Just a suggestion, and I suspect I might have overlooked some drawbacks: what about hosting it on SEVERAL of those websites/platforms/services/communication systems (probably with a version "number" or a last updated date), and inside the book, provide several backup links, in case the first one was dead by the time they visited it?
Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.
One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it.
You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.
And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.
And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X".
This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok.
You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".
In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!
If you setup multiple domains or url shorteners, each can redirect to whatever free platform is available (facebook groups, reddit, github, web.archive, etc). It does require a bit of maintenance tho.
Congrats! Little suggestion if I may, don't use the location of the user to set the default language of the website. Everything on my computer is in English, but your website defaulted to Spanish, as I'm currently in Spain.
About 20% of documented residents of washington speak spanish, and up to 52% including bilingual, documented, and undocumented. Thus it is the majority language.
In India and Spanish for me too. However, I can select English from the selection dropdown above.
Anyways, why is that even the Big Tech does this! For instance, Google Maps will default to Dutch (which in the land of the Dutch) while my OS, the browser and everything else is in English. I found no option to say “English” and be done with it. I can translate but that isn't the correct way to it.
Yes, I believe a better approach is to recommend the language based on the browser settings, allowing users to switch manually if they prefer. This is my plan, and I will release this feature once it's developed.
Thank you very much for your suggestion. Currently, I don't display the website language based on location; I simply set Spanish as the default language. In the future, I will recommend the language based on the user's browser settings, as mentioned in the article you provided. Thanks again for your suggestion.
Unrelated (sorry), but here’s what I see when I open that Medium link in Safari. It’s quite a challenge to find the article between the pop-ups.
Screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/XbYLs5c.png
But they haven’t improved that in years, so I suspect it must actually be working for them and convert well!
I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are many ways to pronounce the same combination of letters, depending which word they are part of (like "ough", etc.). Words have emphasis that also make them more difficult to pronounce.
Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation, one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean (although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).
As linguists will sometimes joke, English spelling is extremely useful, you can look at an English word and tell exactly how it was pronounced 700 years ago.
Even native English speakers struggle with it. This is the so-called "curse of the autodidact": when people have read quite a bit on a specialized topic but never had a spoken conversation about it, and mispronounce technical words or place the stress on the wrong syllable.
> A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
Not by coincidence, in USA they have spelling challenges aired nationwide.
Indeed, and I suppose spelling bees makes sense for any language that is not written exactly as it is pronounced, French being one of them.
From what I've read so far, Esperanto only has a single way to write every sound it uses, so it would be much less challenging.
Let me know what you think, but I suspect spelling is not exactly the issue, but rather the fact that there is not a single way to write each sound. There are several sounds possible for each spelling ("ough").
If there were a single way to write each sound, then the spelling in itself wouldn't really matter, as we would only learn the spelling of each sound once and be done with it; we'd always recognize it.
Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)
I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:
- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).
- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).
I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.
I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.
1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?
2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)
Thanks!
----------------------------
Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.
> Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)
This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.
Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner
(didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)
People get around the problem of not being able to type these letters by adding an x or an h (cx, gx, ux). Apparently Zamenhof himself was addressing the issue in order to make the language "simpler," as well.
For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.
A funny thing happened in Slovenian, particularly colloquial Slovenian. We have accents. Many accents. Each vowel has several different pronunciations and sometimes those completely change the meaning of a word. Or they make the text flow better. Or it's an accent thing.
Either way the language has many accents in writing.
But over time, those accents are disappearing. Written Slovenian from the 19th century is absolutely littered with them. Modern Slovenian in colloquial writing is starting to lose even the č, š, ž accents.
Interestingly, people don't compensate with things like cz, or ch, or cx. They rely on context informing the reader how to pronounce a word.
I believe the loss of accents on vowels happened because they're not that necessary. The loss of č š ž is happening because of computers. Takes an extra keypress to type those. On iOS/Android it takes a long press and who has time for that when typing a text? Nobody. So we don't.
Could Spanish not work similarly? Do Spanish people write out all the accents when sending a text?
I know my French girlfriend doesn't always write all her accents and French is also chock full of accents.
Something similar is happening in Vietnamese and I think smartphones are to blame. Writing properly accented Vietnamese on mobile keyboards, particularly the iPhone, is pretty tedious so people often leave out the accents and rely on context to figure out meanings. Unfortunately for a language like Vietnamese which has tons of monosyllable words and where the accent markings completely change the meaning of a word this can lead to a lot of ambiguity.
Why a company with Apple's resources can't be bothered to implement proper autocorrect for a bit market with 80+ million native speakers is a mystery to me.
I could be wrong, but don't people have autocorrect on their phones that will correct the character based on context? Is that even possible?
Lets say somebody wants to say "how I eat" in spanish. The correct way to do it would be "cómo como". "cómo" means how, and "como" means "I eat". I wouldn't make sense to say "como cómo", so therefore, autocorrect should, in theory, feel free to correct all instances of "como como". Only until it becomes an international household brand name will this ever be a problem- for this one phrase at least.
Afaik autocorrect doesn’t work for Slovenian. And even if it does, most people I know have it disabled because our colloquialisms use a lot of English, some German, plenty of Serbocroatian, and sometimes Italian. We often spell those loan words our own way.
This combination of languages and intentionally incorrect spellings makes autocorrect total trash.
There is a trend that confuses this (apparent) simplification trend with "evolution" or "progress".
Don't fool yourself, though.
Accents are there for a reason.
Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.
Even if only because the context won't be discernible. But, generally, because of the principle of the lesser effort: it's always easier to just read what is there than thinking which pronunciation applies.
Eventually, the words will become homophonous (edit: assuming there are other words which differ only in the accents) - you'll effectively loose the words or they'll change, probably for worse.
The language will become more ambiguous and more dependent on the context knowledge - which will be hard to get if you don't know the language well to begin with.
In other words, you've just made the language "harder" to learn.
Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.
is there any evidence for that?
anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc
however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too.
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing.
back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn.
English is atypical in its irregular pronunciation rules IMO. At least compared to Latin languages. And it doesn't have accents that change the pronunciation in otherwise similar words.
As such, people are aware that you just have to know how to pronounce every particular word, rather than relying solely on orthography.
Anyway, your example isn't very good: "light" and "lite" are homophonous anyway.
A better one would be "calm". The "l" is almost mute. Presumably, one could "simplify" the orthography to "cam". And you would pronounce "kom" or "kam" according to context.
I claim one of the pronunciations would eventually disappear, sooner or later.
If you're asking for a "scientific study", I don't have one and I don't even know where such a thing can be found.
But the country I'm from has had 3 orthographic reforms in the 20th century. The last one being all about removing supposed "mute" consonants - but which acted like accents in that they altered pronunciation of the word.
Exactly!
And I see that typewriters were invented in 1878, so the difficulty to type Esperanto with typewriters was most probably not taken into account when it was invented.
You can potentially replace them with digraphs if the digraphs aren't used for some other purpose, which some Esperantists have done with the x-method, like gxis for ĝis 'until', although some people find that quite ugly.
An interesting example to me is that pinyin uses the diacritical marks to mark tones in Chinese, which can be hard to type on a limited system but also hard for Chinese learners to remember. The Gwoyeu_Romatzyh system has different spellings for each vowel depending on the associated tone!
This is presumably harder to learn but easier for learners to remember. Similarly, Finnish uses double letters to mark a long vowel as opposed to the ā, like maa 'country' which other languages might write as mā. On the other hand, are also vowels ä and ö which are different from a and o, so to find a way to spell Finnish without these marks one would need to find some unused digraph, which might actually be a big challenge, since Wikipedia says
> The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she").
If one wanted to write Spanish without the accent marks, it might be possible to find digraph equivalents, such as maybe ou for ó (which is a problem in "estadounidense" but almost nowhere else!). The ñ could be written with nh as in Portuguese (señor/senhor).
This would work for ñ but it wouldn’t necessarily work for replacing accents unless the vowel followed by u becomes an accent - which leads to the estadounidense problem you identified.
From what I remember from high school Spanish, there is a default syllable that has an “invisible accent” on its vowel in a Spanish word without accents and the purpose of an accent is to change the syllable that gets emphasized.
Yes, we'd ideally need to find a digraph that absolutely doesn't occur in Spanish. This can be tricky with compound words and loanwords. It seems that ou, oe and oo are super-rare in Spanish morphemes but can occur in loanwords and compounds. I just searched for unaccented digraphs that literally don't occur at all in /usr/share/dict/spanish and the only examples (of which there are 184 excluding k and w) contain only consonants and y.
So, there's not any easy natural way to do this without creating at least some ambiguities.
Spoken Japanese, in my very limited experience, runs into this issue due to the number of homophones and the only recourse are context clues to distinguish their meaning. So there can be ambiguity in an otherwise functional language, although it certainly makes it harder.
True, though native speakers do distiguish a good swath of "homophones" by differing pitch accent---e.g. in the standard dialect あめ means "rain" if the pitch drops on め or "candy" if it stays level. To a native speaker, these sound as different as the two ways of saying "present".
If you grab a native Japanaese dictionary that has accent indicators, like 新明解国語辞典, there really are surprisingly few true homophones in a typical vocabulary.
Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-)
On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.
Realistically accents are such a small hurdle that if a learner can't stomach it, they're probably not going to make it. It's something like complaining that Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is something you can get over much quicker than the myriad of crazy grammar.
Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of.
Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.
Hey I’m all for language experimentation, though if it were truly a modern language designed for the world based on population, consider that it may be a tonal language with characters! Or just use English.
Esperanto was created in 1880, it’s older than world war 1, it’s older than English as the international language, and it’s older than Europe having much exposure to Asian languages
Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907.
This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language?
It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors.
I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.
Regular refactoring seems to be a dangerous thing:
Ido was created around a quarter of a century after Esperanto. The name Ido means "offspring" in Esperanto and was so named by its creators because it was a development of Esperanto. The creation of Ido led to a schism between those who believed that Esperanto should be left as it was and those who believed that it had what they perceived as inherent flaws which made it not quite good enough to be the world's international auxiliary language. Those who opposed change maintained that it was endless tinkering that had led, in their opinion, to the decline of Volapük a once popular constructed language that had predated Esperanto's publication by a few years. They would also surely have pointed out that Dr Zamenhof's reform proposals of 1894 had been rejected by popular vote.
The problem would be to get the thousand brains to agree.Now thousands and thousands of brains are applied every day to stretching anbd applying Esperanto to all aspects of life. I have found Esperanto of a lot of use when travelling on my own, to get my bearings within a country. Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job, serving as a unique common language on my travels in, for example, Armenia and Bulgaria.
Esperanto speakers are highly organised. There is a Jarlibro (Yearbook) published annually giving access to a network of local representatives. These people, scattered all over the world and act as 'consuls', providing help and information, and passing on the visitor from another country to his/her contacts. Esperanto does have an Academy, but it is the people who decide in practice.
when I used esperanto on IRC (many years ago), people wrote "cx", "gx" "ux", etc. This seems very standard usage when you are writing on limited charsets. Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal. I actually find the choice of accents cute and I love them.
Very interesting. I should spend a few minutes reading about it, but: does that mean that accents do not actually have a utility in Esperanto, and that using ĝ or g in the same word does not create two different meanings?
Is it just for pronunciation purposes?
Edit: The forum link that kissickas's posted answers my question :-) Thanks
Ok I see.
By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.
> I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none
This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.
You may be right but I was Born and went to school in the UK and I don't remember any accents. The first two words are just French and Japanese words we use but the accents are generally left out of English spellings of them without any noticeable difference, the other I've always spelled as "co-ordination" with a dash.. of course if you went to a posh school it is likely done properly.
True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English
(also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)
English had native accents, as in naïve, to show that the double vowel was pronounced as two sounds, but they have declined in use over the year. Cooperate isn't spelt with 'oö', which makes pronouncing it from the spelling difficult. But English has never really been spelt phonetically anyway, so it is now overdue for a reformation really.
Quick suggestion: could you show the summaries directly on your first page, without the user needing to clicks links? (Otherwise, we are back to part of the original problem: need to open many tabs to read each story's summary, or do a lot of back and forth between front-page and post's summary).
In case there would be too much text when doing this, another way to solve this would be to unroll the summary dynamically when user clicks "summary" (instead of opening a new page). Hope this is useful!
Hmm I did have for a moment this page as the home page - https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top, but wasnt sure if people will like having that as the home page.
I should do a survey about which page should be in the front, well to ask any HN readers who now check out the site, could you let me know that is the current home page the way to go or is this one https://summarybrew.com/summaries/top
Also your idea of unrolling the entire summary text on clicking something like "summary" is awesome, didnt think of that.
Thank you kindly for your words of support and your suggestions.
I recently sent an email to Dropbox support, asking/begging them to let me pay for their service. But at a normal price for a lambda user.
Dropbox is the only cloud service that I absolutely love since it was released, the only one I really want to support... and the only one I am not paying for. I pay for iCloud and for Google Drive, 2-3$/month each.
As a normal user, I do NOT need 1 To of storage for 10$ a month. I need a few hundreds Go, and am happy to pay 2-3$ a month for those.
I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still... My money is just waiting to be taken and has been for years. This year, I gave up on waiting for them and started paying for Google Drive, and unloaded some old files from Dropbox to Drive.
I would just like the exact same features I've been using since years, but with a few more Go of space available. That's all I am asking for. And that's 25$ a year I would be willing to give Dropbox, instead of me being a free-rider since years.
I had a lot of people asking me to buy my company’s software for 10% or 20% or 50% of what I was charging. I never responded to those cheapskates and rather, in limited number, looked at them as evidence that I wasn’t charging too little. I happily pay much more per GB for Dropbox than for whatever AWS charges because Dropbox has the best client apps, which is of course why they don’t charge per GB.
Seriously. I am still surprised that to this day none of the big players can compete at Dropbox’s level. Not even Apple can make iCloud “Just Work™” the way Dropbox’s client apps and service work.
As a customer I use Dropbox because of how well it works, not because of its $/GB.
> Not even Apple can make iCloud “Just Work™” the way Dropbox’s client apps and service work.
Not surprising. Apple's main business isn't building a file syncing service and while they're a much larger corporation I'd bet that Dropbox has more resources dedicated to its core product compared to Apple's iCloud file syncing offerings.
I don’t think it’s resources as much as culture. Apple makes products for Apple users and their products for the benighted are dogshit (eg Itunes for windows). Dropbox on the other hand treats every platform as first class.
At first I thought this too, but now I prefer for my file storage to be platform agnostic. For instance, if I decide to switch from iOS to Android in the future, I can just download the Dropbox app instead of implementing workarounds.
For me it's beyond that. I make constant use of my Dropbox files from Linux boxen, my iPhone, and a couple of MacBook Pros. I severely doubt iCloud would ever support Linux in a meaningful way.
There is enough competition around Dropbox although they are the biggest one.
I think the true reason you don't see too much fierce competition, is because of little profit you can make off of offering a raw storage, even with awesome client.
Even the almighty Dropbox alone may never be profitable...
Google offers 'Google Drive Stream' that apes the killer Dropbox features: offline files that smart-sync as needed. Unfortunatly, it's only for GSuite accounts.
Google also discontinued one of their apps to rename and launch it as a different name. I got confused as to how I was supposed to replace it so I just uninstalled it and never used it again. Google doesn't spend nearly enough time working on UX.
But Dropox? Always works great. Always. Never had a problem. So I use them more and more. Too bad I can't encrypt my entire Dropbox like, say, Spideroak but oh well.
I tried Google’s file sync app a long time ago and it was dogshit compared to Dropbox. Unless Dropbox raised prices above $50/month I am not going to have a reason to ever try it again.
The big players can’t compete because all of them are invested in making the experience on their own platform the best. Box is the only platform agnostic competitor.
That makes no sense. That's like saying a restaurant won't server a single to somebody, because they serve the best steak! Families are a good example where Dropbox are pricing themselves out (I ended up up going with pcloud because I couldn't justify paying Dropbox for all that space we don't need).
I mean, that is actually true. A restaurant that spends a lot of money on fixed costs (large tables with lots of space between them in expensive cities) will not accept a reservation for 1.
Just call any Michelin 3 star restaurant in an expensive city and ask for a reservation for one at a table, not the bar. It’s not at all illegal to deny this. Number of people in your dinner party is not a protected class.
Comments like these are what makes selling software to consumers such a joy. The time it took a CSR to read your email asking for a 50% discount off of $10 a month probably cost them all the profit they would have received from that account for a year.
Dropbox's fixed storage for a fixed price business model probably assumes a large majority of their customers wont use the full 1TB they pay for. Providing smaller amounts of storage for a lesser price would just reduce revenue without reducing storage costs, so it doesn't make sense for them.
If you want a pay per GB service, setup a S3 account (or similar) and get one of the many decent frontends to it. Its what I do.
Have you found decent frontends which let you sync files between Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and iPhone, using S3 as the backend? If so, I'd love a few pointers, because I've been looking for something like that.
My personal use case involves files stored on a NAS, which is accessible via VPN and any client with a file browser (so, basically every platform). NAS is backed up via rclone to cloud storage. Its not sync, but I dont really want files synced to all my devices.
Based on Dropbox’s S-1 [1], they received $1.107 billion in revenue (2017) and the “cost of goods sold” (COGS) just to deliver those purchased services - excluding software development, sales, marketing, and general corporate expenses - was $0.369 billion, or about 33%. That 33% is basically hosting, support, and devops/SRE (see S-1 page 68 for a detailed description of Dropbox’s COGS).
Stated another way, very roughly, at most 33% of your money went to storage. The real number is probably lower than 33% because the 33% includes support, but let’s use 33% for simplicity.
That means of $100 per year for the 1 TB plan, very roughly[2] $33 is spent on storage. If one wanted to ask “How much less would it cost Dropbox to provide me with 250 GB than 1 TB?” the answer is probably at most 75% of $33 [3], or about $24.
So, if your argument is that Dropbox should offer a 250 GB plan that incorporates their decrease in cost, that 250 GB plan would be priced at about $76/year, not $25.
(These numbers may be a little off because the S-1 doesn’t have per-plan COGS, but they probably aren’t far enough off to change the conclusion. Maybe it’s $70 or $80, but it’s not $25.)
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Dropbox add a less expensive plan, but I’m guessing it would be 10 or 25 GB, not 250, and thatthe plan would be significantly less profitable than their current consumer plan (that is, they’d intentionally ignore the conclusion above). IMO, they’d do so because they thought enough subscribers to this new plan would (a) upgrade to the bigger plan (or business service) eventually, and (b) stay on the free plan forever otherwise. This plan’s entire purpose would be to get users used to paying for something.
I'm of the same opinion, I'd be happy to kick $2-$3 a month for 100GB of storage to Dropbox.
However I don't think storage is really their concern, their product is the syncing capability, the apps on all devices, Dropbox Paper etc.
Additionally I'd be really interested in knowing what % of paying customers actually use their 1TB allowance, or even half of it. This is probably where the majority subsidise the cost of the "whales", like at an all you can eat buffet
I'm in the same boat as that guy and I donate to Wikipedia every year. I love the service. I'd happily pay Dropbox for 100GB. Instead I did a bunch of referrals and I now have 18.5GB which more than enough suits my needs.
>I need a few hundreds Go, and am happy to pay 2-3$ a month for those.
The cost for dropbox to host your 10MiB vs 1TiB is likely the same. Those numbers are so small, the fixed costs of the infrastructure (engineers, hard drives, networks) is way higher than the difference in storage space.
As a normal user, I do NOT need 1 To of storage for 10$ a month. I need a few hundreds Go, and am happy to pay 2-3$ a month for those.
I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still...
The reason is not the focus on enterprise. It is that most of their competition makes money on other products (Google - Ads, Microsoft - Windows/Office, Apple - Hardware), so they can sell storage at cost price or even as a loss-leader.
You want to pay $2-3 for a few hundred GBs of storage space. But this is highly redundant storage, generally requires plenty of bandwidth, and they need to hire developers to improve the Dropbox backend and apps. Oh, and throw in support for some customers. Obviously, charging only $2-3 per month would be a terrible business choice.
I don't pay 10 Euro per month for the storage. For me the product is the absolutely stellar sync (with LAN sync, partial file sync, etc.), combined with wide platform support (including Linux), the file request functionality, and the fact that they are not in the business of selling my private data. I have paid for Dropbox a couple of years now and I am using 'only' 290 GB. I would still use Dropbox for 10 Euro for 500GB and probably even 10 Euro for 100GB.
There are likely amortized fixed costs per user + as other people have stated opportunity costs that make your 2-3 dollars have negative value to the company vs. you as a free user.
You're asking them to change their services just for you before you've even started paying. Just imagine the headache you'll be to deal with once you feel entitled as a paying customer.
I use Linux primarily and have three G Suite accounts. It drives (heh) me crazy. They even moved from syncing to this FUSE-like Drive File Stream on Windows but still nothing for Linux.
Meanwhile Dropbox has a CLI client for your headless servers.
There are lots of unofficial clients that work quite well. Drive is pretty good, if you like manually pushing and pulling files, which I actually find kind of nice
Have you found any good software for handling backups on Google Drive? Their pricing is appealing, but I haven't really done the research to see what the software is like.
After CrashPlan closed their Home user plan this month, I have moved to using Arq Backup. I now only pay a few pennies every month and I still get to have versioned backup of my household shared network drive.
Dropbox is completely unresponsive to individual users. I want more space beyond the 1 TB for their personal plan. You would think they would want to take my money. How hard is it to offer more space? They offer more space to their business users.
My only choice is to get a business plan that costs x4.5 as much and provides me with 3 users accounts that I don't need. They're going to force me to switch to a competing provider like GDrive or SpiderOak
To clarify, I do not need more storage, I already have what I need with Dropbox + Drive (that I already pay for). But I need more storage on Dropbox, because that's my preferred way of handling Cloud storage (having the files on my computer at all times) and I love that Dropbox has been pioneering the field with a great product.
I want to support them, but not at 5x the price of competitors.
Maybe their product is worth the price because the features you just rattled off aren't provided by other companies to a satisfactory degree and therefore Dropbox is 5x better than competitors for you?
GP does raise a valid point though. Most consumers don't pay for a product with cheaper, comparable alternatives just because they are feeling philanthropic.
The fact of the matter is, if Company A doesn't meet their needs but Company B does, they will pay Company B, and no amount of great software, service, and wages for very talented people will change that.
(...) we need to separate the usefulness of the underlying technology called “blockchain” from the mania of people turning bitcoin into a big dumb lottery. Blockchain is simply a nifty software invention (which is open-source and free for anyone to use), whereas bitcoin is just one well-known way to use it. (...)
Will just comment on this sentence: careful here, blockchain is just one of the technologies that Bitcoin uses. But there are other important elements to Bitcoin, such as the concept of decentralization. A company or a bank can use blockchain in a centralized manner.
This video by Andreas Antonopoulos (bitcoin advocate) helps make the distinction: Bitcoin vs. blockchain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHbtp7pOftU).
From the video description: "Blockchains are only one of the foundational technologies. In an attempt to co-opt the interest around Bitcoin, companies and governments are trying to circle the square by creating centralised and permissioned versions while entirely missing the point: decentralization."
PS: That being said, Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency using blockchain and decentralization.
Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.
One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it. You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.
And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.
And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X". This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok. You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".
In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!
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