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Want your images back? That'll be $5

lutr.dev

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

#141

Post by xp84 »

Maybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize:

1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account

2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0

3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel

4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty

5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident

Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'

Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.

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

#142

Post by merek »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #127
voidUpdate wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a couple on a debit card and it's gone pretty smoothly. I paid around £200 for an online service who they effectively ghosted me, so I submitted a chargeback to my bank, and they said they'd get in contact with the provider. I never heard back about it other than getting my money so I'm guessing they ghosted my bank too

Chargebacks are a pain and as a seller you almost always lose them, Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested. As a company there is just no point in fighting them. I even had emails of clients they made a mistake and didnt realise it was our payment, but even that wasn;t enough.

> Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.

I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.

Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.

To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).

The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.

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

#143

Post by inigyou »

defrost wrote: post #98
inigyou wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knew it 20 years ago. SaaS was just taking off. The word "cloud" was barely a thing.

Some of us started coding and archiving data 40+ years ago, many of us were suspicious of cloud storage from the get go and have never relied on it as primary storage and still keep multiple location physical backups regional and under direct control of stakeholders.

So you didn't know it either, you just guessed differently from other people's guesses.

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

#144

Post by locknitpicker »

root-parent wrote: post #45
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…

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...

> (...) your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data.

If they are PII then under GDPR they are obligated to delete the data.

If not then they will be liable to pay fines up to $20 million or 4% of their total global turnover.

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

#145

Post by herf »

wang_li wrote: post #125
herf wrote: post #119

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…

I, too, miss the time when I was a kid and people would give me free cookies. Now as an adult I have to buy my own cookies.

Yes, I think part of it was the "dark fiber" at the time, made bandwidth relatively cheap. But most personal photos don't use that much bandwidth - being able to use them anywhere online (which iCloud and Instagram don't allow) was a big idea. We went from "my content hosted in the cloud" to "Instagram's content" in a lot of ways. That is only partly a pricing issue.

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

#146

Post by cj »

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…

Yes.

Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account.

At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent.

The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO.

(But not giving a preview of the account you're reclaiming isn't a good UX obviously, not going to defend that!)

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

#147

Post by zamadatix »

root-parent wrote: post #45
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…

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...

Unless your subscription type already comes with a guarantee the data will not be kept or used in training I'd assume the conversations will eventually be used in training regardless how much you paid previously or whether or not you decide to discontinue one day.

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

#148

Post by xp84 »

echoangle wrote: post #85
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…

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.

Imagine you were building this reactivation flow. How likely would you have thought it to be that someone keeps the password to a completely unused account for 10-20 years, then suddenly misremembers it as an actually-used account and goes to reactivate it? This has probably happened on Photobucket maybe 5 times total. I don't even remember the names of any sites I signed up for and never used in 2006, let alone have interest in logging into them decades later. They could have added a check to make it clear the account is empty up front, but I can see how the person designing it thought it might be incredibly rare (and they were right).

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

#149

Post by lutr »

cj wrote: post #146
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…

Yes. Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account. At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent. The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO. (But not giving a preview…

Yes, I'm at fault here with missing the e-mails. The Photobucket account was registered using an old e-mail address that I was using as a kid. I happened to find the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager.

So these are the unfortunate circumstances. This post basically shows what's it like to be a living and breathing edge-case (missed e-mails & no images in your account).

This actually made me think about the edge-cases I must have shipped at work and how they're affecting people.

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

#150

Post by InsideOutSanta »

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…

Yeah, I think this is actually kinda nice. I recently got my fotos out of flicker and paid them a month of subscription to do it. I didn't mind that at all. At least my data is still there.
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