For the record: I think this is going to be one of the posts where the HN vibe would be totally off (incorrectly negative) looking back 10 years from now. Similar to the original Dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I can't tell if you're saying that they were incorrectly negative, or incorrectly positive?
In my experience, everyone hates Dropbox, and especially that it's always popping up asking you to sign in, and that it's preinstalled on fresh Windows installs whether you want it or not.
~10 years ago Dropbox was amazing and widely used, at least in my University and by many people in my community. For the record, the infamous post OP is referring to is almost 20 years old now.
Thanks, I've updated my comment to clarify. I think HN is being incorrectly negative here.
The original comment about Dropbox was saying how everyone can "trivially" implement Dropbox using a network share and hence it has no reason to exist - but obviously this is wrong.
Many HN commenters are now saying how they won't ever buy anything from Meta. That's fair, but brand perceptions shift - newer generations are already at a point where they are way more comfortable sharing their lives and branding themselves than before - wanting to be a YouTuber now is what wanting to be an astronaut was in the past. A lot of the reputational damage dealt to Meta is US-centric (e.g. Cambridge Analytica), and the HN crowd, being mostly Western and privacy-aware amplifies that. The average person who's using Meta's services doesn't read HN, and is certainly much less critical of Meta.
Also, I think AR glasses has lots of potential as an eventual phone replacement. I'll give an example - virtual humans that exist in your glasses that can act as a fitness trainer, tennis coach, rock bouldering buddy that you can summon anytime. I think we are kind of all glued to the same pane of glass for too long and give it 5-10 years for the pendulum to swing, this blending of physical and virtual will become very interesting.
That's the thing, the stuff you described isn't a phone replacement; we don't use our phones to do that right now. I do think that AR and holographic projection (which is also advancing very nicely, and having some very cool tech demos[1]) have a lot of interesting uses, but it's not doing the stuff that we use phones to do now (reading websites, watching videos, listening to music, text chatting, etc).
I don't know how anyone is excited to hear, "hey, with this you can watch videos just like on your phone, but the video is also kinda transparent so it's harder to see!" (which it has to be, or we're really gonna be seeing car accidents skyrocket).
I think there is value in doing certain things one-at-a-time, with full attention, but this makes some of those into overlays that you're now sharing with other tasks.
I hear you, I can see how it might not be a "replacement", rather a better word would be "alternative".
Phones are here to stay, but I was hinting on how only a few years ago it's hard to envision how a person could live a modern life without smartphones, and yet increasingly products are coming out that reduce our phone reliance - from modern dumbphones [1], to cellular smartwatches, to (the failed) Humane Pin, and now this. Which in my opinion actually has the best shot at dethroning the phone.
Whether this outcome would be better I don't know, but with every new wave there's an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and fix them. Take watching short videos for example, I don't think most would agree it's the best use of time, yet people watch them out of compulsion. A form factor that discourages watching videos might actually be better in this case. Ultimately I think a lot of what people currently do on their phones will have an alternative on AR. It's not 1-to-1, but it'll be pretty damn close.
Personally, I use Nextcloud, running on one of my home servers. For SaaS storage, I honestly dont' know.
I don't use Nextcloud to have instant access, I use it for redundancy for critical data that I don't want only living on my phone or laptop (like tax and legal docs), but that's also data that I don't want to hand to a third party app willy-nilly.
