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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#11
post #2

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files,…

> right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item

You have described Google Drive.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#12
post #6
post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

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.

> Most people I know e-mail files to themselves

It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#13

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to s…

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#14
post #2

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

i didn't expect to laugh when i enter news today :)

Daniel Gackle thinks BrandonM's is most probably the most misunderstood comment in news.yc history.

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

  Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.

  I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

  When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

  The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

  * described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#16
post #2

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

It was quite a stupid and expensive ride, but they were vindicated, especially on point 3:

>Our business is in a stronger position than it's been in years

>What’s energized me most since joining Dropbox is the connection people have with our brand

>It gives me a lot of confidence in what’s ahead for Dropbox

All corporate fluff, no actual content.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#17
Really hope that all the positives in the leadership announcement are true.

Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a hedge against the risks of Dropbox enshitification).

But I'd love to see Dropbox continue to provide worthy convenient service.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files,…

> right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item You have described Google Drive.

Not quite; it's not a direct link to the item.

Put into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#19
I 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 years? I feel like the company could have had a skeleton crew keeping the lights on and I wouldn't have noticed a thing.

Now, in 2026, all I want is for my coding agent to be able to grep the files in dropbox. Feel like dropbox will sooner rely on selling merch than offer something useful like that, though.

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