6 ms·
Amazon images broken by Photobucket's change of terms
- Forge36 9y agoGiven that many if the images were used for temporary postings, I wonder how much backlash could have been avoided by letting old images he accessed by this parties but blocking images uploaded after a certain date?
- throwaway2048 9y agoIts not the old images chewing through TBs of bandwidth a day.
- juice_bus 9y agoI am really curious if imgur will see a large increased load from photobucket's switch.
- Magnets 9y agoImgur blocked embedded images on ebay a few years ago. https://community.imgur.com/t/ebay-imgur-image-problem/9003/11 https://community.imgur.com/t/ebay-imgur-image-problem/9003/...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2048 9y agoThis is the normal cycle of Internet image host, its shocking photobucket took this long to reach this point. There is fundamentally no profit in hosting images for free that people embed/link directly. The same thing has happened to countless image hosts beforehand, and is going to happen to imgur too as soon as the music stops and the stacks of VC cash fueling the furnace are all burned away. This is a great example of a market failure. Nobody wants a sustainable model where the image host can actually make money. As soon as they start taking away the "direct image links" feature, which is the only feature anyone actually cares about, and the thing that has zero possibility to make money, ever, everyone flees onto the next host, and the cycle starts anew. We need another solution here. Maybe IPFS? Maybe torrents? Maybe some image hosting foundation? It sucks badly that the Internet loses its collective image heritage every few years because somebody else thought that they could give it away for free and make it up in volume.
- dingo_bat 9y agoI'd wager google can do it for free + the click-data + images to train their AI. Surprising they haven't done it yet.
- pjc50 9y agoGoogle already cache a large chunk of the images in their image search. The expensive bit of image hosting is really the abuse detection ...
- jacquesm 9y ago> We need another solution here. We already have, it's called pay for your own bandwidth. Alternatives: use a CDN (also not without drawbacks but a lot better than an image host) and yet another one is to accept that these companies will die every couple of years but as long as the average internet pages rots as fast or faster as the image hosts disappear it isn't a huge problem, most of those images have limited freshness anyway, the few that are evergreen and that will continue to be linked from supported pages could be re-uploaded from some kind of cache.
- Magnets 9y agoImgur has transitioned to an image-based version of reddit so may be able to survive
- _delirium 9y agoImgur has already started doing it, just not all the way. They redirect direct image links to the framed version of the image, and they have a growing blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to embed images, including ebay, codepen [1], and probably others. [1] https://twitter.com/codepen/status/662641042647326720 https://twitter.com/codepen/status/662641042647326720
- NelsonMinar 9y agoCould you talk about which services came before? Photobucket is the oldest one I can recall. Except maybe Flickr, which hasn't done this.
- minus7 9y agoAnd this is why you offer local image/file uploads on your platform/forum. You simply can't rely on a free this party service to stay alive forever, especially something unprofitable as image hosting
- mabbo 9y agoMight be worth Amazon's and Ebay's time to detect when things like this happen and automatically alert their sellers. Or even better, cache and serve the images themselves (why aren't they already doing that?)
- jfoster 9y agoIs an alert enough? It sounds like plenty of the merchants are aware of the problem, but are having difficulty dealing with it.
- ramshanker 9y agoAmazon does not caches these images? This is surprising.
- MichaelGG 9y agoCache? I'm surprised they let people link to images not hosted on their system in the first place. Speed, etc.? There's gotta be zero benefit to end users to have non-Amazon hosted images. It also means, apparently, Photobucket would have a lot of info on which listings are popular, eh?
- HelloNurse 9y agoIf confirmed, the demand for $399 per year puts Photobucket solidly in the ransom price range. Renting a web server with ample space and bandwidth is much less expensive.
- syshum 9y agoI hope self hosting makes a come back... The internet is far far far too siloed today
- brogrammernot 9y agoThis is not an apples to apples comparison. You're expecting people to run their own server? Add in costs to maintain the server, learning how to upload files, any downtime or wrong setup costs are on the user. You can say $399 is ransom, but that's not unreasonable in my mind. It's a $399 business cost for these sellers on Amazon, EBay, Etsy. Those pictures have earned them more than $399 in the lifetime they've had them.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoOr better yet... uploading them to Amazon S3. There even exists GUI tools to do it with no technical knowledge.
- uhhhhhhh 9y ago$400 only if you choose to use their service. logging in to PB, downloading your images, uploading them elsewhere and updating your listings is completely possible and probably would take a few hours at best. You could hire someone to do it for less than $400 if you wanted to, except for the few sellers working at scale with thousands of listings If you're one of those sellers with thousands of listings, and you are using a free service, and ignored the terms of service notification given on the 26th, then it seems pretty reasonably to blame yourself and either pony up the money or find another service and pay for that.
- namdnay 9y ago"I have been using your site for 10+ years [...] You are extortionists. You are EVIL" And in those 10 years, how much did you pay for this service?
- thrill 9y agoEverything that he was charged.
- aargh_aargh 9y agoExactly... I don't get why the customer using their free service feels entitled for it to continue. Better put into words by Louis C.K.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TviGil-U2HE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TviGil-U2HE
- sleepychu 9y agoTo be fair you've left out the thing they seem frustrated about "you gave ZERO notice"
- toomuchtodo 9y agoIf you're not paying for the service, notice is not required. It's free. There is no compensation changing hands. People never learn.
- mgkimsal 9y agoof course it's not required. it's a big component of goodwill, however.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoGoodwill doesn't pay the server bills. Backup your Gmail account. Backup your Flickr account. Backup any free service you're using. Otherwise, you have no one to blame but yourself when the rug gets pulled out. Edit: or start paying for them, as a sibling comment said.
- baybal2 9y agoNah, same story as with guys who do bait and switch with dev tooling and libs on NPM. One day an angry client calls you with "Dependency A, broke down in B," you take a look at code to see some lib in dependency tree outputting "feature A is now paid" in ASCII art. Don't be reliant on public services.
- evan_ 9y agooh no, I hadn't heard about paid NPM packages- do you have any more info about this? My searchesare just coming up with stuff about leftpad going away and packages called "paid" etc.
- twiss 9y agoAmazon and Ebay should consider paying some multiple of the $399/year Photobucket is asking to remove these messages on their websites. After all, they are benefiting from the free image hosting, too. That could be a better business model for an image hosting site than charging end users, too.
- ReverseCold 9y agoThis seems reasonable for Photobucket, eBay/Amazon shouldn't have let people host images on 3rd party sites.
- theon144 9y agoNo sympathy here. If anyone relies on a free service, they must anticipate said service changing terms or functionality at any point in time, or even disappearing completely. It's unfortunate it affects many users who had no say in the choice of the infrastructure (say, many of those stamp bulletin board members), but that's how it goes. It's silly to use a free-of-charge service as infrastructure. Besides, if I am reading correctly, and there is in fact no data lost, calling it "ransom" is just ridiculous - nothing is being hold ransom here.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago"We made all of your ebay listings worthless, give us $399 to put them back as they were" with zero notice upfront sure sounds like a ransom to me. Although I'm totally with you on the part about not building a business around someone else's free service, this does seem somewhat unreasonable on PhotoBucket's part.
- brogrammernot 9y agoI don't think so. Society has gotten this weird notion that with a free service they deserve more than they actually do. It's free until they change it. If you build your e-commerce business on shaky ground (free services) there's an inherent risk it gets pulled out from under you at any moment.
- BenchRouter 9y agoEhhh, let's not pretend it's not a two-way street. You offer your service for free because you want people to use it. Maybe people shouldn't expect much from free services, but free services also then shouldn't expect much from its users (i.e. that they might get angry quickly and drop their service on a whim). > If you build your... business on shaky ground (free services) there's an inherent risk it gets pulled out from under you at any moment. This also very much applies to Photobucket. This could very well be the thing that kills it.
- 9y ago
- NelsonMinar 9y agoIt's a shame Amazon doesn't contract with some image hosting service for its store. Maybe they could use Azure or Google Cloud Storage to serve files via HTTP.
- WillKirkby 9y agowhy not AWS?
- acveilleux 9y agoI think that was sarcasm but maybe a little too dry.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CapitalistCartr 9y agoI hear AWS is pretty affordable. Maybe they could get a volume discount.
- kennydude 9y agoIt even has a file storage service which actually works
- MatthewWilkes 9y agoHonestly, this is the most surprising thing for me. Allowing page views to make HTTP calls to external hosts that aren't controlled by Amazon would let them track user behaviour across their listings. Facebook stopped that with profile images a long time ago.
- AndrewDucker 9y agoThe issue here isn't that PhotoBucket are charging to host images. It's the no-notice change and the size of the charge. Effectively they've knocked people off Ebay telling them that they can keep their sales for a one-off payment of £300. If they'd given them two weeks notice then people could have evaluated the cost and decided if £300/year was a reasonable amount to pay, or if they should migrate elsewhere. Doing it like this basically forces some people to pay up instantly. That's not fair dealing, that's rather more mafia-like.
- UnoriginalGuy 9y agoBecause PhotoBucket know that if people even had two weeks to evaluate it, they'd put their images on AWS's S3 service instead for pennies on the dollar.
- hamandcheese 9y agoForget the Amazon and eBay listings - those will the fixed, I'm sure. The real tragedy here are the forums and other non-commercial uses that may be lost forever.
- tedajax 9y agoAs if millions of PHPBBS voices cried out at once and were silenced.
- beastcoast 9y agoDoes anyone have an example of a detail page with an externally hosted product image? I'm like 90% certain amazon hosts its own images. I wonder if the sellers are using external URLs to upload their listings through seller central, and Amazon automatically creates the listing with the placeholder image hosted on Amazon.
- kennydude 9y agoHaving notice and potentially adding a banner at the bottom of affected images to warn of the change would have been nice. Photobucket still seems to do that weird detection where if you load an image url in your browser it takes you to the webpage filled with ads
- protomyth 9y agoI am of the crowd who thinks this is Amazon and eBay's fault. What insanity would let you use a third-party hosted photo on a product you are selling. The number of things that could go wrong are mind boggling and all will be put on your site since that is what is currently in the address bar. Also, does the third-party site have as good of security as you do? Are you going to get pictures, that shall we say, are not up to your community standards and don't represent the product? Asking free to give you a notice is just poor business.
- kzahel 9y agoI spent a little time last week when I found out about this writing an extension to make the images work, https://github.com/kzahel/photobucket-embed-fix https://github.com/kzahel/photobucket-embed-fix The extension gets permission for Photobucket domains and modifies the referer header. Very simple.