[HPsquared]

The famous HN comment on Dropbox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 E.g. "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

[smaudet]

I still don't use dropbox (used it briefly a long time ago), replace ftp with sftp and cvs with git and it might still be true-ish?

Another good thing about re-implementing, often these solutions are like 700 pound gorillas, built fast and trying to move trains not place flowerpots.

Usually the 700 pound gorilla can be gutted, and the danger of not gutting it is that everyone starts to think that having 700 pound gorillas in your backyard is a "normal" part of "modern" living (dystopia living, actually).

Which is how we arrive here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cloud-computings-coming-energy-cri...

Where arguably the tech industry is fast becoming one of the most wasteful, hurtful things to this planet.

[themoonisachees]

Right but the value proposition of Dropbox wasn't the tech it was built on, it was the fact they gave you free cloud storage in exchange for an email address.

[1oooqooq]

in fact it was despite the tech.

Most my musician and composer friends were forced to use it because it was the cheapest way to share a few hundred gigabytes of instrument samplers with remote contract workers.

They would reserve a week to deal with botched dropbox client upload/downloads. A freaking week. I convinced a few to just pay postage on a external HDD and bite the bullet if they got damaged. They never looked back.

[willsmith72]

> it was the fact they gave you free cloud storage in exchange for an email address

This feels rather reductive

[themoonisachees]

I mean, that's what happened. I don't know how else I could phrase this.