Hacker News Reader

Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

I want to be angry at this, but I really can't.

From the business perspective, it doesn't make sense to subsidize your free users' business needs. The article mention a backslash, but I'm not sure how much should they care about complaints from customers they have chosen to fire.

From the users' point of view, this is their 6-months reminder that a) you should read the terms of what you are agreeing to, and b) if you are not paying for a service, you get what you pay for. A harsh lesson for sure, but a lesson more people should probably learn.

View on HN

I wouldn't be angry about not letting people do the thing, but after letting people do the thing for over a decade, they could have been a lot more graceful about changing their mind.

Like, I don't really blame them for not sticking with a clearly nonviable free tier, but taking the easy way out at the expense of fucking over your (free, sure) users is still sorta rude.

idk if people "should" know better, it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice.

Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.

>it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice.

I'm baffled that people seem to feel this is an unreasonable expectation for anyone trying to make money from such a service, especially as a free user. It's not a public utility.

>Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.

This isn't society, though, this is business. This is why companies hire lawyers and pay for contracts with their suppliers, etc.

Yes, the way Photobucket went about this is crass, clueless and rude, but users who just expected the service to "work" indefinitely are also at fault for doing so.

In a general case I'd agree with you, but Photobucket is an exception. This would be like Yahoo shuttering their free email tier overnight and asking for payment.

The bar for being a business is pretty low, though. If they had the logistics and budget to pay for a lawyer, they probably wouldn't be hosting on photobucket anyway.

I think that expectations from physical-world objects could be clashing with online service "objects".

For example, if I buy a physical-world object then it's well-understood that the vendor can't break into my house and take it back or, in most circumstances, demand its return. Many physical-world objects additionally come with a warranty assuring that it will continue to work for some length of time.

Online, the digital "object" that I upload to a free service has no such ownership analogue - the service provider can generally cease to offer the service at will. This not only means there's zero warranty, but effectively that service providers can "break into my house" to "take back" the object.

I don't think there's much awareness in the general public that GMail, to pick on a well-used example, could shut down tomorrow and almost every user would irretrievably lose the last N years of their email.

I think a decent analogy would be a grocery store. Sure, you've gone there and got free samples for over ten years, but now they feel those burger bites and cheese dip w/ crackers weren't actually helping them sell more product.

Do you expect the grocery store to give ample notice? Should they change their mind when people complain?

Admittedly the analogy isn't perfect because the samples aren't a major portion of the grocery store's cost/business, but it's still decent.

This is a BIG (and breaking) change. It would cost the company ten minutes to send out a proper notice. Burying these changes deep down in a terms and conditions document is bad behaviour.

Proper way to do this would be to: - Notify your customers about the change in an easy to read email and/or message when you log in. - Only apply the change to new uploads at first, then it's easily discoverable and handled by users. Inform them that you plan to do this for all hosted images. - Apply the change to older uploads a few months later.

Hiding and rushing it just makes people angry. They won't pay if they feel you tricked them.

If anything I'm angry at BBC reporting this as "ransom demand".

How can a firm rely on a free service without a contract guaranteeing anything?

It would be more accurate to not call them customers but users.

There's a serious distinction, and the complaints explicitly are from business users claiming that they shouldn't be considered even potential customers.

Im sorry, but saying someone needs to read the terms of services is BS. If i where to read all the updates i get, i would be doing nothing but read these BS agreements. The way they did this was very ugly, instead of sending a notice, they hid it in a all of text. This is why these agreements should not be classified as contracts and not legally binding in any way.

Caveat Emptor. If you're running a business that depends on a third party hosting assets related to your product, reading and keeping up with the terms of service isn't BS, it's mandatory. If you don't want to do your due diligence, then host everything yourself and eat the bandwidth costs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com