Want your images back? That'll be $5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#111

Post by echoangle » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

mbo wrote: post #100

echoangle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one complaint is that the OP was told he would be able to get photos for $5 when they actually weren’t any there (which photobucket knew before obviously). That actually seems deceptive enough that I would try to get my money back.

Yes that's exactly why I mentioned that in the first line of my comment. I quote directly: > (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)

So how is it a win-win then? OP only lost?

The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#112

Post by Ukv » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

jadar wrote: post #19

Wow, shocker, a company will not indefinitely store your data for free.

Removing free user data is unfortunate, but understandable that it might eventually come to that.

A monthly subscription to regain access is questionable to me, since it'd mean they are still storing the images. A one-time fee could be justified for the cost of recovering the data from cold storage, but risks incentivizing intentionally luring in users then unexpectedly holding their data as leverage to have them pay up as a business model.

Claiming a user can pay to recover their photos, while not actually having anything to restore, is misrepresentation.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#113

Post by philo23 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

okramcivokram wrote: post #18

I have received the email that my photobucket account is going to be deleted, so I've logged in after who knows how many years and got offered the same thing, to subscribe. Instead I've went to close the account and in the process (or somewhere else, don't remember exactly) there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service r…

[dead]

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#114

Post by dakolli » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

junior44660 wrote: post #52

root-parent wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I predict that in the future, when you cancel an LLM subscription, they will threaten that unless you pay, to fully delete your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data. You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...

I always pose fundamentalist questions and hypotheticals to the LLM to poison such training data.

Also, press thumbs down when a response is good and thumbs up when a response is bad. Don't do free labor for them.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#115

Post by cloudbonsai » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

mbo wrote: post #68

Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable) Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket ). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddri…

> Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize

IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.

Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#116

Post by yifanl » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

junior44660 wrote: post #52

root-parent wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I predict that in the future, when you cancel an LLM subscription, they will threaten that unless you pay, to fully delete your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data. You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...

I always pose fundamentalist questions and hypotheticals to the LLM to poison such training data.

I just ask it to spellcheck the Webster dictionary about 50 times an hour.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#117

Post by tobadzistsini » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

Attachments are suffering, as the saying goes. Presuming the author used Photobucket in the early aughts and 26-ish years later he's curious about any photos?

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#118

Post by smrq » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #105

inigyou wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 2000s there was an implicit social contract that websites would treat your uploaded data with respect. You weren't putting your stuff in Chad's garage, you were putting it in a professional seeming storage business that just happened to be free because none of us really understood how to monetize the net.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks 2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.

This really seems like the exception that proves the rule, given how few Facebooks came out of that era. We had a social contract, but it turned out that being sociopathic is a winning strategy when everyone else is playing by the implicit rules. See also: modern politics.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#119

Post by herf » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

This is gross, it could be a onetime fee.

It's hard to remember with all the ownership changes, but the Photobucket era was really a different time, of "it's your data, you're in charge, and we give you maximal control of it" - people would upload there to post elsewhere, and I recall they ran ads to monetize. But this era had the ethic that uploading was expensive, and you'd maybe want to do it once and have control of your stuff after that.

Now we have photo hosting services that barely work on the web (iCloud), or work only within a walled garden (Instagram), and I do miss the "it's your stuff, we're just a website" kind of attitude from the mid-2000s.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#120

Post by mindslight » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #106

mindslight wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many knew this 20 years ago, as well.

Many? I was on the internet and well connected to many hackers starting 30 years ago. I’m an expert on early internet and hacker culture. You’re incorrect.

Wow. Thanks for that "expert" correction!

I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.

I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful for someone who was young at the time, and is now even using a self-hosted solution. It's also fine to say that you personally weren't concerned, were distracted by the gobs of money programmers were getting paid to build centralized services, thought that the developers with ethics would hold more long term sway over companies, and so on. But don't act like it was unknowable.