Amazon images broken by Photobucket's change of terms
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Effectively they've knocked people off Ebay telling them that they can keep their sales for a one-off payment of £300.
If they'd given them two weeks notice then people could have evaluated the cost and decided if £300/year was a reasonable amount to pay, or if they should migrate elsewhere.
Doing it like this basically forces some people to pay up instantly. That's not fair dealing, that's rather more mafia-like.
Besides, if I am reading correctly, and there is in fact no data lost, calling it "ransom" is just ridiculous - nothing is being hold ransom here.
Although I'm totally with you on the part about not building a business around someone else's free service, this does seem somewhat unreasonable on PhotoBucket's part.
It's free until they change it. If you build your e-commerce business on shaky ground (free services) there's an inherent risk it gets pulled out from under you at any moment.
Maybe people shouldn't expect much from free services, but free services also then shouldn't expect much from its users (i.e. that they might get angry quickly and drop their service on a whim).
> If you build your... business on shaky ground (free services) there's an inherent risk it gets pulled out from under you at any moment.
This also very much applies to Photobucket. This could very well be the thing that kills it.
When it shuts down or asks for money it's a cost/benefit analysis. There's companies that let you host for free, but eventually if all companies charge then they'll end up paying.
I don't have any issue with users hopping from free service to free service but there's no contract between the parties with a free service besides that a TOS can change at any moment.
People are more just questioning this decision from Photobucket's end: The sudden change in TOS is unlikely to go over well, and the price seems extremely steep. One wonders whether charging $10/month and sending out several explicit announcements beforehand would've resulted in a much better outcome. That being said, I'll concede that this move may turn out to be brilliant for Photobucket, so I suppose we'll see what happens.
To make an analogy: Sure, you're free to be an asshole to people. No one's questioning that technically you have the right to be one. But don't be surprised when people don't want to be around you anymore, and if your goal is to make friends (customers) one wonders why you would decide on that course of action.
There's nothing special about payment that makes such tactics impossible. Only their reputation keeps most companies from doing something like that.
You can have a completely valid contractual relationship between two parties even if one side doesn't pay the other. In the real world, you can even acquire certain rights based on someone letting you do something long enough. Always walked through the neighbour's garden to get to your car faster? Some legal systems will consider this an established right after some time.
Can you provide any examples of real life cases where something like walking through your neighbor'a garden became an established right? I'd be interested to see as that just feels like a hyperbole to me.
If you want lots of example, Google “prescriptive easement cases”.
...
"Fuck you, we have your stuff hostage, pay us."
"On 26 June, however, the company published a brief note advising users to "take a moment to review our updated terms and policies"."
Photobucket told its users that they were going to charge extra, but it was a bit sneaky
There is fundamentally no profit in hosting images for free that people embed/link directly.
The same thing has happened to countless image hosts beforehand, and is going to happen to imgur too as soon as the music stops and the stacks of VC cash fueling the furnace are all burned away.
This is a great example of a market failure. Nobody wants a sustainable model where the image host can actually make money. As soon as they start taking away the "direct image links" feature, which is the only feature anyone actually cares about, and the thing that has zero possibility to make money, ever, everyone flees onto the next host, and the cycle starts anew.
We need another solution here. Maybe IPFS? Maybe torrents? Maybe some image hosting foundation?
It sucks badly that the Internet loses its collective image heritage every few years because somebody else thought that they could give it away for free and make it up in volume.
We already have, it's called pay for your own bandwidth.
Alternatives: use a CDN (also not without drawbacks but a lot better than an image host) and yet another one is to accept that these companies will die every couple of years but as long as the average internet pages rots as fast or faster as the image hosts disappear it isn't a huge problem, most of those images have limited freshness anyway, the few that are evergreen and that will continue to be linked from supported pages could be re-uploaded from some kind of cache.
And in those 10 years, how much did you pay for this service?
Better put into words by Louis C.K.:
People never learn.
it's a big component of goodwill, however.
Backup your Gmail account. Backup your Flickr account. Backup any free service you're using. Otherwise, you have no one to blame but yourself when the rug gets pulled out.
Edit: or start paying for them, as a sibling comment said.
a 1 week notice, with a, say, $40 plan (or even just $40 for the first year with a higher rate later) would probably have had a lot of grumbling, but people who wanted their images back 'on' various sites would be more inclined to pay $40 to make the problem go away. For many folks, $400 is just... beyond their ability to pay immediately.
It's still a super jerk move though. I'd complain too.
I'd also complain if I walked through a really shady part of town with expensive stuff on and got mugged though.
You left your stuff on someone's lawn, they said you could do so for free, and then they started charging for the privledge.
That's very insincere of you at best.
Pathetic!
The fact people are able to put an hour or two of work in to update the listings with the images hosted elsewhere (they have access to the images still, so its not a ransom as some have implied), or choose to pay a pretty low yearly fee to pay for a service they are using to make money on, seems pretty fair to me.
On a separate note, The style of discourse you are using is what is pathetic. Following the trends set by an idiot only makes you look like the idiot you're following.
The service wasn't free, it was paid for by advertisers.
It can be said to be a ransom if your bait and switch makes people desperate to pay you. It will cost people using it to sell a load of money.
They could have grandfathered old time users but they chose not to. So people will have to start digging through and excavating their memories to remember where they put up all bitbucket links.
Finally, I chose not to respond to your last paragraph. See, I'm taking your advice :)
Agreed. I'm not saying they did a good job, and those that use this for images in free forums etc... have a reasonable case to be upset. Those that used the service to make money made a decision to use a free service, and that decision is rarely the correct one when it comes to business. Free services provide tradeoffs that can be changed on short notice without you having any recourse.
>The service wasn't free, it was paid for by advertisers.
The service was free for users, that advertisers paid doesn't change or diminish that in any way. The service was uploading and hosting images, that wasn't paid for, therefore the service was free. Monetizing it with adds doesn't change that.
>They could have grandfathered old time users but they chose not to. So people will have to start digging through and excavating their memories to remember where they put up all bitbucket links.
This is about third party linking, users have full access to their images through photobucket itself. If people remember the various forums and third party sites they posted the images, but not the single centralized photobucket account, then there isn't much you can do to help those people, but the problem does fall on their own actions/decisions.
>Finally, I chose not to respond to your last paragraph. See, I'm taking your advice :)
Admittedly it was a grumpy post. I'm getting tired of that style of discourse. It doesn't add to an argument, it comes across as obstinate and arrogant (then again I manage to do that with full sentences)
Hackernews is free (to an extent as it supplements a business) while Reddit is not free. You just don't pay cash with reddit but you are needed to make mine.
I meant they will not remember where they posted the photo bucket links were posted.
hotlinking wasn't done illegally it was a feature that was encouraged to be used. There are people that are dead now who will have empty spaces for images. I think that is rather unfair.
It would have been different if the business had to close down.
Would they give people a link to where the links were posted? They want people to cough up the money that is why I see it as ransom.
Re: Grumpy post yeah. It happens to the best of us. I was just angry that the op deliberately remove critical information to mislead. Just like news organizations we criticize.
A service delivered for free is a free service. If that is paid for by monetizing ad views/clicks (that can be ignored and/or blocked by the consumer), its still free for the user, therefore its a free service.
The difference between a free service run on donations and a free service run on adds is essentially nothing. Both are monetized free services. At this point we're probably far into opinion territory, so maybe we'll have to agree to disagree here.
>hotlinking wasn't done illegally it was a feature that was encouraged to be used. There are people that are dead now who will have empty spaces for images. I think that is rather unfair.
Unfair? perhaps. Is it fair to a company to provide life long hosting to those people? Do people expect the company will exist forever and be able to infinitely scale? It wasn't done illegally, but neither was the change to disallow hot-linking unless its paid.
>Would they give people a link to where the links were posted? They want people to cough up the money that is why I see it as ransom.
That isn't needed, you just login to your account, download your images (if you need to), and you have them all. If you don't remember where those are posted, then its probably not important enough to you to update, and in many cases old content cannot be updated. At that point, the service going away (photobucket going bankrupt and closing for example) needs to be an expected outcome.
The internet is far far far too siloed today
Add in costs to maintain the server, learning how to upload files, any downtime or wrong setup costs are on the user.
You can say $399 is ransom, but that's not unreasonable in my mind. It's a $399 business cost for these sellers on Amazon, EBay, Etsy. Those pictures have earned them more than $399 in the lifetime they've had them.
logging in to PB, downloading your images, uploading them elsewhere and updating your listings is completely possible and probably would take a few hours at best. You could hire someone to do it for less than $400 if you wanted to, except for the few sellers working at scale with thousands of listings
If you're one of those sellers with thousands of listings, and you are using a free service, and ignored the terms of service notification given on the 26th, then it seems pretty reasonably to blame yourself and either pony up the money or find another service and pay for that.
Also, does the third-party site have as good of security as you do? Are you going to get pictures, that shall we say, are not up to your community standards and don't represent the product?
Asking free to give you a notice is just poor business.
The extension gets permission for Photobucket domains and modifies the referer header. Very simple.
It also means, apparently, Photobucket would have a lot of info on which listings are popular, eh?
Photobucket still seems to do that weird detection where if you load an image url in your browser it takes you to the webpage filled with ads
https://community.imgur.com/t/ebay-imgur-image-problem/9003/...
Don't be reliant on public services.