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Comment by mariusz79 | Hacker News Reader

Come on, wasn't twitpic free? What why should they keep paying for hosting if the business went under?

Let's not pretend that they didn't make money off the ads they placed on their websites. Yes it was "free" but they weren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Also any goodwill they may have gained in their heyday is all but used up now with this whole shutting down, not shutting down, shutting down, fuck you and your pictures situation.

If it was profitable they wouldn't be shutting down.

Not necessarily true. It stems from Twitter demanding they abandon their trademark.

http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/

Paying for hosting? They were making money from ads they put next to our pictures. They were using our content to drive traffic to their site. Without the user's photos, the site is worthless. They should have been paying users a cut of advertising revenue like YouTube does. "Free" means they're pocketing the profit for themselves.

If they had profits, maybe they wouldn't be closing down. Those ads were to pay bills and they are broke. Allowing massive bandwidth usage now is just throwing bad debt after bad.

There is no indication that Twitpic is broke. They announced their shutdown after Twitter objected to their attempt to trademark their name (as any company might do, if another business applied for a trademark using a large chunk of their name in a similar context.)

So, the profits aren't enough to warrant changing names? The profits aren't enough to be worthy of a buyout - or even letting others foot the bill for backups. Not to mention there's someone out there who is dealing with multiple levels of suck right now.

It might be a better path for people to reach out to help the guy WITHOUT offering to offload the value proposition of what he built.

Also, any sort of agreements between people who uploaded content and Twitpic can't just be sold off to the first person to show up with a hard drive or offer to pay bandwidth costs. That would be a set of legal costs, etc. etc.

This is absurd. They were providing a service that users deemed valuable, and users gave them access to the content (and the ability to monetize that content) in exchange for their service. You don't actually believe Facebook should pay you for using their free service do you?

This isn't about money. People have offered to cover the costs of a backup.

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