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Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Drop

Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox. Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.

disantlor 6y ago
For me, Dropbox is a great product that makes my life/workflow with music production so much easier and convenient. Moving interface things around is at worst annoying but really just trivial. I don't understand why people on HN get so reliably get fired up about UI changes.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Agreed, it's been a really nice service. Plus, downloading is already taken care of for me with sync, which is where Dropbox is really positioned for best use. If I'm downloading something from a Dropbox, that's a pretty good sign I'm not going to be working with that person much, or it's a one-off task.
- planb 6y ago
  These are not simply UI changes. Dropbox implements more and more dark patterns that go directly against everything it once stood for. This service used to be a fire-and-forget way to have a local directory that's also online and on multiple machines. Now it's a service that tries to be everything at once and never gets out of your way.
  - disantlor 6y ago
    I have to say I have literally never once had the thought that Dropbox is in my way. I have a 3TB pro account which I have setup on my studio computer with full sync to an external drive. I record/work on sessions with sync continually active. Both of those things should be "no no"'s, but it works fine. I go home and my laptop is smart syncing the recently active sessions only which conserves space on the laptop drive but lets me do some small work on recently active sessions. It's totally seamless and I cannot recall the last time I was even alerted by Dropbox about anything except that I was hitting my 3TB cap soon. The only issue I ever had was using it on Windows where it would occasionally create conflicted file copies, which was annoying, but moving to OSX resolved that.
    - TurningCanadian 6y ago
      You don't use the web interface much, eh?
      - disantlor 6y ago
        I do. I go through stuff and use the star interface to track things I want to focus on. Actually I was slightly annoyed that they made it more hidden on the web interface. Looks like they added it back.
  - FreakyT 6y ago
    Completely agree! Dropbox was at its best when it had almost no UI outside of "sync status" and "pause/resume" in a menu. Now they constantly shove their terrible UI in your face when all you ever want to do is sync/view your files.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    If I'm paying for something I don't want to be engaged. I want to be efficient. It's incredible just how bad UIs have gotten in the last 10 years. I use Nextcloud and there are parts of the UI that defy logic. For example, when I select a file it brings up an "Actions" menu that's hidden via a hamburger button. It has 4 options and I have about 3000px of horizontal whitespace on the same row. TLDR; It's all hamburgers and whitespace and I don't understand why.
  - babyshake 6y ago
    You can tell that an increasing proportion of their product engineering is based around figuring out how to convince/trick people into paying, or paying more. This seems to be the rule and not the exception for SaaS companies that have grown to a certain point.
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  Too bad for Dropbox and other companies HN people are not the only ones. There are at least two big variables here: 1 - Is the new UI actually better? by how much? 2 - What's the cost of change for the existing users? Bonus complexity: There are large groups of different customers inside your customer base. If your product is the best ever with no competitor in sight you can annoy them almost indefinitely, the second anything remotely similar appears, all the built up resentment just fuels the migration and it usually behaves like a tsunami, at first it's barely noticeable until a 3 foot wall keeps going and going and you can't do anything about it.
- te_chris 6y ago
  Absolutely this. As a producer as well dropbox means I can work off a laptop as my main machine - albeit a tricked out 15in mbp with 1TB SSD. Selective sync is amazing. The web UI is great for listening to demos and such - I'd love a playlist/play dir feature though.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox. Why is this such a huge problem for you? Seems super minor?
- notdang 6y ago
  for me it's a sign that marketing people took over the company
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I don't get why marketing would care about a minor detail in the UI after you're already using the product?
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      User retention. Keep people in the platform so they can't take their data. Force users to come back to dropbox again and again (to run up your engagement stats) instead of throwing the file over Slack or whatever.
    - lukeschlather 6y ago
      The detail is that you have two people: one is paying for the product and one is not. The one who is paying shares a file with the one who doesn't pay. Dropbox provides a worse experience for the person who doesn't pay. This is in contrast to services like Zoom or Google Drive where part of the sales pitch is that you get a seamless experience when communicating with people - even if the person you're talking to might not be paying, you can guarantee because you are paying their experience won't be impaired, at least for the duration of your interaction.
    - rtx 6y ago
      Have you seen the recent trend of hiding the login button.
- duiker101 6y ago
manigandham 6y ago
The company is nowhere near failing. It's just not necessary to be as big as it is. Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com. I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer.
- djhworld 6y ago
  For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their rigid pricing structure, £7.99 a month for 1TB is good value for people who use 1TB, but I only need like 10% of that so would be wasting money I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at £1.99 which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    Real hard to make a business with a $2 a month fee. When credit card fees in the US, the bank is eating like 50 cents of it. I think 7-8 bucks/pounds is about the minimum price for many apps to bother with it. Below that rather just have a limited “free” tier.
    - vladjjj 6y ago
      But I'd pay $25 a year in a heartbeat, otherwise I'm shuffling between free tiers.
    - throw3848 6y ago
      Charge yearly... Works for domains..
      - 6y ago
prionassembly 6y ago
Dropbox had a discontinuous price increase a couple of years ago that soured me on them. I'm still a user -- the price is still a couple of notches below marginal utility. But I no longer recommend it. Something similar happened to Evernote -- I stopped liking the brand when I started to feel price-gouged. And then I quit on them shortly after when the apps were not snappy and well-organized to my liking (at the price they were charging me). I was a bit of an Evernote evangelizer too. For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from canned peaches and pineapples.
- gresrun 6y ago
  I believe you’re referring to “Notecards”. In the US they come in 2 common sizes: 5”x7” & 4”x6”
- spoonjim 6y ago
  Because software switching is annoying, raising prices is the oldest trick in the book for getting revenue growth when you have tapped out the potential inherent in your product.
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    Precisely, yes. And then this makes you wary of subscription-based software in general. At one point it seemed that an "extended Moore's law" (if not CPU transistors, then the general cost of compute, memory and storage) and the beauty of near-zero marginal costs would lead to a bright "there's an app for that" future. I remember Evernote launched at some point an iOS app to store food reviews, it was glorious. But now the future seems darker. Bean counters have finally noticed the windfall that's the extreme economies of scale in internet businesses. There's no "singularity" of accelerated tech change. I'm tech-savvy enough to roll out a personal blog stored on my custom sqlite format, but isn't it safer if I just write longhand and file it physically? Use the typing process for proofchecking. Decelerationism.
- dash2 6y ago
  >For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from canned peaches and pineapples. Hmm... you may not be Dropbox's most typical consumer! :-)
dalrympm 6y ago
I have been a Dropbox customer for several years and every single time I try to download a file from the web I get stumped. It's really a user hostile interface and it's up there on my list of things to replace but not high enough that I've done anything about it.
- hiimtroymclure 6y ago
  just downloaded it the other day to search for old files from long ago and was barraged by popups, installers, and trying to get me to do 5 things at once. So confusing. I gave up searching for what I was looking for
- anderspitman 6y ago
  I actually just made a little app yesterday that converts share urls into direct HTTP download URLs that are usable by cURL, etc. Not sure if this solves your problem: https://apitman.com/apps/droplink/ https://apitman.com/apps/droplink/
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
I don't think the writing is on the wall at all here. I think the company over shot a little, by trying to be a general-purpose enterprise platform instead of a tool (or suite of tools). But from what I know the core business and the team are still really strong. They're just more of a Slack and less of a Microsoft, and probably have to adjust for that realization.
jeffbarr 6y ago
I thought I was the only one who had trouble with this. Based on the other replies here, that's definitely not the case.
dnhz 6y ago
I'm confused here. Someone shared with me a file via dropbox, xlsx, and right at the top of the sidebar where I can leave comments, there's a download button.

disantlor 6y ago

For me, Dropbox is a great product that makes my life/workflow with music production so much easier and convenient. Moving interface things around is at worst annoying but really just trivial. I don't understand why people on HN get so reliably get fired up about UI changes.

themodelplumber 6y ago
Agreed, it's been a really nice service. Plus, downloading is already taken care of for me with sync, which is where Dropbox is really positioned for best use. If I'm downloading something from a Dropbox, that's a pretty good sign I'm not going to be working with that person much, or it's a one-off task.
planb 6y ago
These are not simply UI changes. Dropbox implements more and more dark patterns that go directly against everything it once stood for. This service used to be a fire-and-forget way to have a local directory that's also online and on multiple machines. Now it's a service that tries to be everything at once and never gets out of your way.
- disantlor 6y ago
  I have to say I have literally never once had the thought that Dropbox is in my way. I have a 3TB pro account which I have setup on my studio computer with full sync to an external drive. I record/work on sessions with sync continually active. Both of those things should be "no no"'s, but it works fine. I go home and my laptop is smart syncing the recently active sessions only which conserves space on the laptop drive but lets me do some small work on recently active sessions. It's totally seamless and I cannot recall the last time I was even alerted by Dropbox about anything except that I was hitting my 3TB cap soon. The only issue I ever had was using it on Windows where it would occasionally create conflicted file copies, which was annoying, but moving to OSX resolved that.
  - TurningCanadian 6y ago
    You don't use the web interface much, eh?
    - disantlor 6y ago
      I do. I go through stuff and use the star interface to track things I want to focus on. Actually I was slightly annoyed that they made it more hidden on the web interface. Looks like they added it back.
- FreakyT 6y ago
  Completely agree! Dropbox was at its best when it had almost no UI outside of "sync status" and "pause/resume" in a menu. Now they constantly shove their terrible UI in your face when all you ever want to do is sync/view your files.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  If I'm paying for something I don't want to be engaged. I want to be efficient. It's incredible just how bad UIs have gotten in the last 10 years. I use Nextcloud and there are parts of the UI that defy logic. For example, when I select a file it brings up an "Actions" menu that's hidden via a hamburger button. It has 4 options and I have about 3000px of horizontal whitespace on the same row. TLDR; It's all hamburgers and whitespace and I don't understand why.
- babyshake 6y ago
  You can tell that an increasing proportion of their product engineering is based around figuring out how to convince/trick people into paying, or paying more. This seems to be the rule and not the exception for SaaS companies that have grown to a certain point.
PedroBatista 6y ago
Too bad for Dropbox and other companies HN people are not the only ones. There are at least two big variables here: 1 - Is the new UI actually better? by how much? 2 - What's the cost of change for the existing users? Bonus complexity: There are large groups of different customers inside your customer base. If your product is the best ever with no competitor in sight you can annoy them almost indefinitely, the second anything remotely similar appears, all the built up resentment just fuels the migration and it usually behaves like a tsunami, at first it's barely noticeable until a 3 foot wall keeps going and going and you can't do anything about it.
te_chris 6y ago
Absolutely this. As a producer as well dropbox means I can work off a laptop as my main machine - albeit a tricked out 15in mbp with 1TB SSD. Selective sync is amazing. The web UI is great for listening to demos and such - I'd love a playlist/play dir feature though.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox. Why is this such a huge problem for you? Seems super minor?

notdang 6y ago
for me it's a sign that marketing people took over the company
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I don't get why marketing would care about a minor detail in the UI after you're already using the product?
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    User retention. Keep people in the platform so they can't take their data. Force users to come back to dropbox again and again (to run up your engagement stats) instead of throwing the file over Slack or whatever.
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    The detail is that you have two people: one is paying for the product and one is not. The one who is paying shares a file with the one who doesn't pay. Dropbox provides a worse experience for the person who doesn't pay. This is in contrast to services like Zoom or Google Drive where part of the sales pitch is that you get a seamless experience when communicating with people - even if the person you're talking to might not be paying, you can guarantee because you are paying their experience won't be impaired, at least for the duration of your interaction.
  - rtx 6y ago
    Have you seen the recent trend of hiding the login button.
duiker101 6y ago

manigandham 6y ago

The company is nowhere near failing. It's just not necessary to be as big as it is. Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com. I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer.

djhworld 6y ago
For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their rigid pricing structure, £7.99 a month for 1TB is good value for people who use 1TB, but I only need like 10% of that so would be wasting money I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at £1.99 which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Real hard to make a business with a $2 a month fee. When credit card fees in the US, the bank is eating like 50 cents of it. I think 7-8 bucks/pounds is about the minimum price for many apps to bother with it. Below that rather just have a limited “free” tier.
  - vladjjj 6y ago
    But I'd pay $25 a year in a heartbeat, otherwise I'm shuffling between free tiers.
  - throw3848 6y ago
    Charge yearly... Works for domains..
    - 6y ago

prionassembly 6y ago

Dropbox had a discontinuous price increase a couple of years ago that soured me on them. I'm still a user -- the price is still a couple of notches below marginal utility. But I no longer recommend it. Something similar happened to Evernote -- I stopped liking the brand when I started to feel price-gouged. And then I quit on them shortly after when the apps were not snappy and well-organized to my liking (at the price they were charging me). I was a bit of an Evernote evangelizer too. For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from canned peaches and pineapples.

gresrun 6y ago
I believe you’re referring to “Notecards”. In the US they come in 2 common sizes: 5”x7” & 4”x6”
spoonjim 6y ago
Because software switching is annoying, raising prices is the oldest trick in the book for getting revenue growth when you have tapped out the potential inherent in your product.
- prionassembly 6y ago
  Precisely, yes. And then this makes you wary of subscription-based software in general. At one point it seemed that an "extended Moore's law" (if not CPU transistors, then the general cost of compute, memory and storage) and the beauty of near-zero marginal costs would lead to a bright "there's an app for that" future. I remember Evernote launched at some point an iOS app to store food reviews, it was glorious. But now the future seems darker. Bean counters have finally noticed the windfall that's the extreme economies of scale in internet businesses. There's no "singularity" of accelerated tech change. I'm tech-savvy enough to roll out a personal blog stored on my custom sqlite format, but isn't it safer if I just write longhand and file it physically? Use the typing process for proofchecking. Decelerationism.
dash2 6y ago
>For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from canned peaches and pineapples. Hmm... you may not be Dropbox's most typical consumer! :-)

dalrympm 6y ago

I have been a Dropbox customer for several years and every single time I try to download a file from the web I get stumped. It's really a user hostile interface and it's up there on my list of things to replace but not high enough that I've done anything about it.

hiimtroymclure 6y ago
just downloaded it the other day to search for old files from long ago and was barraged by popups, installers, and trying to get me to do 5 things at once. So confusing. I gave up searching for what I was looking for
anderspitman 6y ago
I actually just made a little app yesterday that converts share urls into direct HTTP download URLs that are usable by cURL, etc. Not sure if this solves your problem: https://apitman.com/apps/droplink/ https://apitman.com/apps/droplink/

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

I don't think the writing is on the wall at all here. I think the company over shot a little, by trying to be a general-purpose enterprise platform instead of a tool (or suite of tools). But from what I know the core business and the team are still really strong. They're just more of a Slack and less of a Microsoft, and probably have to adjust for that realization.

jeffbarr 6y ago

I thought I was the only one who had trouble with this. Based on the other replies here, that's definitely not the case.

dnhz 6y ago

I'm confused here. Someone shared with me a file via dropbox, xlsx, and right at the top of the sidebar where I can leave comments, there's a download button.