Photobucket rant

Thinking about it. Photo-sharing services exist for several reason, but for our purpose, there is one important reason.

That is, it saves forum owners (such as GRM) from incurring the costs of both hosing space and, more importantly, bandwidth for their readers to download the photos.

Think about the phrase "This post is worthless without photos!". For car-related forums (and lots of others), that's often true. And if the threads are worthless without photos, so is most of the forum.

Nobody wins here. Everyone wants something for free, but in the end, someone has to pay.

In some sense, it's the forum owners that benefit most from free photo hosting. But of course, no one is getting rich by operating a forum.

Photobucket is a business that exists to make money. Nobody begrudges them that.

There is no easy answer here.

In reply to EvanR:

I completely get that. 100% see what you wrote as truth.

The problem for me is that photobucket explicitly billed themselves as a free photo sharing site. It was their credo, their modus operandi. They sold themselves as a certain thing then changed the rules halfway through the game. If they had set a hard limit on the amount of third party hosting a user could use on a free account, and left all images up to that point visible, that would be one thing. And perfectly reasonable. But what they are doing now? berkeley them. Through and through. berkeley them.

In short I have no sympathy for any ill that comes their way and I hope it's a ton.

I have no issue with paying for a service, what I have issue with is the way they're doing this. I'm using 2% of the space on my free account, why should I have to pay $400?

If they had a tiered payment system, where I'm paying something like $50 a year, I'd pay it...

I get it, man. You (and everyone else using their service) feel betrayed, lied to.

Businesses lie every day. That's the way the world works. When businesses lie to their customers, it's an ethical issue.

But this situation is slightly different. Photobucket users are, in some sense, not the customers at all. At least in the sense that they aren't providing the business with income.

I don't have any idea what their business model is/was. How they were generating operating income by giving something away for free is beyond me.

The real customers are their investors (or shareholders, if it's a public company). Those are the people management has to please, not the users.

My only guess is that, whatever their actual source of income is, it wasn't generating enough money, and the investors got mad.

So they switched the program midstream. That is a betrayal of the users' trust, to be sure. But there's no contract (that I know of) between the users and the company, so if they want to change the rules in the middle of the game, there's no recourse.

Be angry. Be hurt. But in the big picture, what does that accomplish?

I just logged into Photobucket to print out pics for the Challenge build book, and discovered I can no longer view any pics - when you click on them all you get is the pic telling you to upgrade for 3rd party hosting. Not only that, but the link to download albums(which I could never get to work) is gone now too. I tried from my PC and the app, but it's the same both places. I still fail to see how this could be a good move for their bottom line.

My Photobuck still seems to work.  I could never get the album download to work though.

I am on Chrome (PC) and using uBlock to block the adds (it shows 30 adds being blocked!!)

I recently downloaded a bunch of my pics (one at a time) which seems to work a bit better now.

Oh, good suggestion on the ad blocker. I usually don't bother with one, but it's damn near a requirement to navigate their site. Glad to know your pics are still working, I'll try it on a different OS and see if I have any luck.