[bane]

This feels like a step backwards. DB has struggled to figure out something beyond being a really great cloud-share drive thing, and sorta kinda messed around with using your DB to host media like photos (which would then make users desire to upgrade their space) and automagically supply some interface sugar around a pile of photos.

But they could have kept going in that direction and competed with all of the photosharing sites, soundcloud, heck even youtube if they had wanted. Say I like to vlog, what would be easier? After filming raw footage, edit it, make my final cut, upload to youtube and wait for transcoding and availability? Or just put my final cut into a "droptube" folder and it automagically appears at www.droptube.com (not a real thing, but could be in some alternate dimension)

Or what if I want to host a simple site? Fiddle with a hosting provider, screw around trying to figure out the 37 different metrics I'll be charged for, or just put some html, css and js file into a dropbox "webhost" folder?

I dunno, I think they're closing off lots of opportunity and have had trouble executing on this kind of cloud application for the masses, or they're really not going after it.

[mjevans]

I'm guessing they can't go that route because youtube (google), and twitch (amazon) are the only 600lbs gorillas that can do /something/ to stave off the insane 100lbs gorilla that goes for the jugular (MPAA/RIAA and the like).

Photo-gallery, as you've noted opens them to competing with other such providers... who all seem to eventually race towards throwing ads on everything to try and make some profit.

Freely accessible areas also equate to more consumers (not users), and I don't know if DB's business model charges any kind of fee for access to that data.

This mostly sounds like DB is out of areas they want to / feel they can succeed in tapping for new customers and thus they attempt to cut back on costs with the hope of inertia retaining the existing users.

[toomuchtodo]

> This mostly sounds like DB is out of areas they want to / feel they can succeed in tapping for new customers and thus they attempt to cut back on costs with the hope of inertia retaining the existing users.

I'm okay with how Dropbox as-is as a Pro user, and have no problem giving them $100/year in perpetuity.

A product must not constantly evolve/improve for it to succeed (I'm looking at you Github with your damn dark bar at the top nav now!). "Good enough" can carry the day. Sync always works. My files are always there. That's what I'm paying for.

[bigiain]

I was pretty happy with paying for Dropbox as-was. Turns out they've now broken a bunch of image links in forum posts and websites I've shared using Dropbox since I joined in 2010 (and became a paying customer later). I will not be renewing my subscription - largely because of this change.

Part of my attention since they announced this change late last year has been taken up asking myself "which of those shared photos do I care enough about to go back to the relevant forum/website and update the link - if that's even possible?" And the realisation slowly grew - I probably don't _really_ care enough about broken links to images - especially on sites I not longer actively use - which raises the obvious question, why am I paying Dropbox at all then?

Sure - their product might need to "evolve" but if I'm paying for a pterodactyl and they've pivoted to small warm blooded mammals, they may well out compete all their dinosaur competitors, but I'm one of the customers who'll say "Sorry, I didn't ask for a mammal, where's my pterodactyl that I've been paying you for?"

[TeMPOraL]

> A product must not constantly evolve/improve for it to succeed

Unfortunately, it goes against the startup ethos. That's why I avoid using startup products whenever I can. With regular companies, the problem is less pronounced, though it exists nonetheless.

It's sad people have to keep fucking up things they first made work, only because they're looking for more profit.

[manigandham]

Dropbox isn't a startup. It stopped being that a long time ago.

[TeMPOraL]

Did they pay off their VC obligations? If no, then I'm going to play the "if it walks like a duck..." card.

That said, my point was more general than just this Dropbox issue.

[tw04]

Right, but their problem is - at SOME point, google or Microsoft will figure it out. MS in particular will destroy them if they do get their syncing and sharing down. I'm in your same boat but I also have free onedrive through work. The second they get their sharing figured out (and quite frankly they may have already but I haven't put it through the ringer again) - dropbox is in trouble.

[rodgerd]

OneDrive isn't quite as good as Dropbox, but it's good enough for my use cases - and it costs as much for a five-user family license that includes Office as it does for one Dropbox account.

I ran both in parallel for nearly a year. I've cancelled Dropbox.

[mixedbit]

My guess is that the reason they are closing this is the cost of bandwidth. Dropbox allowed to host publicly all types of large files and exchange such files by a link that did not require any interaction with DropBox to download. It seems really hard to monetize such usage.

[bane]

I believe they already do some kind of bandwidth monitoring, so I could also see them just passing that along to subscribers who use too much. I would have also hoped their bandwidth costs would have improved when they moved to their own cloud instead of S3.

[TeMPOraL]

I vaguely remember that they were able to throttle/block off a public file when it caused unusually high traffic.

[RachelF]

Perhaps, but the MPAA/RIAA and what happened to KimDotCom are also probably a big factor.

[Razengan]

I had the exact same ideas for DropBox the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11906573

----

I wonder what features Dropbox can offer that won't inevitably be surpassed by Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive.

To me, their main strength seems to be that they have the best cross-platform UI/UX right now, but even that may not be the case for long.

Maybe they could evolve/branch into a general-purpose file hosting service, where people can use it to publicly share images (like imgur) and music (like Soundcloud) with the appropriate UI for each case (or spinoff site, e.g. Imagebox and Musicbox) except people would just need one account to comment/vote on everything. Who knows, maybe they can even become an alternative to YouTube..

Let independent developers publish their games and apps from there, bypassing Steam and the other app stores, optionally charging a fee per user, with Dropbox taking a cut.

Maybe even offer a chatroom/messaging system, to compete with Slack/Skype etc.

[codazoda]

I suspect they just want to focus on their core benefit so that they don't stretch too thin.

[TeMPOraL]

The core benefit of Dropbox is being "a folder that syncs". They've pretty much nailed it at the very start, and all the recent changes seem to be only step backwards. Lack of ability to link directly to files (instead of their heavy and useless web UI with "download" button) is something that makes their product worse, from user's POV.

[jpalomaki]

Smart sync was a giant leap forward. This one actually makes the sync usable on business accounts as well (fairly small laptop SSD and 15 people storing stuff was a difficult combination).

[ovao]

Although it involves a redirect, so it's not, per se, direct, appending ?dl=1 to a Dropbox link does at least trigger a file download.

[the_af]

This is not useful for hotlinking pictures, for example for embedding them in a forum.

[mos_basik]

last I tried, which was a couple months ago, replacing the "www" with a "dl" in a public link made it work for hotlinking. so, starting with

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2s31p57eod49dva/1371724997329.png?...

and navigating to this

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/2s31p57eod49dva/1371724997329.png?d...

results in a redirect to this

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/2s31p57eod49dva/13717249...

which can be hotlinked. What this means in a specific sense, I haven't yet learned. I'm particularly interested to know the behavior of any of these links if the file is moved/renamed. I have not tested it, but my intuition is the dropbox.com link would survive a move and the dropboxusercontent.com link would not.

[ovao]

I believe that's an intentional limitation.

[the_af]

I know it's intentional. I'm just saying it results in something that is definitely not direct and noticeably less useful. That it can be made to trigger a download is not particularly useful.