Also worth reading the poster's follow-up years later and the ensuing discussion. Graeme's observation about the significance of the comment is super important:
Time for another episode of "The Case for 9224" (not criticizing you! it's just my hobby, apparently)
That comment has gotten a bum rap over the years. The commenter was trying to be helpful with Dropbox's YC application (that's what "app" meant on HN in 2007). Back then, file synchronization was widely thought to be a solution-in-search-of-a-problem. I've been trying for years to get people to understand this (starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275, then https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), even though I know you can't argue with the internet.
The comment only became infamous years later [1, 2], after Dropbox was clearly a success—so this is a case of hindsight. If people would only read all three comments, instead of stopping at the first, they'd see that the exchange was pleasant and successful [3]. But a meme is more fun. It didn't exist, so it had to be invented! [4]
Compare that with the other infamous-HN-comment-from-2007, "did you win the Putnam" [5], which got pilloried in real time. No hindsight fallacy there!
If the hivemind had empathy (which alas it does not), people would stop to consider how they'd feel about getting publicly mocked over decades for something they posted with good intentions at age 22 [6]. Alas, this is how the internet works—not much we can do about it. It's amazing, though, what a good sport BrandonM has been about it all this time. That part of the story is actually real, so we should celebrate that too.
I never interpreted these comments as mean-spirited, it’s just funny how the comment is completely wrong on hindsight. Kind of like the 640 kB of RAM thing or horses being better than cars.
I don’t think the point is that the people saying it at the time were stupid, it’s just interesting that people can come to completely wrong conclusions which seem reasonable at the time.
It's not completely wrong in hindsight†. It's only "wrong" if you assume "app" means Dropbox itself, and if you ignore the context of the thread. Brandon was talking about an application that framed Dropbox as an alternative to USB drives, and critiquing the pitch.
There was a time on HN where it actually made sense to bat a YC application back and forth, and to talk about what might make a more or less compelling one. It's long gone, and the people dunking on this comment have completely lost touch with what the original community was. I'm not saying that community was better (it was much more insular), but it was certainly more collegial.
† In fact, I think we now know it was literally correct, and YC had the same qualms, accepting Drew Houston just to get access to him and apparently hoping he'd find something better to work on.
At least point 1 and 3 were completely wrong (or technically not wrong but irrelevant to the point).
As you can see by the success of Dropbox, point 1 wasn’t a real issue. That’s also the funniest point, because „why would anyone pay for XYZ, as a software engineer I can just do A, B, C, and D myself“ is such a common counterpoint which completely neglects that most customers aren’t going to do ABCD themselves because they don’t want to deal with it and don’t have the know how.
And point 3 probably can also be classified as wrong, at least Dropbox seems to make some amount of money.
No, couldn't possibly have been wrong, because YC agreed with them. Again: you're missing what Dan is saying. The thread isn't about Dropbox-the-product. It's about the YC application Drew Houston wrote to pitch Dropbox. I really don't think there's a way to rhetoric your way out of this one!
But do you think the commenter meant „here are my issues with this YC application, you should make those points more clear: …“ or do you think he meant „here are my issues with this YC application, you should find something else to do!“?
Because to me it seems like he’s criticizing the product itself, not just the presentation.
