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April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

news.ycombinator.com

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

#81

Post by pbhjpbhj »

fananta wrote: post #4

I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught up in the details. I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.

The problem as I see it is a that "show HN" is simply "here what do you think of this". If I - as a sort-of web-designer - look at the page and see a problem with alignments, lack of call to action, poor SEO optimisation or something then I want to offer that up; that's what I think.

Generally HN isn't the best forum to offer these more trivial thoughts - you really want to say "what do you think of this concept" or "what do you think about how I've implemented {concept X}".

Usually then if there's something that looks wrong but is not appropriate for discussion - like a spelling mistake - I'll take a glance to see if there's a simple contact form and use that instead. Emailing seems too much trouble unless I'm hoping you'll ask me to do some work for you(!).

Ugliness of the launch page seems quite important however and as it's subjective it's a point that could be discussed or on which the votes would help gauge the importance of the point.

If you feel the details are fine, or don't need work, then ignore the comments. Ditto for this comment.

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

#82

Post by GFischer »

smtddr wrote: post #63
raverbashing wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and totally irrelevant when considering consumers. That's the most important part, and the mostly often ignored in HN discussions It's the same with the difference between the Apple I and Appple II

>That's the most important part, and the mostly often ignored in HN discussions Example... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572743

When (if) Netflix adds live sports, (and channel-like functions), it'll be the nail in the coffin for cable tv.

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

#83

Post by ams6110 »

fit2rule wrote: post #36
bstar77 wrote: post #3

Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.

I think a far more insidious fact is that Dropbox fills in a gap left wide open by incompetent OS developers. Its the 21st Century - the OS should be providing such features inherently, without requiring a third party involvement. Maybe HN'ers, at that time, were somehow conscious of this fact, and thus declined to 'see the revolution' that was headed their way. Either way, since there was no other option, Dropbox wa…

Dropbox support several OSes though, which is still better than any one OS providing a similar capability natively. In general, the OS should just do what it NEEDS to do, and let applications fill out the rest.

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

#84

Post by vvvVVVvvv »

th3byrdm4n wrote: post #15

I love this flashback, thanks for sharing. Between being a reminder that group thinking isn't the best thinking, no matter the quality of the group - and encouraging me to get out there - fail and be criticized. . . Great.

Group thinking is not bad, as long as we're defining group : (small) set of people with lot of common characteristics, goals (if applicable). The opposite of the "mass" which usually is a large set of people whom highest common denominator is to be human.

The question is whether HN can be considered a group or a small mass =)

Plus you have to keep in mind the average pov will be biased in a different way than let's say marketing101.net.

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

#85

Post by 300bps »

singular wrote: post #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 enoug…

With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical Dropbox customer.

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

#86

Post by esusatyo »

raverbashing wrote: post #17
broodbucket wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His statement is correct, and totally irrelevant when considering consumers.

> and totally irrelevant when considering consumers. That's the most important part, and the mostly often ignored in HN discussions It's the same with the difference between the Apple I and Appple II

It's the same with any modern Apple products too. People called iPads and iPhones stupid.

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

#87

Post by singular »

300bps wrote: post #85
singular wrote: post #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 enoug…

With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical Dropbox customer.

As I said, very easy to achieve as a developer (I hadn't done anything crazy), and the symlinks were working up to that point.

Even as a non-typical dropbox user (a developer, then), I think there should have been some kind of a warning a, some ability to recover from the situation b (I was left for nearly a month with a completely non-functional dropbox), and not suddenly getting dropped without warning by support c.

If I'd known up front that a deployment of not that unusual amounts of code (especially if you use git) would have led dropbox to irrecoverably fail for me, I wouldn't have used them in the first instance.

I don't think even as a 'non-typical' user the very poor, typically big co, experience I had was justified, esp. given that I am a member of the group of people who first started using dropbox.

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

#88

Post by jiggy2011 »

300bps wrote: post #85
singular wrote: post #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 enoug…

With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical Dropbox customer.

Good service/support is about recognising that sometimes your customers are not typical and accommodating them if at all possible rather than just serving the lowest common denominator.

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

#90

Post by mkr-hn »

josteink wrote: post #28

I remember being sceptical at the time (lots of people were). The consensus here on HN seemed to be that Dropbox was trying to solve a problem Microsoft had already tried to solve a million times (file-sync) and the fact that Microsoft had never been able to sell it and get a decent user-base for their service was proof that this wasn't something people actually wanted. Funny how a good enough implementation and good…

> I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it.

It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems.

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