Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Want your images back? That'll be $5

lutr.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 286 posts

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

#151

Post by chabes »

xp84 wrote: post #141

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…

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

Empty does not equate to unused. This was their old account that they definitely used.

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

#152

Post by xp84 »

inigyou wrote: post #86
collinmanderson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/1150/

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.

> websites would treat your uploaded data with respect

Are you saying that the free websites in question owed their users completely free storage of that data, in perpetuity?

How is that a reasonable expectation, regardless of how one viewed "Chad"?

I can agree that that would certainly be nice. But like, with the exception of those who remained in continuous profitable operation, most free sites will end up shut down or sold, so either the data will be deleted, or someone is going to be paying for servers continuously to preserve that data forever. No one will do that and expect $0.

I'd also add that I am pretty sure of all random things uploaded to random sites 20 years ago, 99% of it is either content no one cares about today, or content that the uploader kept on their own disk or their paid cloud storage.

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

#153

Post by xp84 »

lutr wrote: post #10
equinoxnemesis wrote: post #5

Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.

Right?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this. But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.

I'm honestly genuinely surprised that you care so much about $5 ($3 in 2006 money, when people last used photobucket) that you wrote this article over it, but cared so little to just ask for the refund 15 seconds after finding the account was unused.

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

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

Aurornis wrote: post #122
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 wish there was some easy way to bet against this happening. I would put a lot of money on the side of this never happening for a multitude of reasons, but I bet I could collect a lot of money from cynics and doomers who think this stuff will happen.

You wouldn't win because those cynics don't really believe their own nonsense to the extent of risking money over it. But if there was an option to bet, one we could point them to and say, "if you really believe it then here's your chance at free money", maybe some of them would reconsider their belief.

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

#155

Post by vitally3643 »

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…

Photobucket has been sending me an email every few months that my account is due to be deleted. It's been at least two or three years.

I'd love them to delete my account because there's nothing in it, but apparently it's just an outright scam

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

#156

Post by xp84 »

chabes wrote: post #151
xp84 wrote: post #141

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…

> 4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty Empty does not equate to unused. This was their old account that they definitely used.

He said in the article that he guessed maybe he used a different account.

This is a lot more believable (esp since he said it) than a conspiracy that PB deleted all photos and built this whole system just to steal $5 a pop -- especially considering how few people must be trying to get back into their 2-decade-old PB accounts in 2026. Hardly seems worth the effort for a scam.

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

#157

Post by lutr »

xp84 wrote: post #153
lutr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this. But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.

I'm honestly genuinely surprised that you care so much about $5 ($3 in 2006 money, when people last used photobucket) that you wrote this article over it, but cared so little to just ask for the refund 15 seconds after finding the account was unused.

Haha, that's fair! I wrote the post because I thought it was actually kinda funny. And when I found out the account was empty, I did stop the subscription. But I guess I didn't realize in time that I could go even further and request a refund. Not really a refund kind of person :P.

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

#158

Post by xp84 »

jmcphers wrote: post #129
ComputerGuru wrote: post #101

Shout out to Flickr! No matter how many gigabytes you had uploaded, you can still access them. You just can’t upload more without a Flickr Pro plan.

Is this still true? I am a Flickr Pro user and the few times I've let my subscription lapse, I recall that I could only see my most recent 200 uploaded photos until I paid up again. They didn't delete them, for sure! But they were inaccessible.

...or $11 for a month, and you can cancel it? Where do people think the money comes from to store gigs and gigs of photos literally forever?

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

#159

Post by ibejoeb »

itsthecourier wrote: post #91

storing data over years takes money, so charging for it I can understand but charging and knowing you don't have any data for this user is a big NO NO

Wow. Lede well buried. I thought I got the story, but after a while I started scanning over all the edge and missed that actual story. I really though we were complaining about spending $5 to retrieve data that had been stored for years at no cost.

Pretty seedy move. That, and what appears to be the dark pattern of prompting for payment first, then ultimately allowing export after refusal.

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

#160

Post by lutr »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #150
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.

[dead]
Post reply on HN