300k files is tough (very easy to get to that count if you're keeping open source codebases on DB), so I move files out of dropbox and clear its cache. After a week of constant 24/7 100% CPU usage and dropbox failing to update anything, I contact customer support and get sent copy + pasted boilerplate telling me to do what I've already done.

After more than one email to say 'I've done that, what next?' I get told it's due to symlinks in my dropbox folder. I have several in node_modules folders, and have never had a problem with them before, so I find this weird but remove all symlinks from my dropbox folder. No change after several days.

I try deleting files on the web interface - it refuses to do so for a folder with a large number of files in, and tells me to use the desktop interface (great...)

Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.)

At this point the customer support tells me how to delete my account if I'm not happy and they simply stop replying to my (polite) emails.

Googling around it appears this issue has existed for at least a year and a half, and yet there is very little mention of it (there's a bulletpoint hidden away on their website) nor does the interface warn you about it at any point. How hard would it be to at least add a notification like 'looks like you're adding a lot of files, please don't add too many more or I might stop working'.

I used to hold up dropbox as a great example of a YC company that was technically innovative and something of a hacker's company, but this experience has left me quite massively disappointed.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#75
Here is my personal experience...

It is actually took place, later on when there was an announcement regarding Dropbox raising from Sequoia .

This was the first time I heard of Dropbox.

Those days building a product which did similar to what dropbox were doing, except that mine used any distributed version control it could find on a computer (I had it supporting git, mercurial and bazzar) and push to servers with SSH.

It was all automatic, built with python, and monitored FS for changes. Supported any number of directories, etc.

So I felt I have this great prototype which I considered starting working on this full-time, till that morning when I read the TC article and I realized it simply been done, and by people who now have $6M in their pocket to make it even more awesome.

Given the effort and dreams I built upon my own version, I remembered how I could not use dropbox for quite some time.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#76
post #2

If there is any thread that might help comfort you about the pessimism sometimes found on HN, this is it.

It's also amusing that the top comment on this thread is a big rant about one specific customer service incident. Totally unrelated to the linked story, and as usual, not seeing the forest for the trees.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#79
post #77

Also there is a whole thread regarding its YC Application https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503 - which sadly, the link itself is no longer available (404). I assume many would be happy to read it though.

Here: http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdr...
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