HN saw the birth of Dropbox; I hope we don't see the death of it here.

The video review and transcription tools have been game changing for us.

In 2020, Dropbox launched “new paper,” which turned the flat list of Paper documents on paper.Dropbox.com into literal files that live in your Dropbox folder. This was a staged rollout. Mine wasn’t migrated until five years later.

For a while, I could edit “paper files” that other team members created, and I could create paper docs on the old version (to the utter confusion of my team members), but I couldn’t create new paper files without duplicating a team member’s doc and deleting the content.

Now when I visit paper.Dropbox.com, all of my “old paper” docs are completely missing and I see an empty list (of what I presume are old-style docs.) :( I have local backups, but like, what’s the point of maintaining two separate services with the same name for five years?

Edit: Apparently my account was migrated in December 2024. I don’t know why the old interface is still accessible to me. A redirect or a message like “Check your ‘Migrated Paper Docs’ folder” would go a long way instead of showing an hauntingly empty list.

(I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)

First password, now paper, what's going on at Dropbox?

Steve nailed it when he said - you are just a feature.

Does it support mobile web?

Why are they killing the app?

I’m a long time Dropbox user and had no idea what Paper is (it’s a collaborative document editing thing). I can’t recall ever seeing it as part of the Dropbox brand or anyone using it. I might have even been interested in using it… Is this just me or did they really fail to market this product big time?

I for one am very happy if this marks the start of the downfall of the mobile app. They were a neat concept but ruined by the gatekeepers, and the web has evolved to the point where most are unnecessary.

notion ate there lunch

[dead]