So... are you arguing that Musk is an opponent of 'free speech' because... a bunch of private citizens argue with you when you speak critically of Musk?
The whole thread (and to be fair, Musk himself most of the time) has lost the plot, since the phrase "freedom of speech" is about the government not restraining or punishing speech. Honestly, what Twitter allowed or not before or after Musk is entirely irrelevant to the concept of free speech. Twitter/X is still just some guy's website.
> labor and land are cheap such that you can get fiber laid cheaply and quickly.
Which is why all of sub-saharan Africa is crisscrossed in fiber, and every hut in those villages has an ONT zip-tied to the straw walls where they get their symmetrical gigabit service.
If it requires nothing more than a click to cancel, it seems like you'd be happier in life if you viewed such a thing as merely a two-step process (signup, get what you need, cancel immediately) rather than a serious commitment to spend $5 a month for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, everyone in business is now required to do this 'wishful thinking' that people will commit to everything. I laugh sometimes at items that Amazon hilariously suggests that I "Subscribe & Save" to!
When signup is one click, and cancellation requires a phone call... then I'm right there with you with the pitchforks!
I really doubt anyone's getting rich off this. Genuinely doubt it. How many people remember their photobucket accounts, let alone bother to hunt them down, let alone want to bother getting a credit card out and remembering to cancel (or more hilariously, who's gonna pay $60 a year to keep that sub). I think whoever is running that site is probably barely breaking even at best, considering that they have to keep paying the S3 bill to store literally every image uploaded to PB ever.
I'd ask a different question: how many people on HN have hit their free quota limit in e.g. Google Photos and are now forking off 5 bucks a month because that's the easy way out ?
But that's a very different product. I was only saying I don't think the PB thing is getting anyone rich, rather it's probably bringing in just enough profit to keep whoever owns it from shutting it down and deleting the (S3) "bucket." As such, it's arguably a nice favor done to the few people who uploaded stuff to this site and are ever coming back for it. The alternative is for the stuff to have been long since deleted.
I think the main thing here is merely that it's costly to keep a massive archive (of mostly garbage[1]) online and available on a long timescale. Not just the S3 bill (which I wouldn't underestimate the cost of, for a site that let just anyone upload basically infinite amounts for a decade), but the cost of having engineers maintain and monitor the site forever, either with revenue having dried up a decade ago, or, also having a staff of people to operate the whole business.
You're remembering that if you uploaded something to some free site in 2001, it was still there in 2004. That was because the same people and companies were still around 3 years later, it wasn't because they cared more about you than 2026 startups do. Sure, 2004 Photobucket may have cared more about us than 2026 Meta does -- but I doubt 2001 AOL or AT&T cared about us more.
[1] I only mean most of the content uploaded to Photobucket 2 decades ago is completely useless and abandoned with no one ever coming back to look for it. Memes or screenshots posted to forums that themselves have been offline for a decade. And just content that people don't remember even creating.
I'm honestly genuinely surprised that you care so much about $5 ($3 in 2006 money, when people last used photobucket) that you wrote this article over it, but cared so little to just ask for the refund 15 seconds after finding the account was unused.
Haha, that's fair! I wrote the post because I thought it was actually kinda funny. And when I found out the account was empty, I did stop the subscription. But I guess I didn't realize in time that I could go even further and request a refund. Not really a refund kind of person :P.
> 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.
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).
Maybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize:
1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account
2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0
3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel
4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty
5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident
Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'
Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.
He said in the article that he guessed maybe he used a different account.
This is a lot more believable (esp since he said it) than a conspiracy that PB deleted all photos and built this whole system just to steal $5 a pop -- especially considering how few people must be trying to get back into their 2-decade-old PB accounts in 2026. Hardly seems worth the effort for a scam.
They were underage when they made the account. That's a whole different and big fucking deal. Means any TOS and contracts and shit are basically null and void.
The whole thread (and to be fair, Musk himself most of the time) has lost the plot, since the phrase "freedom of speech" is about the government not restraining or punishing speech. Honestly, what Twitter allowed or not before or after Musk is entirely irrelevant to the concept of free speech. Twitter/X is still just some guy's website.
reply