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> It‘s a bit of a „isn‘t Dropbox just FTP on a VM“ moment right now. Since this is not the first mention of Dropbox I've seen in HN threads in the last 48 hour

> It‘s a bit of a „isn‘t Dropbox just FTP on a VM“ moment right now. Since this is not the first mention of Dropbox I've seen in HN threads in the last 48 hours: Let's not forget that Dropbox was at its best when it was "just" a streamlined ftpd over sshfs or whatever - when it was just "a folder that syncs". That didn't last long, the downfall started with them killing their most useful accidental feature[0], which started them on a path of enshittification[1], which they followed swiftly and diligently into complete irrelevancy they enjoy today. So if the agentic tooling is now enjoying its "Dropbox moment", I implore people working on these tools, don't overdo it. -- [0] - The "Public" folder initially supported direct linking, meaning you could publish static web sites by simply putting them in Dropbox/Public/, you could update the files there and changes were immediately "live". Notably, this was the heyday of phpBB and similar discussion boards, back between the rise and subsequent fall of free image hosting - so the ability to put images in your Dropbox/Public/ and hotlink them in a discussion was extremely useful and popular way to use the service. [1] - They didn't just kill direct links, they replaced them with what I consider to be OG enshittification pattern - captive page that asks you to press a button to download. Yes, same one every "synced drive" service offers now, to enable various functionality that's 99% harmful to the user with the link.

pmontra 5d ago
Maybe I knew how they explained the change back then but I forgot about it. If I must take a guess now, maybe their legal office had a word with marketing about the risk of becoming a publisher, with responsibility for what their users shared publicly on the internet.
- TeMPOraL 5d ago
  Perhaps. This was also before CDNs were a thing, so they may have decided they can't afford to be one, as more and more people discovered just how versatile the Public/ folder is. Either way, this was the peak of Dropbox; after shutting down direct Public/ links, it was still useful for its main job as seamless cross-machine, cross-platform "folder that syncs", but gradually lost market share as OneDrive and Google Drive became more broadly useful (and had the advantage of being first-party on their respective platforms), and then Dropbox the company itself lost focus and tried a bunch of failed pivots in the direction towards cloudification, away from "just syncing files". End result for end users? We now have zero options for bullshit-free, file-first, seamless "folder that syncs" experience for non-tech users (techies that like fiddling with things have Syncthing). Only cloud-first options remain, and they're full of footguns and enshittified to the core (which becomes apparent the moment you want to share a file outside of the vendor's cloud ecosystem).

pmontra 5d ago

Maybe I knew how they explained the change back then but I forgot about it. If I must take a guess now, maybe their legal office had a word with marketing about the risk of becoming a publisher, with responsibility for what their users shared publicly on the internet.

TeMPOraL 5d ago
Perhaps. This was also before CDNs were a thing, so they may have decided they can't afford to be one, as more and more people discovered just how versatile the Public/ folder is. Either way, this was the peak of Dropbox; after shutting down direct Public/ links, it was still useful for its main job as seamless cross-machine, cross-platform "folder that syncs", but gradually lost market share as OneDrive and Google Drive became more broadly useful (and had the advantage of being first-party on their respective platforms), and then Dropbox the company itself lost focus and tried a bunch of failed pivots in the direction towards cloudification, away from "just syncing files". End result for end users? We now have zero options for bullshit-free, file-first, seamless "folder that syncs" experience for non-tech users (techies that like fiddling with things have Syncthing). Only cloud-first options remain, and they're full of footguns and enshittified to the core (which becomes apparent the moment you want to share a file outside of the vendor's cloud ecosystem).