5 ms·

Personally I've noticed how dropbox has gone from being a tool that fits well into a larger context, to instead trying to encompass the entire experience of tou

Personally I've noticed how dropbox has gone from being a tool that fits well into a larger context, to instead trying to encompass the entire experience of touching synced files. For example, the number of clicks (and the precision of those clicks and the distractions around them) to open the dropbox folder in your OS's file explorer has gradually increased. And the amount of attention dropbox asks for, things like notifications and upsells, has also gradually increased. The post aludes to this notion of not trusting dropbox to just do the one thing well, and instead expecting them to grab more and more (because they are financially driven to do so), which resonated very hard. It's so common for a good piece of software to get worse and worse, bit by bit, as the marketing and business downsides consume the technical upsides.

julik 5y ago
Coming from a similar background product-wise: the struggle is real, and while file syncing and sharing is great and achievable it only allows you N user retention/acquisition, and thus M profit potential. If you (or your investors) demand M*1000 of that, you start looking for a way to usurp not only the user's file syncing needs, but also document editing, calendars, email, contacts, backup... anything that is within reach. This is exacerbated by the fact that more and more vendors (such as Adobe and Figma) drive away from "files", which effectively forces you to use _their_ cloud storage solution. When you are Dropbox this is not a very sweet spot to be in, because Adobe has _both_ the apps for creating projects _and_ the storage/sync, but you only have storage/sync. As long as cloud storage needs to grow exponentially at any cost, feature bloat of the kind Nikita is describing will continue. Most likely Syncthing is so good exactly because they do not have these extrinsic pressures. Add to that the fact that in a bigger product org, the way you get promoted is by shipping "your" feature. Quite often it would be a feature no user would ever want, but it is much more the problem of selling "your" feature to management internally versus selling it directly to the user. A great example of a solution which is local-first, allows you BYO cloud storage (of multiple kinds) and simply offers its own cloud storage at a small markup is Arq, and we are blessed that it does not have the pressures I have described above.
magicalhippo 5y ago
I'm about to drop Dropbox as well, due to how PITA it is to use. Have a picture in your Dropbox you want to send as a message on Android? Well, just click Share button of course! Wait, no, that just shares a link not the image itself... No, you gotta do "Open with...", find suitable image app (gallery or picture viewer), wait for it to download and open the image, and share from that app... Though I imagine Dropbox would be glad to get rid of me, not being a paying customer. I don't need 2TB so $10/mo is way too much.
- thom 5y ago
  On iOS you just tap the Dropbox icon and browse to the picture you want to send in the messages app. Surprised it's harder on a more open platform.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    On my S8 it doesn't resize the images and instead just complains it's too large for MMS, so it's pretty useless like that. I know, who uses MMS these days...
thom 5y ago
It’s one click to get to your Dropbox folder though, what’s changed there? Besides I just have some symlinks to point at it and I never think about manually going there again. I dunno if I’m just already on the top tier of subscriptions but I get zero upsell or notifications after it’s installed and configured. I’d certainly love it if everything was off by default but it’s not really any hardship to go through the preferences. Obviously the moment it stops just sitting there backing up my files and keeping them in sync across my devices I’d be bothered, but whatever they’re trying to force on people hasn’t really registered with me in a decade of use.

julik 5y ago

Coming from a similar background product-wise: the struggle is real, and while file syncing and sharing is great and achievable it only allows you N user retention/acquisition, and thus M profit potential. If you (or your investors) demand M*1000 of that, you start looking for a way to usurp not only the user's file syncing needs, but also document editing, calendars, email, contacts, backup... anything that is within reach. This is exacerbated by the fact that more and more vendors (such as Adobe and Figma) drive away from "files", which effectively forces you to use _their_ cloud storage solution. When you are Dropbox this is not a very sweet spot to be in, because Adobe has _both_ the apps for creating projects _and_ the storage/sync, but you only have storage/sync. As long as cloud storage needs to grow exponentially at any cost, feature bloat of the kind Nikita is describing will continue. Most likely Syncthing is so good exactly because they do not have these extrinsic pressures. Add to that the fact that in a bigger product org, the way you get promoted is by shipping "your" feature. Quite often it would be a feature no user would ever want, but it is much more the problem of selling "your" feature to management internally versus selling it directly to the user. A great example of a solution which is local-first, allows you BYO cloud storage (of multiple kinds) and simply offers its own cloud storage at a small markup is Arq, and we are blessed that it does not have the pressures I have described above.

magicalhippo 5y ago

I'm about to drop Dropbox as well, due to how PITA it is to use. Have a picture in your Dropbox you want to send as a message on Android? Well, just click Share button of course! Wait, no, that just shares a link not the image itself... No, you gotta do "Open with...", find suitable image app (gallery or picture viewer), wait for it to download and open the image, and share from that app... Though I imagine Dropbox would be glad to get rid of me, not being a paying customer. I don't need 2TB so $10/mo is way too much.

thom 5y ago
On iOS you just tap the Dropbox icon and browse to the picture you want to send in the messages app. Surprised it's harder on a more open platform.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  On my S8 it doesn't resize the images and instead just complains it's too large for MMS, so it's pretty useless like that. I know, who uses MMS these days...

thom 5y ago

It’s one click to get to your Dropbox folder though, what’s changed there? Besides I just have some symlinks to point at it and I never think about manually going there again. I dunno if I’m just already on the top tier of subscriptions but I get zero upsell or notifications after it’s installed and configured. I’d certainly love it if everything was off by default but it’s not really any hardship to go through the preferences. Obviously the moment it stops just sitting there backing up my files and keeping them in sync across my devices I’d be bothered, but whatever they’re trying to force on people hasn’t really registered with me in a decade of use.