TIL PhotoBucket is still around.
I checked my spam folder recently and it was literally like 20 emails from them in the past like 2 months saying some variation of “We still have your photos. Don’t you want them? Come back”
It was strangely sad
The demon of capitalism inhabiting the corpse of a brand
I used a Photobucket account a long time ago, when it was free and I was a naïve teenager. They were one of the first websites that I remembered got enshittified fast. When they started getting grabby for money in the late 2000s I moved on to another image hosting service and forgot about it for about 16 years.
Couple years ago I decided I wanted whatever I had uploaded in that account because I’m sure some of those pictures I had on it were going to be hard to find on my system or drives. Those motherfuckers wanted $8 for me to be able to access my account. Reluctantly chucked the 8 bucks at them and took my pictures off. Come to find out, I’d found some of the originals and realized Photofucket reduced the size and quality of the images uploaded on to their platform. Absolute abysmal failure of a website.
That’s pretty standard for any image host, especially way back in the 2000s. Disk space and bandwidth was more expensive back then
Why you should self-host: Exhibit A
And that’s why I always self-hosted. In the 80s out of necessity and since the internet out of an anti-cloud-sentiment. My archive is many many terabytes of images, videos, emails, complete website-rips (before archive.org) and whatnot since the last 40 years. Triple backed up.
Either the site gets backed, or you, or they enshittify and lock you in forever.
how’s a refund not the first thing that comes to his mind as soon as he saw the empty bucket
Yeah, that would have been a no-brainer for most people, but he also mentioned paying by debit card which seems like a bit risky too.
