Ask HN: Do you think there's a need for simple file sharing service?

1 points by Fsp2WFuH 8 years ago | 7 comments

Thinking of making a simple site for sharing files. As easy as imgur, you drag-drop, upload, and get a link you can share. But with a twist - you can only download once, preventing most DMCA takedowns and illegal activities (movie sharing).

LinuxBender 8 years ago |

That limits the transfer to 1:1. Unless it is linked to from a popular site, I think you might find not many people will use it.

I created a couple of sites that let people upload any large file, all server side code, no javascript and people rarely use it. I've also created public anonymous sftp servers, but people don't use them. "too difficult".

Nowadays folks mostly use discord for chat and small images and box for bigger files because of the integration with their desktop and other clients.

one87 8 years ago |

https://www.justbeamit.com/ That's pretty much what you described

tothrowaway 8 years ago | |

https://send.firefox.com is another one.

sharemywin 8 years ago |

What would the use case be?

How would you monetize?

Fsp2WFuH 8 years ago | |

You want to send a file to a friend, maybe a word file, maybe a movie. So probably up to 4GB in size. Something that could be too big for email, or too large for imgur to not compress it (images).

I'd advertise my other products, so it would be a loss leader for me.

sharemywin 8 years ago |

I'd probably make people register.

Fsp2WFuH 8 years ago | |

Such a simple service does not require registration. Assuming you're mentioning this for reasons of logs/security/liability reasons, I'd probably just throttle. Maybe auto delete after 1hr after upload complete and no download attempts made, so server is always clean.