[mbo]

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 harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.

[echoangle]

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.

[mbo]

Yes that's exactly why I mentioned that in the first line of my comment. I quote directly:

> (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)

[echoangle]

So how is it a win-win then? OP only lost?

The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.

[mbo]

It is a win-win for Photobucket users who have their images (which OP is NOT a cohort of) preserved long term and the startup who snapped up Photobucket's data and liabilities. It is fair to say that OP experienced a win-loss in this specific situation.

I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.

[xp84]

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).

[Dylan16807]

If it was that old you likely had a password you used for a bunch of things, and also you can reset the password.

The case of not having images is really obvious.

[cloudbonsai]

> Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize

IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.

Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.

[collinmanderson]

https://xkcd.com/1150/

[devsda]

If chad is really struggling and asks to partially pay for his gas costs to meet halfway for getting my stuff* back, I would understand and not be mad at him.

[*] assuming chad doesnt lie about having my stuff as OP claims in this case

[lutr]

Life really is a series of xkcds, it turns out!

[inigyou]

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.

[xp84]

> 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.

[veltas]

I will say personally I didn't feel this way in the 2000's, and I was a child at the start of that decade. Maybe I am cynical.

[dghlsakjg]

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks

2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.

[smrq]

This really seems like the exception that proves the rule, given how few Facebooks came out of that era. We had a social contract, but it turned out that being sociopathic is a winning strategy when everyone else is playing by the implicit rules. See also: modern politics.

[mopsi]

Indeed. The 2004 chat snippet is notable because it displayed attitude that was uncommon at the time. Zuck made it mainstream.

[dghlsakjg]

Wasn't Google's business model to slurp up literally everything on the web, and everything users would give them to sell eyeballs to advertisers?

Gmail also dates to 2004. If reading your email to sell ads to third parties based on the content of your private correspondence doesn't fit that attitude, I don't know what does.

I stand by my assertion that this shit was always going on, we just weren't wise to it in the 2000s.

[dghlsakjg]

The dominant business model that decade was monetization via getting people to fork over their data.

That's basically what Web 2.0 was.

[klodolph]

Back in the 2000s I think a much larger fraction of the web was running out Chad’s garage.

You got a Pentium III and a DSL connection? Run a website! Run an IRC server!

[al_borland]

I took a tour of the CBOE in 2011. The old trading pits that were no longer used were filled with a random assortment of desktop PCs running as servers for the exchange. At least that’s how it look and what they told us. I hope it isn’t still that way.

[Dylan16807]

I don't know how long respect lasts for keeping abandoned data but it's not more than five years.

And I expect a professional business to protect my items less long than Chad.

[kevin_thibedeau]

That works when you are the product and they have customers who want to use their humans for some other business activity. If they have viable customers, you are useless as a product.

[micromacrofoot]

social contracts stop working when they're not between individual people with a shared experience

when you make a contract with facebook or any other large site you're making a contract with a legal team tasked with protecting their money

at a certain point scale only works through oppression

[oasisbob]

If a PE vulture keeps a company with marginal profitability alive, there is absolutely no way they're devoting any kind type of human capital to proper maintenance.

It's likely running on the original infrastructure from acquisition, is full of EOL dependencies, and likely wasn't well-secured to begin with even before the takeover.

Any changes to regulatory requirements are also likely ignored. The EULA is probably full of all sorts of falsehoods about how they maintain the site. ("We use commercially standard methods to secure and blah blah blah ...")

Keeping these kinds of zombie sites online is not a win-win situation.

[spopejoy]

> Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing

You answered your own question :)

> Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize

As in, failed to turn free users into VC returns by selling their data or forcing them into a subscription model

> former PE vulture did the math

Self-explanatory

[InsideOutSanta]

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.