The infamous dropbox comment

TJL #101

Mar 06, 2021

This is a story about why you should be more optimistic. On the internet there is a forum called HackerNews. HackerNews is startup incubator Y Combinator’s online message board with a focus on tech startups.

Users can post news, links, and stories to HackerNews and other users can comment on that. Startups often launch on HackerNews to create a buzz and get initial users for their product. Users can upvote and downvote comments and this makes the “best” comments float to the top.

In the image above you can see Dropbox’s initial launch on HackerNews. Not shortly after, someone commented about everything that was wrong with the app and it got upvoted to the top by the other HackerNews users. This was the comment written by user BrandonM:

I have a few qualms with this app:
1. 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. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

This is the time that I should tell you that commenting on HackerNews is tough. If you comment something that doesn’t anything to the discussion you will be downvoted. If your comment is downvoted enough until your score reaches negative points, and then your comment is hidden. This sucks, trust me, I’ve been there. HackerNews had (in the past it was way worse) extremely technically correct but very cynical commenters.

The points is that this leads to very cynical comments. BrandonM’s comment was upvoted to the top so it must be correct, right? I mean… yes they were kind of correct, but at what cost? Although everything BrandonM said about the app was true, Dropbox succeeded in spite of that and IPO’d in 2018 valued at $8.2b.

The moral of the story is that there are two sides to every coin:

The pessimistic side: Yes there are many things wrong with the app, that’s why I’ve stopped working on it.
The optimistic side: Yes there are many things wrong with the app, and yet in spite of that we’ll succeed.

You can choose which side you decide to look at.

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Today Jan Learned

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