For me, Dropbox is a great product that makes my life/workflow with music production so much easier and convenient. Moving interface things around is at worst annoying but really just trivial. I don't understand why people on HN get so reliably get fired up about UI changes.
These are not simply UI changes. Dropbox implements more and more dark patterns that go directly against everything it once stood for. This service used to be a fire-and-forget way to have a local directory that's also online and on multiple machines. Now it's a service that tries to be everything at once and never gets out of your way.
Completely agree! Dropbox was at its best when it had almost no UI outside of "sync status" and "pause/resume" in a menu. Now they constantly shove their terrible UI in your face when all you ever want to do is sync/view your files.
I have to say I have literally never once had the thought that Dropbox is in my way. I have a 3TB pro account which I have setup on my studio computer with full sync to an external drive. I record/work on sessions with sync continually active. Both of those things should be "no no"'s, but it works fine.
I go home and my laptop is smart syncing the recently active sessions only which conserves space on the laptop drive but lets me do some small work on recently active sessions.
It's totally seamless and I cannot recall the last time I was even alerted by Dropbox about anything except that I was hitting my 3TB cap soon.
The only issue I ever had was using it on Windows where it would occasionally create conflicted file copies, which was annoying, but moving to OSX resolved that.
I do. I go through stuff and use the star interface to track things I want to focus on. Actually I was slightly annoyed that they made it more hidden on the web interface. Looks like they added it back.
You can tell that an increasing proportion of their product engineering is based around figuring out how to convince/trick people into paying, or paying more. This seems to be the rule and not the exception for SaaS companies that have grown to a certain point.
If I'm paying for something I don't want to be engaged. I want to be efficient. It's incredible just how bad UIs have gotten in the last 10 years.
I use Nextcloud and there are parts of the UI that defy logic. For example, when I select a file it brings up an "Actions" menu that's hidden via a hamburger button. It has 4 options and I have about 3000px of horizontal whitespace on the same row.
TLDR; It's all hamburgers and whitespace and I don't understand why.
Too bad for Dropbox and other companies HN people are not the only ones.
There are at least two big variables here:
1 - Is the new UI actually better? by how much?
2 - What's the cost of change for the existing users?
Bonus complexity: There are large groups of different customers inside your customer base.
If your product is the best ever with no competitor in sight you can annoy them almost indefinitely, the second anything remotely similar appears, all the built up resentment just fuels the migration and it usually behaves like a tsunami, at first it's barely noticeable until a 3 foot wall keeps going and going and you can't do anything about it.
Agreed, it's been a really nice service. Plus, downloading is already taken care of for me with sync, which is where Dropbox is really positioned for best use.
If I'm downloading something from a Dropbox, that's a pretty good sign I'm not going to be working with that person much, or it's a one-off task.
Absolutely this. As a producer as well dropbox means I can work off a laptop as my main machine - albeit a tricked out 15in mbp with 1TB SSD. Selective sync is amazing. The web UI is great for listening to demos and such - I'd love a playlist/play dir feature though.
