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Ask HN: What's something that HN has been wrong about?
12 points by kashnote on Jan 31, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 64 comments
The one example that most folks know about is Dropbox, where pretty much everyone hated on the original post that Drew submitted. And we all know where Dropbox is at now.

What are some other examples of HN hating on an idea and then it turning out to be the next big thing?



HN has been wrong about almost every single topic. It has also been correct about almost every single topic. That's because "HN" isn't a monolithic entity but lots of individuals who often disagree. People complaining about the "HN hivemind" are mostly just folks who have trouble comprehending that people with different opinions exist.

I'd also have to disagree with your "everyone hated on Dropbox"; you can read the original thread at [1], many people said "wow, great!" That's actually the majority of the comments, and BrandonM's comments (which is what people usually refer to) is a lot more friendly and nuanced than "hating on the idea". After Drew's response, BrandonM's response can essentially be summarized as "right, I see how this would be useful".

Like I said: HN is lots of different people who disagree on essentially everything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863


Thanks for taking care of defending BrandonM this time :)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...


There's something to be said for The Wisdom of Crowds - an observation that given certain conditions, a crowd can make better estimates / predictions / etc than individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

One example is the consistent love for Rust, which makes me think it's probably a technology worth adopting (if it fits the project).


HN has continuously surprised me by the range of opinions, professions, ideas, etc presented. The diversity here is much broader than one might initially assume.


Where is Dropbox now? Last I checked their stock had slid 50% since IPO and they hadn't added major functionality to any of their clients. Most people I know switched to Google Drive, iCloud or selfhosted.

Is there any reason, 10 years after release, why I should be using Dropbox instead of my own network attached storage? Or does their product really just boil down to "storage as-a-service, as a service"?


They’ve been commoditized by box, drive, icloud and everyone under the sun like everyone here predicted. Still a multi-billion company tho so I guess it’s not a bad outcome. For me the lesson here is even if your idea is obvious, if you have first mover advantage and execute well you can still succeed


they hadn't added major functionality to any of their clients

Stagnating!

Seriously, which major functionality you’d want to add to your, idk, snow brush, duct tape, thermometer?

Or does their product really just boil down to "storage as-a-service, as a service"?

I’m not using cloud storage/sync, but if I did, that would be an exact formula for choosing a product. I mean I’d want to put files in a dir (v-drive?) and that’s it. And when the time comes, Dropbox will be first, because it’s basically synonymous to it, unless price-prohibitive. Am I missing something here?

Maybe features you talked about are sharing, social-something, smartphone integration, etc. Genuinely not sure.


I think your comment does prove that on a long enough time horizon cynicism is the correct disposition to have when it comes to weighing new things. It's on the founder/team to constantly prove that not to be the case.

In the case of Dropbox, I would say HN was directionally correct that the software would be commoditized, but I would say that the avg. commenter then would not be able to predict the IPO.


Dropbox is an $8.5b publicly traded company, so it’s in a much better place than an idea that got shot down on the internet and never went anywhere.


Fair enough. One has to wonder how much of their market share was cannibalized by the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft though. Dropbox certainly didn't try to distinguish themselves from the pack, and now they're barely on the map. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of middle-schoolers today have never even heard of it.


Yeah, I completely agree with you. It seems like the best path for them would have been something like what slack did. There was a time when Dropbox was a widely used product, that would have been a great time to get acquired and bundled.


Sure. I built a webapp that uses Dropbox as a global, read-only storage that is accessed on average just once a day per app instance. At midnight, or at startup, each site synchronizes its local file list with a common dropbox site.

Yes, there are many other ways this could have been done, but it was built to be administered by non-technical people who at least understood how to upload files to Dropbox and they have access to all of Dropbox's file management tools. A massive chunk of functionality that we didn't have to build out!


I pay for dropbox. You recommend that I should use my own network attached storage? I don't even know what that is or how it works.


Ok? You do know about iCloud and Google Drive though, and both of those are cheaper-per-gigabyte than Dropbox. If you're still paying for Dropbox in 2023, that's a you-problem.


There's nothing wrong with not having "as cheap as possible" as your primary selection criteria for products and services.


I don't understand the problem at all.


Maybe /u/gardenhedge prioritizes other features above cost.


Considering how few features Dropbox hosts, I find that incredibly hard to believe.


I use Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. Dropbox has faster and more stable sync and better Linux support. For many that is enough to pay for.


I pay for email and search and I don’t see the problem.


They invented the market that Google Drive and Onedrive took over.

There is little need to pay separate for Dropbox now that it is in Google Suite/Workspace and Microsoft Office 365.

But for a few years they were the only ones.


I think lots of people were wrong about the F-35. It is a very good warplane even though it cost a ton of money to develop. (Military aviation nerds, feel free to contradict me)


Finland's selection of the F-35 added data to a growing feeling of mine that the F-35 is a software and production problem reaching maturity.

I look at Finland as a country that takes defense seriously and expects to fight hard with exceptionally degraded facilities and logistical support. They chose the F-35 vs. the Super Hornet+Growler, Gripen+GlobalEye & Rafale means something. At a minimum they think the marginal cost of the aircraft is worth the supply chain it offers.

I strongly suspect that the aircraft is a far more capable electronic warfare platform than is generally understood. A very good local defense blog covered the process extensively and is well worth spending time with - https://corporalfrisk.com/2021/12/11/f-35a-is-hx-the-winner-...


I still remember g+ post from I think one of Google’s vps advocating to scrap the whole program in favor of A-10. Lol what a clown town it was


Most of the complaints seemed centered around cost and delays, rather than the engineering somehow being bad (oxygen issue was an exception). You're echoing the same cost complaint.


It's an incredible plane and only going to get better.

Also a great budget to bury black projects...


Heres another one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055


But the user posting the comment only has ~3k of karma ;-)


The Musk Twitter takeover discussion was full of predictions about how long the site would continue to function, most of which have already been exceeded.


Let’s not forget, there were also many people on HN predicting at various times during the buyout that:

* Musk would somehow weasel his way out of the contract

* Musk would demonstrate that Twitter had lied to the SEC about bot numbers

* Musk would embrace a policy of free speech absolutism (within legal limitations) upon taking over

None of which came to pass.


Maybe we should put a lettuce in front of a camera. Seemed to have done the trick last time.


The iPad did not get a particularly warm welcome. In defense of 2010 HN commenters, not that many people commented, and what was written from announcement toward release (and afterward) trended toward a more welcoming mindset.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081097

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081397

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081519


Intel has gone bankrupt at least a dozen times by now.


Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general. I mean think what you want about the industry, but it has definitely been a financial success. Yet HN has had a non-stop hate boner for it since 2010.


It's wild that people can say this on the heels of widespread systemic failure like FTX, Terra, and all the other rug pulls/scams. We tried cryptocurrency; it's incompatible with our societal and governmental paradigms.

I was rooting for cryptocurrency 7 years ago, when it wasn't sold as "digital gold" or whatever asinine label people give it nowadays. I'll eat the crow and admit I was wrong to not anticipate the abuse of an open, distributed system. The landscape of cryptocurrency today is an irrecoverable mess, evidenced by the slipping valuation and hemorrhaging trade volume.


Those were custodial companies. The whole point of crypto is not your keys, not your coin.


Yep, I agree. Even still, millions fell for it, and because they aren't regulated (like, say, a bank or something) they were able to fuck people over on an unprecedented scale. You can try and educate people on this truth, but it doesn't matter. FTX and Coinbase bought up the advertising, exchanges are the face of crypto for the common person.

There's simply no momentum left in cryptocurrency as a software movement. An economy cannot live on HODLers and hustlers alone.


But Crypto is too complicated for 99% of the population to use directly. Given that exactly what is it useful for then?

The Stock Market is too complicated for most people but it is pretty safe for the average citizen to participate in ( and you have many levels of "participation" according to you expertise, budget and inclination).


Crypto is digital cash in the most literal sense. If you lose your wallet, the cash in it is gone. If you're mugged, the cash you give your attacker is gone. People secure little paper bills in their wallet/purse much better than they do their credit card info. If you set people's expectations correctly, that gets you 90% of the way there.

The other 10% is the fact that securing digital data is not as easy to do as physical money. However this is where hardware wallets come in, and the user experience for hardware wallets has improved considerably over the last half decade. They just need to be more widely deployed.


If 90% of your argument is that we need to move the goalposts, and the other 10% says we need to rework the UX to accompany it, maybe aiming to be digital cash isn't in crypto's best interest? That's disregarding it's volatility, missing accountability and lack of meaningful regulation.


Moving goalposts? Crypto is and always has been about self custody, from the very beginning.


There are billions of dollars of cryptocurrency moving around on black markets every day. It is a massive success for shady business.


I'm sure there have been traditional businesses that were systemic failures and scams


You're going to have to define success here.

People made a lot of predictions about what the impact of crypto currency or blockchains generally would be. Few of those seem to have come to pass.


Do you actually know anyone who has actually ever used cryptocurrency for a real transaction? Beyond something like buying coffee? And not for black market purposes?


Yes: me.


That depends how you define success. I don't think many consider a zero-sum game where only the winners are publicized a success.


It is objectively not a zero-sum game, which is my point. It has grown from a million, to billion, to trillion dollar industry.


Bigger doesn't prove the game is not zero sum. There is no valid underlying use for any cryptocurrency for the average person. If you take away early adopters, crypto-zealots, shills, criminals organizations and suckers, what's left is far from clear. Is cryptocurrency some transformative, post-governmental currency, controlled by the people - or the next speculative de jour - or a scam - with a better marketing strategy?

What seems clear is that when you confound speculative utopian societal changes with the underworld's dream currency, crazy things happen.


I'm sorry, but do you know what zero-sum means? Maybe go look it up. It's okay, you're one of today's lucky 10,000.

The market has grown in size. The value of crypto companies and market caps today is not literally the sum of the value of crypto companies and market caps 10 years ago. Ergo, not zero-sum. This is purely a mathematical statement about industry financials, not a moral judgement about abstract "value" in terms of societal contribution.


My implication is that ultimately crypto will go to zero - because it is worthless. When you sell something that is worthless to someone, that is a zero sum game.


> it is objectively not a zero sum game

Right, it’s actually a negative sum game because the network takes resources to secure. Thanks for pointing that out.


Haha so true, it’s pretty wild and sometimes I feel crazy not being a crypto hater on here. Don’t get me wrong, there are scams galore in the space but I think there’s a real place for crypto in the future.


I co-founded a bitcoin company. Spent the most active 5 years of my professional life there. No regrets!


Noticed the same since the early days.


Financial success while ignoring externalities? Is the amount of pollution created as a byproduct of using all the electricity not in the calculation?

Being surprised that there is a pushback against such a technology seems inappropriate or foolish.


One could make literally the same arguments about Uber and Airbnb. HN has it in for crypto specifically, for whatever reason.


Good luck trying to make a parallel argument that has the same strength.

Does Uber or Airbnb use 100,000x more resources per transaction than the standard alternative?


A significant fraction of world GDP is spent on financial services selling trust. It is not obvious that a world with trustless self-custody crypto would be more expensive than traditional finance.


Bitcoin does not scale by design. Ethereum may be different. I doubt there is a uniform hate towards the crypto world the original commenter laments about. It's probably a bit more nuanced -- as you could expect from HN (on average).


You’ve wandered into my field of expertise. Bitcoin can be made to scale to billions of concurrent users. There is a clear roadmap from here to there.


Can be, but isn't, right? What's the delay? It's been over a decade -- apparently the electricity consumption isn't a priority for the community.


Electricity consumption is the entire point of bitcoin and isn't going to change. It is what the security arguments are based on. Note that electric consumption of proof-of-work does not scale with usage though.


Bitcoin.

The value of censorship resistant low fee fixed supply digital money seemed to fly over the heads of people that many would expect to see the potential.

It still amazes me to this day but as they say, "you will buy bitcoin at the price you deserve".




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