Products · Pattern or everyday thing
File sharing
Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 17 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 18 complaints
- Sharing files between two phones is surprisingly hard to do in practice2025-11-21
- Anonymous file distribution tools are a pain to use, requiring native client programs2024-09-26
- File sending is not intuitive and the UI needs a lot of work2024-08-24
- Peer-to-peer file transfer sites are slow and finicky to use2024-05-23
- Colleagues waste time hunting for files and resort to endless email passing2024-04-13
- Existing QR-based sharing apps are clunky and only partly work2024-01-21
- Doesn't know how to send large files without an account on big services2023-08-19
- Sharing files across mixed devices is hard, so people end up emailing files to themselves2023-02-19
- Setting up local network sharing requires basic knowledge and is hard for people2023-02-19
- Transferring a file from mobile to desktop across platforms is hard2022-05-04
- Moving data between applications is difficult, fragile, and sometimes impossible2021-06-01
- Sharing data between apps is annoying, so users must export and share each piece of data individually2021-02-09
- Getting a file from Android to a Mac is repeatedly hard to do2020-12-24
- Ads make it hard to guess where the correct download button is2017-03-07
- Download links look like UI buttons, so users must guess which one is real2012-06-29
- Recipients must install a downloader client just to get a shared file2012-03-21
- Sharing a file by hosting it on a web server is clunky and cumbersome, a frustrating multi-step process2012-02-24
- Sharing one file means dragging it into a shared folder, setting passwords, and creating accounts2010-01-02