Dropbox status: access issues and outage reports

Problems in the last 24 hours

The graph below depicts the number of Dropbox reports received over the last 24 hours by time of day. When the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line, an outage is determined.

Most Reported Problems

The following are the most recent problems reported by Dropbox users through our website.

• Errors (75%)
• Website Down (25%)

Live Outage Map

The most recent Dropbox outage reports came from the following cities:

City	Problem Type	Report Time
Nottingham	Errors	23 days ago
Guayaquil	Website Down	24 days ago
Flumet	Errors	1 month ago
Irapuato	Errors	1 month ago
Bournemouth	Sign in	3 months ago
Paramaribo	Errors	4 months ago

Full Outage Map

Community Discussion

Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.

Beware of "support numbers" or "recovery" accounts that might be posted below. Make sure to report and downvote those comments. Avoid posting your personal information.

Dropbox Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  Saurabh | Celsius 233 (@Celsius233Books) reported 58 seconds ago

  @colemickens @Dropbox lenovo and security issues...takes one back to the 2015 Superfish scandal where lenovo was visually scanning every single webpage you visited to sell ads

• 
  Invest Like the Best (@InvestLikeBest) reported 5 minutes ago

  Ben Thompson's two laws of consumer tech: 1) Consumers do not want to pay for software 2) Consumers do not care about being productive. "We went through this in early SaaS. The canonical company for this is Dropbox. They had to rebuild the whole thing and realize the only way we're going to make money is by selling to companies. You literally had OpenAI replaying the Dropbox story, but at like 100x the size. We're going to sell subscriptions to consumers. And they did. They sold a lot, but they didn't sell enough. If you're going to be in the consumer market, you have to be doing advertising. If they had leaned into advertising immediately, as soon as ChatGPT was a hit, I think they would have a great ad product right now. I think Google would be in much bigger trouble. I think Meta would be in much bigger trouble. Charging people money is hard. Giving people things for free is easy. And it's very frustrating that OpenAI did not pursue this sooner."

• 
  Robert J Abalos (@robertjabalos) reported 6 minutes ago

  Want Your Startup to Get VC Funded? You Must Meet All Six of These Requirements Venture capitalists at the seed stage bet on potential more than perfection, yet they demand specific proof points before writing a check. After reviewing hundreds of deals and data from PitchBook, Crunchbase, and leading funds, six absolute requirements stand out. Miss any and the odds of funding drop sharply. First, an exceptional founding team. Team quality remains the single highest weighted factor before product market fit solidifies. VCs look for domain expertise, prior execution, complementary skills, and coachability. Research shows roughly one in four two founder teams loses a co founder by year four, so investors scrutinize resilience and equity alignment. Companies with strong teams raise at higher valuations even with lighter metrics because execution can fix product or market gaps. Second, a large and expanding market. Seed investors require a total addressable market of at least one billion dollars, ideally several billion, with a clear path to one hundred million in annual revenue. Serviceable addressable market should support venture scale outcomes. Markets growing above twenty percent annually command premiums. Small markets cap upside and rarely produce the fund returning exits VCs need. Third, early traction proving customers care. For SaaS this often means ten thousand to one hundred thousand in monthly recurring revenue or three hundred thousand plus in annual recurring revenue. Pre revenue startups need strong engagement such as daily active users to monthly active users ratios above twenty percent, organic waitlists, or letters of intent from unaffiliated customers. Dropbox famously used a demo video that drove seventy five thousand sign ups overnight, unlocking its Sequoia seed. Slack showed early retention that later became legendary. Fourth, rapid and consistent growth. Seed VCs seek fifteen to twenty percent or higher month over month revenue or user growth sustained over multiple months. Absolute numbers matter less than trajectory. Startups posting twenty percent plus monthly recurring revenue growth have seen close rates near sixty five percent in analyzed pitch data. Flat or decelerating growth signals risk. Fifth, early unit economics and retention signals. Even at seed, investors examine lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios above two to one, ideally three to one, net revenue retention near or above one hundred percent, and cohort retention that flattens rather than collapses. Gross retention above eighty to ninety percent is a positive signal. These metrics prove the product delivers lasting value and that growth will not require endless capital. Sixth, capital efficiency and clear runway. Burn multiple and months of runway matter. Investors prefer teams that can stretch capital to eighteen months or more while showing improving efficiency. Median U.S. seed rounds now sit near three to four million dollars, yet graduation to Series A has tightened to roughly twenty to fifty percent depending on cohort and sector. Lean teams of four to eight people that still deliver results stand out. Data confirms the stakes. Only a minority of seed companies reach Series A, and failure rates near forty percent are common. Yet the power law rewards those that clear these bars. Airbnb, Stripe, and early Slack all combined strong teams, massive markets, and measurable early traction. Founders who quantify these six elements with real numbers, not projections, dramatically improve their chances of securing seed capital.

• 
  Phillip Shoemaker (@pbsIdentity) reported 7 minutes ago

  India just ordered hundreds of Google Firebase accounts shut down after authorities found scammers using the platform to impersonate major banks. At least 57 Firebase-hosted websites and databases were targeted for takedown this month alone. Some mimicked banks. Others distributed malicious Android apps. Some were designed to steal financial information from phones. Here's what I find interesting. Firebase isn't some shady hosting company operating out of a basement. It's Google infrastructure. That's exactly why criminals want it. We've spent years teaching people to look for obvious signs of scams. Weird domain. Broken English. Sketchy hosting. Browser warning. No HTTPS. But increasingly the attacker doesn't need to build suspicious-looking infrastructure. They borrow legitimate infrastructure. Google. Microsoft. Cloudflare. GitHub. Dropbox. Whatever gives the attack credibility and reliability. Now imagine the average person inspecting the link. They recognize Google. The connection is encrypted. The page loads perfectly. The certificate is valid. Everything their brain has been trained to interpret as: SAFE may technically be true. Except the person controlling the page is a criminal. That's an important distinction. HTTPS proves your connection to the website is encrypted. It does not prove the person operating the website is honest. A Google URL proves Google is providing infrastructure. It doesn't necessarily prove Google created the content you're looking at. The little padlock was never a morality detector. We just accidentally trained an entire generation to treat it like one. India says scammers have increasingly shifted toward Firebase because its legitimate development tools and database functionality make it useful infrastructure for fraudulent sites and apps.

• 
  Martin (@martin_valchev_) reported 15 minutes ago

  Small feature, real problem: Handing a WordPress site to someone else usually means FTP credentials, database dumps, or a shared Dropbox folder that stays there forever. A link that expires and can be revoked is just... better. Security shouldn't require discipline. It should be the default.

• 
  chaos (@konig0000) reported 15 minutes ago

  Solution of yesterday’s question: Design Google Photos: the part after the boxes “Hash it and put it in S3” fails the interview. Two phones compress the same sunset differently. Same photo. Two hashes. Two rows. You just built a worse Dropbox. The system needs three IDs, not one. client_upload_id — generated on the device before the first byte moves content_hash — hash of the exact bytes you received asset_id — the thing the user sees in the library Uploads are sessions. Library entries are assets. Blobs are renditions. If you collapse those into one key, retries, edits, and shared albums all collide. 1. Retries must be idempotent on the client, not on the filename Phone goes offline mid-flight with 612 shots, 40 already half-uploaded. Each photo gets a client_upload_id the moment it enters the queue. Chunks are uploaded against that ID. Commit is PUT /uploads/{id}/complete. Same ID + same bytes → same session. Server returns the existing asset. Late packet after commit is a no-op. Filename + timestamp is not an ID. Camera roll and AirDrop will mint two. 2. Exact dupes are content-addressed. Near-dupes are reconciled. After commit: look up sha256(bytes) if it already exists for that user (or the shared album’s owner set), attach the new upload to the existing asset_id do not create a second photo The 28 shared “Goa 2026” shots that are almost-but-not-quite the library copies will miss on sha256. That is expected. Run a cheap perceptual hash (pHash / dHash) + capture time + camera model from EXIF. If distance is tiny and captured within a few seconds, mark as near_duplicate_of and do not show two tiles. Keep both blobs if you must; hide one in the UI. Two devices, two compressions, one photo in the grid.

• 
  Rituraj (@RituWithAI) reported 19 minutes ago

  🚨 Someone built a tool that checks if your email is registered on 120+ sites — without the sites ever knowing someone checked. No notifications sent. No login attempts logged. No alerts triggered. Silent. Invisible. Complete. It's called Holehe. 16,800 GitHub stars. And the technique behind it is what makes it different from every other email OSINT tool. Here's how most email checkers work — and why they fail. Standard approach: try to log in with the email and a fake password. If the error says "wrong password" — the account exists. If it says "account not found" — it doesn't. Problem: every login attempt gets logged. Every failed attempt triggers security alerts on accounts with 2FA. Some platforms lock accounts after repeated failed attempts. The target knows someone was checking. Holehe never attempts a login. Instead it uses the "forgot password" flow — the password reset mechanism that every platform exposes publicly. When you enter an email on a forgot password page, the platform has to check whether that email exists in its database. It tells you: "we sent a reset link" or "no account found." Holehe reads that response. Gets the answer. Never touches the login flow. Never triggers a security alert. Never logs an access attempt against the account. The platform confirms whether the email exists. The account owner never finds out anyone asked. Here's what 120+ platforms looks like in practice. Social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit. Professional: LinkedIn, GitHub, Freelancer, Fiverr. Dating: Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Badoo, Happn. Entertainment: Spotify, Netflix, Twitch, Steam, Epic Games, Deezer. Shopping: Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Zalando, AliExpress. Services: Airbnb, Uber, PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe. And 90+ more. Every registration checked silently. Here's the use case that makes people share this. Run your own email address. See every platform that comes back positive. Then run an email address you gave to a company that claimed they'd never share it. See if it's registered on data broker sites and marketing platforms you never signed up for. See where your email has been sold or leaked to. Here's what investigators actually use it for. Journalists verifying whether a source's claimed identity matches their digital footprint. Security researchers auditing their own exposure before a public disclosure. HR teams verifying whether candidate profiles match claimed backgrounds. And the obvious: anyone who needs to know whether a specific email address belongs to a real active person — without alerting that person. Here's the wildest part. It runs async — all 120+ platforms checked simultaneously. Results in seconds. And it exports clean JSON or CSV for integration into larger OSINT pipelines. Pair it with Blackbird (which takes the confirmed email and finds linked profiles), Sherlock (which takes usernames found in those profiles and searches 400+ platforms), and Maigret (which builds the full dossier) — and you have a complete four-tool OSINT pipeline from a single email address. One command to instal. Run it on your own email first. 16.8K GitHub stars. 1.7K forks. MIT License. 100% Open Source. GitHub link in the comments 👇

• 
  Guymon Adams (@guymonadams) reported 21 minutes ago

  @BrianRoemmele Man, this seems to be a recurring problem for Dropbox. I remember a similar story several years back about their own employees browsing thru user files. All the reasons I moved over to Sync, a much more secure and respectable alternative.

• 
  Naresh Mintri (@Yogamaestro) reported 21 minutes ago

  @IncomeTaxIndia Seems like e-filing portal overloaded. Taking long to register new taxpayer, buffering. Even dropbox menus not working. Plz look into it. Thanks.

• 
  Mikemira (@storiesbyohama) reported 22 minutes ago

  Twitter did not explode online first. It exploded in a hallway. In 2007, Twitter was still small. Most people online did not care. So the team did not try to shout at the whole internet. They went to SXSW. They put two big screens in the corridor. People at the event sent a text. That text showed up on the wall in front of everyone. One person posted. Ten people saw it. Then those ten posted too. That is how usage jumped. Not from a giant ad. From one room full of the right people. This is the growth lesson most founders miss. You do not need the whole market on day one. You need one place where your first users already stand. A campus. A conference. A WhatsApp group. A Discord. One street. One event. Dropbox did this on Hacker News. Tinder did this at campus parties. Airbnb did this when hotels ran out of rooms. If signups are slow, stop spraying ads everywhere. Find the one room. Make the product visible there. Let people watch other people use it. That is how early growth actually starts. I'm Miracle Ohama, a Growth Marketer helping B2B SaaS & tech companies find and fix revenue leaks across their funnel, I fix Growth Funnels & build real experiments that increase ARR.

• 
  Crazy Freakin Planet (@FreakinPlanet) reported 28 minutes ago

  @ericzakariasson @bot Why do I need to sign in to Dropbox every time I need to do something with it. Create more persistent connectors and please increase limits for premium+ users. It’s not usable after a couple of hours of light use.

• 
  Sridhar Katakam (@srikat) reported 30 minutes ago

  Tips to new @OmarchyLinux users from a new Omarchy user 1. If you are coming from a Mac and have installed Omarchy on a Windows machine: Your keyboard most likely has start button and then the Alt button. Swap these so Super key becomes command where the left thumb usually rests. I asked Claude Code to do this for me. 2. If your mouse has a scrollwheel: Super + mousewheel scroll up and down switches desktop spaces. This is besides the usual Super + <number> and Super + Tab / Super + Shift + Tab to switch spaces. In addition to these, I have AI set up Ctrl + Alt + arrow. 3. Missing Alfred/Raycast? Install omacast. 4. If your laptop is connected to an external monitor with bluetooth mouse and keyboard and you find that the computer is not waking up (after you walk away for a while) when you press any key or move the mouse, ask AI to fix this for you. 5. The default font size of text in Claude Code is 12px which is small for my aging eyes. Ask AI to change it to 16px. 6. Todoist does not have a native app for Linux and so if you miss its Quick Add feature, ask AI to set this up. It added the functionality and assigned Super + Q to it. Later, I came to know there's a community plugin for it. But I am happy with what Claude did. 7. If you use Dropbox, chances are, the total available space in your account is not accurate because it is hardcoded in Omarchy at this time. Ask AI to fix this for you. 8. If/when the fan in your computer is spinning fast and is noisy, ask AI to find out the reason and fix. In my case, it turned out to be Performance profile in the Lenovo laptop. Claude changed it to Balanced and now it's all fine. 9. Get familiar with keyboard shortcuts.

• 
  siamkidd (@SiamKidd) reported 30 minutes ago

  Now the dust has settled with the SN24 Quasar debacle, I thought I'd share some info which would shine a slightly more positive light on the Quasar team. A few weeks ago, they approached DSV to raise $280k. They said they had big developments, some breakthroughs with a new model and that they needed capital for the training run. At the time, bear in mind that their alpha was strong, they were largely in good favour of the community and Const was still a firm backer/supporter of Quasar. And he held the keys. And they were to appear on Novelty Search soon. So it ticked a bunch of boxes. Anyway, we agreed, as we are always keen to help teams. But the issue was that I was away for 3 weeks and I never travel with crypto capability. And anytime any money moves around in DSV it's a right palava as we have 3rd party regulated custodians and have to jump through all sorts of hoops, (as social engineering with deepfakes is a very real threat). So we were able to jump through some hoops and ping over $104k to begin with and then the rest at a later date. Then we had those 2 days of madness at the beginning of the week and Quasar is no more. There's been all sorts of accusations and my view on all this is that there has just been terrible decision making, that's all. Announcements of announcements, over-exaggerating claims, giving a 24 hour deadline to offer proof, delivering it 2-3 days late and then walking back on some of the claims etc etc. I mark this down to simply their very young age and no business experience. But I don't think they are scammers. Just some very bright kids who's first experience of business is a subnet, which is like drinking water via a fire hydrant! And a pertinent piece of info behind that, is that they were very willing to return our funds. So as of today, that $104k has returned safely back to DSV. Their time as subnet owners is over and so there was a fear that we wouldn't get a penny back. But it wasn't the case. So do take this into consideration the next time you hear someone calling them scammers. With regards to Const, I think he too has also had a bit of an unfair ride with some of the comments I've seen. Const has had probably the roughest time with SN24 and is massively down from it all. He initially bought the slot from us, then reimbursed the team twice after 2 hacks, given them 6 figures in compute credits and more. So it really is fair that he keeps the slot. And I'm sure he'll find a good team for it. Also he is the founder of Bittensor. Not the CEO. He can't have detailed DD and optics on every single person and subnet in the ecosystem. And if he backs a subnet, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to moon or be good forever. He's essentially the Federal Reserve Chairman and he has to craft policy changes to incentivise efficient growth in the ecosystem. He's the visionary and his role is to drive a path forward for Bittensor, which he is doing. And although I've highlighted personal frustrations that the chain is upgrading far too frequently...at least we are upgrading! That's one of the beauties of Bittensor. We will never be stagnant. And for the outsiders looking in, if it looks a bit chaotic, well, it is. But it's not necessarily a bad thing. You should have seen all the chaos and scandals of the companies when the NASDAQ launched! Or when ERC-20 contracts launched on Ethereum or the mountainous amount of scams on Solana with pumpfun. Hell, Bitcoin even hard forked into Bitcoin Cash due to so much in-fighting in 2017. And Ethereum suffered a $150m DAO hack in 2015/16 which forced a hard for there too. Hence why we now have ETC and ETH. So in comparison, everything is golden over here lol. In recent times, we've had/have: - SN4 partnering with Intel. - SN44 partnering with a NASDAQ PLC. - SN71 partnering with Dropbox. - SN18 getting huuuuge institutional clients. - SN107 co-authoring a research paper with OpenAI. - SN53 delivering Kimi K3 tokens cheaper than Openrouter or even Kimi. - SN95 being integrated within Hermes. - SN9 using green energy from SN110 to power their next big training run. - SN21 achieving Google Adwords campaign predictions that no company has ever achieved. - SN51 regularly doing 6 figure buyback and burns with revenue. And there's probably more that I've missed that I'm not aware of. Anywho, the future is bright! Have a good weekend all!

• 
  Christopher Bailey (@LexBaileyAI) reported 31 minutes ago

  @TetraspaceWest At Fitbit we hired a half dozen people from Jawbone who brought everything cleverly hidden in Dropbox. They got prosecuted. Decade later, companies kaput but Fable found it, processed it and now it’s intermixed in various *** repos and Huggingface. Is nVidia now in trouble?

• 
  Phillip Shepard (@Phillip_shepard) reported 31 minutes ago

  @RobertJBye One thing I do on a daily basis - I have a skill that is called the “video analyzer skill” and I record a screen record with my iPhone and microphone one - I talk about all the issues I need fixed while showing it in video - send it via Claude mobile app - it runs the skill - transcribes and makes its self a html doc with the video frames that the issues exist in - then fixes the issues - builds a test flight and I update it - very useful… if the video is too big I send it via Dropbox which syncs to my Mac

• 
  StockStorm (@StockStormX) reported 32 minutes ago

  Dropbox $DBX says about 5,000 accounts were compromised in an August hack tied to a Lenovo ID login flaw

• 
  Vladislav Zharkov 👾 (@_vladislavzh) reported 33 minutes ago

  I have zero industry experience. None. I don't know how to use issue trackers, I need a GUI for version control, I deliver my files through Dropbox. I don't have templates, I restart or reuse every time. I don't use industry standard tools, I don't know workflows and pipelines.

• 
  하레 (@ascoeur9) reported 34 minutes ago

  I also experienced the same issue two months ago and reported it, but no action has been taken. In the end, I started syncing all the folders with Dropbox.

• 
  DAX : TV (@daxtv) reported 34 minutes ago

  @0x00_dev @ProtonMail have been using dropbox for years- never an issue - thought it might be smart to move to Proton Drive - but not now me thinks - hey ho :)

• 
  Justin Kalland (@justinkalland) reported 34 minutes ago

  If you store files on @Dropbox, it may have been compromised between August 4th and 21st. Short version: they trusted @Lenovo to connect Dropbox accounts, and Lenovo had an email verification flaw. Allowing an attacker to create a Lenovo account, add your dropbox account, and gain access. Check if you got a "Your Lenovo Code" email followed by a Dropbox "we noticed a new sign in to your Dropbox account". That happened to me on August 7th, and today Dropbox is confirming the incident:

• 
  Jaclyn Forero | UGC & Paid Social Strategist (@jaclynforero) reported 35 minutes ago

  “We need more UGC.” Do you? Or do you currently have 46 videos of attractive women standing in beige kitchens holding your product and saying: “I’m literally obsessed.” Because those are two very different problems. More creators ≠ more creative strategy. You can hire 10 creators, get 30 videos back, and still end up with a very expensive Dropbox folder full of… basically the same ad wearing different earrings. The part that actually matters happens before anyone presses record: Customer research. Different angles worth testing. Hooks that aren’t all “POV: you finally found…” Scripts that provide structure without making a normal human sound like they’re reading the terms and conditions. Casting creators for the concept instead of just asking, “Does her house look expensive?” Enough B-roll that the editor doesn’t have to perform a small miracle in Premiere Pro. And then — this part is apparently controversial — looking at the performance data and using it to decide what to make next. Recently, I led creative strategy for a top medical-grade-skincare brand's paid social campaign across research, concepts, scripting, creator direction, and post-production. Some of the winning creative generated approximately 2.3x ROAS during testing. My biggest takeaway: UGC works a lot better when you stop treating creators like content vending machines and start treating the entire thing like a creative testing system. Anyway, if your current UGC strategy is “hire more people and hope one of them accidentally makes a winner,” I have some thoughts.

• 
  Lando, the Chef (@_Lando7763) reported 36 minutes ago

  @PhyxicxGaming Thanks. And unfortunately it's even worse than that because it's technically "shared housing;" the place was already a ******** when I got here. No pests, fortunately, and I'm pretty sure the landlord has no idea what goes on here, and doesn't care. I've only ever met the maintenance man, who handles move-ins, plus he picks up rent from the dropbox every week. I haven't seen him since the day I moved in, and he even told me as much that I'll never meet the owner. The psycho has his room on the 3rd floor, I'm one of two on the 2nd floor, and there's one person below me. The bathroom is shared, as is the kitchen, which I never use. Only one burner on the stove works anyway. On my first day, I texted about the broken toilet seat, and the Landlord asked me what happened. WTF? Third-Floor Psycho is the only other person who's walking around raging regularly. Everyone else recognizes the general "peace" of the environment. Unfortunately I have to be here at least a few more months, while I'm still paying off old bills, and re-establishing myself in a new city. It's a slow journey, but a steady one. I just happen to hit a ****** rest stop here and there.

• 
  AiMind (@AIMind_Ai) reported 36 minutes ago

  3 websites replace 20 hours of googling when you build a home server. The hard part of self-hosting is not the hardware. A used HP EliteDesk and a wall-mounted NAS cost almost nothing. The hard part is not knowing what you can even run, or how to avoid breaking the system on the first command. The first keeps a catalogue of self-hosted alternatives. Look up a replacement for Google Photos, Dropbox, or Notion, and you see what already exists, how many GitHub stars it has, and whether it is still alive. Plus a weekly digest of what shipped. The second lets you run any Linux distro straight in the browser. Arch, Debian, Alpine, Bazzite. Click once, and you are inside a live system, with no evening lost to a USB stick and a real install. The third handles the worst part. Install scripts for Proxmox: Immich, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, AdGuard, Nginx Proxy Manager. Paste one line into the console and the container comes up on its own. Immich shows 17,735 installs; Docker 36,408. Each of those services used to cost an evening of documentation and three Stack Overflow tabs. Now it is one command. The hardware takes an hour to buy. These 3 bookmarks save you a month. Names in the replies.

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  Karishma Bhardwaj (@bkarishma360) reported 43 minutes ago

  @shahzamannn_ Your SaaS idea doesn’t need to be complicated. Stripe moves money. Postman sends API requests. Notion organizes information. Dropbox syncs files. The lesson? Simple problem + huge market + great execution = massive company. Stop asking, “Is my idea too simple?” Start asking, “How many people have this problem?”

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  M.Ellis (@MEllisPhotograp) reported 45 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport erm different wifi nope or is this a suggestion should it be possible ? if so then no my internet signal can be hit or miss at times but never had this issue before... Also shared a file earlier for someone near me to edit using ipad app but photos failed to appear on ipad ?

• 
  John B. Holbein (@JohnHolbein1) reported 46 minutes ago

  Replication has become much easier in the era of generative AI. I'm not the first person to say that. However, I've seen fewer people acknowledge a specific aspect of this lowered cost for replicating scientific work: Generative AI will very soon allow us to assess the robustness of individual scholars' full bodies of work. Soon, we will be to compute measures of which scholars do robust science, and which do not. What's wild is that we may be able to almost do that already. Let me show you what I mean. In June, I gave Claude a pretty basic prompt. It read: "I have a big task for you. I want you to start a folder. Call it Acemoglu Replications. Then, go find as many replication archives for Daron Acemoglu as you can. Keep a spreadsheet of the ones you can find and those you can't. Then, start a replication/reproduction effort on those articles. People have in the past criticized the research designs and general robustness of his individual papers. I want to know how strong his body of work is as a whole. Don't come in with any prior beliefs; be dispassionate." I let Claude run overnight while I slept. When I came back in the morning, 29 of Acemoglu's replication archives were fully loaded in my Dropbox. All the code reproducing the paper's results had run. And there was a first draft of a paper assessing the robustness of Acemoglu's full body of empirical work. I'll admit, the first draft of the paper wasn't great. But with 15 short follow up messages--which took me about an hour to write--I was able to prompt engineer a paper-length examination of Acemoglu's work. I've attached the screen shot of the abstract below. I think this reassessment of Acemoglu's work is certainly not done. I'm posting the abstract as a proof of concept, rather than a definitive answer. I'm not posting the full paper yet because I think it still needs more work. Ultimately, I paused this project for three reasons. 1.) Limited time/topical expertise: Most of Acemoglu's work is outside of my area of topical expertise. So, I have limited time to work on it. What this type of a project really needs is someone who has the time and the know-how to dig into each of the replication's individually to make sure they are doing the right things. I think the ideal approach combines the breadth that LLMs afford and the depth of attention/expertise that humans can give. 2.) Questions about the value of the "assess one scholar at a time" enterprise: I totally get that having a database of scholar-level robustness metrics would be very valuable in theory. But what I don't know is whether this approach is truly valuable. Moreover, doing so would come with distinct challenges. a.) Many journals have very restrictive space constraints. A body of work approach would, of necessity, be very long. b.) Collecting replication archives is harder for some types of scholars (those who post them all on their websites) than others (those who don't). c.) We'd have to think hard about questions like: what scholar-specific robustness metrics would be best? And: how would we deal with the fact that prolific authors' robustness metrics would be estimated much more precisely than less prolific scholars? Additionally, I'm just not sure that "taking on" one scholar at a time has enough scientific merit to pursue. If I measured how robust an individual scholars' work is, I'd ideally want to know where that metric stands vis-a-vis the rest of scholars in that field/area. To do that, we'd ideally want the population of these scholars or, at minimum, a random sample. Concretely, if Acemoglu has, say, 78% of published headline results reproducible under some standardized protocol, is that excellent, mediocre, or terrible? To answer that, you need a reference distribution. That makes a random or otherwise well-defined sample of scholars much more attractive than selecting prominent individuals one by one. (I'll acknowledge that I may just be wrong on #2. Arguing against myself, I do agree that human-driven reproduction/replication work rarely assesses full/representative slices of a field. Instead of assessing one scholar at a time, we assess one paper at a time. Field-wide detective work is becoming more common, but my sense is that it's still the exception rather than the rule.) 3.) Cost/benefit considerations and replication norms: we have very weakly formed norms around reproduction/replication generally speaking. We have basically no developed norms around replicating individual authors one at a time. What this means is that the people who would lead a scholar-by-scholar replication effort will, likely, bear a heavy cost and, potentially, reap limited benefits. On the costs side, focusing on scholars' total bodies of work risks making the replicators look petty, vindictive, and antisocial. Enough of the scientific field is hostile towards replications of individual papers. Imagine what will happen if/when a scholar submits a scholar-specific "take down" of a full body of work. My sense is that it's common enough for scholars having their work replicated to be asked to be a reviewer for those manuscripts. I've seen very hostile responses when one paper is at issue. Imagine what type of reviewer Acemoglu would be for a paper that took on his entire body of empirical work! Even if Acemoglu weren't a reviewer, prolific authors tend to have wide coauthor/friend networks. The rally-around-my-friend dynamic we often see would certainly work against this type of paper being published. Even a completely neutral analysis acquires an accusatory character simply because the sampling unit is a named person. And that creates an unfortunate problem of its own: readers may interpret the choice of scholar as evidence that the investigators expected to find something. On the benefits side, replicating individual scholars' total body of work may offer limited payoffs. What journals would accept this type of scholar-specific replication? I'm not sure the top ones would. Conclusion: Generative AI has enormous potential in assessing and, ultimately, enhancing the robustness of scientific research. Instead of asking questions like, “does this famous individual paper replicate?”, we can begin asking questions like: -“What proportion of published empirical findings in [field X] survive a common robustness protocol?” -“How much of the variation in replicability is attributable to papers, authors, journals, methods, or subfields?” -“Are scholars persistently more or less robust across their work?” -“Can we predict which findings will prove fragile?” I may just be wrong on what I think about a one-at-a-time full body examination of scientific research. If I am, please let me know! I am also happy to chat one-on-one with anyone who is curious to learn more about the early-stage Acemoglu-specific replication project.

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  timelock (@hashtimelock) reported 49 minutes ago

  @BitPaine @Dropbox they got me. i noticed the "New Login from new location" email immediately and logged out of all the sessions. dont keep anything sensitive on there, thankfully

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  Gabriellathebadbadfrenchmaid (@Gabriella50726) reported 50 minutes ago

  @AngryBeaverABM @DarkShadow1948 It took me a while to upload it. It was slow. But my computer has so many pages and tabs for work, so that gets slowed down by that and Dropbox cuz the files are so big

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  Scarlett Bama 🇺🇸🅰️🐘🏈🏖️✝️ (@scarlettbama) reported 53 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport Fri AM: Dropbox down? Rare if so! Will not allow PDF upload to existing folder. Upload 50x per month. Started after most recent IOS update. Using iPhone. No MacBook access right now. Pls don't sent to Community Forum.

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  Agbaje Automation. (@digital_ab98389) reported 54 minutes ago

  Cut manual data entry time by 80% with one n8n workflow: trigger on new CSV in Dropbox, parse, map to Google Sheets, flag errors, alert Slack, log runs. Automate, reduce errors, save hours. DM me for demo.