Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonderbore | Hacker News Reader

Too late. They could have done this nearly from the beginning, when people were still using Dropbox and asking to sync any folder on their computer.

Instead they junkified their app and alienated most tech users, who won’t suggest using it anymore.

I hope that documents stuff works out for them though.

View on HN

Yep, after setting to strict limits on their free plans, I abandoned them, and built my own, local "dropbox" (syncthing), and haven't looked back since.

I tried using syncthing as I liked the idea of not relying on a cloud provider, but it seemed to be really slow. So slow that I gave up and setup Google Drive. (even over a local network syncing a 2gb file was going to take hours even though I could download that file from the internet in a couple of minutes - is special configuration required to make it use the local network?)

There shouldn't be, somethings going wrong for you. I use syncthing to sync gigabytes of music from my computer to my phone and it takes a couple of minutes over wifi. Syncthing will automatically exchange all known addresses that your device can be found at between your paired devices, and it will then normally use the local network. Not sure whats going wrong for you :/

The Syncthing developers themselves are using Syncthing to sync dozens of megabytes of data. I saw in one of their forum comments.

I tried to setup a drive with roughly 2TB of data. It was extremely slow to get synchronized between my mac and linux. Both in same LAN. Syncthing seems to be a lot of checksums.

I have all the computers connected via (my own) VPN servers, and the only limit for me was my connection speed (which on cable was 1gbit, on some random wifi, slower).

The nodes are set by default to have local discovery, but you need port 22000(?) open for synchronization to work (if you have firewall enabled)

The percentage of customers who have the ability and desire to set up their own sync solution is so small for Dropbox that they are right not to worry about it.

Globally, counting "normal people"... sure.

People discussing this here in these threads.... i think atleast 80% of them have both ability and means to do so. .

I have the ability and means and still wouldn’t do it. Even $120/year is nothing compared to the time I’d lose setting up and maintaining the system. It just doesn’t make monetary sense.

Interesting. We both evidently did the same calculation when Dropbox started enforcing its limits, but ended up with different answers. For me, the time, hassle and money to run my own instance of syncthing or whatever exceeded the hundred bucks or so a year Dropbox wanted to do it for me. Wonder where our weightings differed.

I didn't want my data in the cloud, I wanted more space, less limitations and more flexibility in sharing (eg. share this folder with PC1, this folder with PC2, etc). ...but I had dropbox, it worked, and i was too lazy to move.

The limitations from dropbox were a push for me, because limiting usage to three devices basically broke dropbox for me, and forced me to move to syncthing.

Me three. When Dropbox hit me with the three-device limit, I decided to just move my stuff to OneDrive. Granted, my OneDrive account has 40 GB free space (through various grandfathered deals), but if it didn’t, I’d probably prefer to pay Microsoft (or Google) $19.99/year for 100 GB rather than paying Dropbox $120 for 2000 GB (the majority of which would go unused).

Dropbox has an obvious problem and it's not that. Their pricing has not kept up with the times. If you're willing to pay for a full year in one shot, the minimum you'll pay is $120. That's just too much for most of their potential customers. Maybe if the pricing was in the neighborhood of competitive those other things would matter.

I don't know if 'most' tech uses are alienated though. I feel their offering is still quite good.

If not alienated, the need for Dropbox is not as high as it used to. If you have a Mac, you can sync the documents and desktop natively directly to your phone and can right click any file within them to get a link or share it with other Mac users. This won’t cover every user but it was enough for me and several friends to drop Dropbox.

It is fine for what it is however all the large tech companies have some comparable offering(Google Drive, Icloud, OneDrive) for which the barrier to entry is much lower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com