7 ms·

Amazon and eBay images broken by Photobucket's 'ransom demand'

59 points by uladzislau 9y ago

kungpoo 9y ago
TIL photobucket still exists
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
probably_wrong 9y ago
I want to be angry at this, but I really can't. From the business perspective, it doesn't make sense to subsidize your free users' business needs. The article mention a backslash, but I'm not sure how much should they care about complaints from customers they have chosen to fire. From the users' point of view, this is their 6-months reminder that a) you should read the terms of what you are agreeing to, and b) if you are not paying for a service, you get what you pay for. A harsh lesson for sure, but a lesson more people should probably learn.
- calgoo 9y ago
  Im sorry, but saying someone needs to read the terms of services is BS. If i where to read all the updates i get, i would be doing nothing but read these BS agreements. The way they did this was very ugly, instead of sending a notice, they hid it in a all of text. This is why these agreements should not be classified as contracts and not legally binding in any way.
  - krapp 9y ago
    Caveat Emptor. If you're running a business that depends on a third party hosting assets related to your product, reading and keeping up with the terms of service isn't BS, it's mandatory. If you don't want to do your due diligence, then host everything yourself and eat the bandwidth costs.
- mariuolo 9y ago
  If anything I'm angry at BBC reporting this as "ransom demand". How can a firm rely on a free service without a contract guaranteeing anything?
- ben0x539 9y ago
  I wouldn't be angry about not letting people do the thing, but after letting people do the thing for over a decade, they could have been a lot more graceful about changing their mind. Like, I don't really blame them for not sticking with a clearly nonviable free tier, but taking the easy way out at the expense of fucking over your (free, sure) users is still sorta rude. idk if people "should" know better, it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice. Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.
  - krapp 9y ago
    >it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice. I'm baffled that people seem to feel this is an unreasonable expectation for anyone trying to make money from such a service, especially as a free user. It's not a public utility. >Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done. This isn't society, though, this is business. This is why companies hire lawyers and pay for contracts with their suppliers, etc. Yes, the way Photobucket went about this is crass, clueless and rude, but users who just expected the service to "work" indefinitely are also at fault for doing so.
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      In a general case I'd agree with you, but Photobucket is an exception. This would be like Yahoo shuttering their free email tier overnight and asking for payment.
    - ben0x539 9y ago
      The bar for being a business is pretty low, though. If they had the logistics and budget to pay for a lawyer, they probably wouldn't be hosting on photobucket anyway.
- pi-rat 9y ago
  This is a BIG (and breaking) change. It would cost the company ten minutes to send out a proper notice. Burying these changes deep down in a terms and conditions document is bad behaviour. Proper way to do this would be to: - Notify your customers about the change in an easy to read email and/or message when you log in. - Only apply the change to new uploads at first, then it's easily discoverable and handled by users. Inform them that you plan to do this for all hosted images. - Apply the change to older uploads a few months later. Hiding and rushing it just makes people angry. They won't pay if they feel you tricked them.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  It would be more accurate to not call them customers but users. There's a serious distinction, and the complaints explicitly are from business users claiming that they shouldn't be considered even potential customers.
michaelt 9y ago
Honestly, I'm very surprised that Amazon and Ebay aren't hosting all their own product images. After all, if there's a dispute over a listing, they need to be able to see it as it was at the time of the sale - which means storing copies of all the images. It would give them control over page-load times and avoid leaking data about customers' browsing habits. And both sites have obviously demonstrated the ability to host (and pay for the hosting of) user-submitted images, as they have much better revenue sources than Photobucket. (I agree it sucks about forum posts)
- ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
  >I'm very surprised that Amazon and Ebay aren't hosting all their own product images. They do. Amazon has it's own CDN. I guess users can link to third party images in the product content but the main images are hosted on Amazon CDN via AWS.
  - yellowsir 9y ago
    i guess that was the point, they don't rehost 3th party images...
- _e 9y ago
  Users lose the ability to run their own analytics without third party image hosting.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Which strongly implies that Amazon, Ebay etc need to start offering good analytics to their users.
    - paulcole 9y ago
      Why? Amazon is THE marketplace to sell on. They don't need to keep adding features. Sellers are welcome to take their business elsewhere but don't have any reasonable alternative.
soulchild37 9y ago
Don't be a free user if you really care about the long term service provided by the provider : https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
- mrkrab 9y ago
  I don't think anybody cares about the long term service of Photobucket. Everybody knew that was going to happen. It has happened to all image uploaders in history, and it will keep happening forever, since image uploaders are 1) a money-losing business (people will flee as soon as you stop hotlinking) and 2) have no real value (how much time does it take you to write an image uploader? probably one of the first things you do when you're learning to code for the web)
reaktivo 9y ago
An issue that could have been solved by watermarked pictures.
- autokad 9y ago
  that sounds like a much better approach. Even if they needed to ditch the hosting of them all together, they could have water marked them and inform them in the water mark the cut-off date
- slouch 9y ago
  Unless the issue is bandwidth cost
nstart 9y ago
Curious why they felt the need to do this at all in this way. Their goal is to maximise profits. How does making people super angry about your service serve that purpose? And they had to know. They had to know the numbers of conversions after the ToS change and whether or not their was an uptick of people seeing this and converting. They had to know that they were going to affect a lot of people overnight. This was not accidental in any way. So what's the difference in money you'd make/lose by putting it up front and center all over your site saying "Photobucket is transitioning away from the free tier". A blog post? An email? A release to the press? At "worst" they'd find themselves in a situation where most people stop using their service. I put it in quotes because, this also means that the incredible cost of hosting people who never intended to pay also goes away. It's tough but hey, it's still a win for Photo bucket. At best, if done right, they might even earn the goodwill of people and convert more people over than they'd expected in the first place. Doing it this way can never get them anywhere more than "worst", and in the long run it'll probably be actually worse as people who might have considered paying will be spooked/pissed off and will vanish into the ether. I can't understand how anyone thought this was a good execution plan to maximise business profitability.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  Maybe they are trying to cash out? Instead of building a sustainable model, they are banking on some people paying because their service is broken right now, and after the initial inrush of cash, as everyone leaves they will shutter the whole thing.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I can buy that. They've been an also-ran for a very long time now, ever since Imgur (at least!) came along and ate their lunch.
    - IgorPartola 9y ago
      And now I wonder how long it'll be until someone comes along and eats Imgur's lunch. Imgur is now a community, not just an image host, so there is some value there, but monetizing it from what I understand is a struggle. And a cheap image host alternative is very low cost of entry. I read somewhere that this particular business goes in a cycle of: dominant player starts trying to monetize, that pisses off the users, one of the users creates a new free/fast/easy-to-use clone and everyone migrates, and then that new company starts running an actual business and wants to monetize, resetting the cycle. I am sure this is the case with more than just image hosting, but image hosting in particular takes like 20 hours and a few hundred bucks to get started and scales very poorly as you get into multiple millions of users.
orless 9y ago
An earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626
- kzahel 9y ago
  Another earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695955
Neliquat 9y ago
Given that their site now brings my pc to its knees with popups and other garbage, good riddance.
SparkleBunny 9y ago
They've been shit for a while now. Switch to imgur and be done with it.
- SippinLean 9y ago
  Imgur has been riddled with ads and slow load times for quite a while, the mobile experience is especially terrible.
  - SparkleBunny 9y ago
    That's your fault for not using uBlock Origin.
jeffdavis 9y ago
https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
paulpauper 9y ago
terrible site full of malware-laden ads. imgur.com is way better for free image hosting
Companion 9y ago
I am more shocked sites like Amazon/eBay allow users to link to third party sites, what if they decided to change it to porn or something if they got hacked? I am surprised they don't download and rehost the images themselves...

59 points by uladzislau 9y ago

kungpoo 9y ago

TIL photobucket still exists

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

probably_wrong 9y ago

I want to be angry at this, but I really can't. From the business perspective, it doesn't make sense to subsidize your free users' business needs. The article mention a backslash, but I'm not sure how much should they care about complaints from customers they have chosen to fire. From the users' point of view, this is their 6-months reminder that a) you should read the terms of what you are agreeing to, and b) if you are not paying for a service, you get what you pay for. A harsh lesson for sure, but a lesson more people should probably learn.

calgoo 9y ago
Im sorry, but saying someone needs to read the terms of services is BS. If i where to read all the updates i get, i would be doing nothing but read these BS agreements. The way they did this was very ugly, instead of sending a notice, they hid it in a all of text. This is why these agreements should not be classified as contracts and not legally binding in any way.
- krapp 9y ago
  Caveat Emptor. If you're running a business that depends on a third party hosting assets related to your product, reading and keeping up with the terms of service isn't BS, it's mandatory. If you don't want to do your due diligence, then host everything yourself and eat the bandwidth costs.
mariuolo 9y ago
If anything I'm angry at BBC reporting this as "ransom demand". How can a firm rely on a free service without a contract guaranteeing anything?
ben0x539 9y ago
I wouldn't be angry about not letting people do the thing, but after letting people do the thing for over a decade, they could have been a lot more graceful about changing their mind. Like, I don't really blame them for not sticking with a clearly nonviable free tier, but taking the easy way out at the expense of fucking over your (free, sure) users is still sorta rude. idk if people "should" know better, it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice. Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.
- krapp 9y ago
  >it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice. I'm baffled that people seem to feel this is an unreasonable expectation for anyone trying to make money from such a service, especially as a free user. It's not a public utility. >Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done. This isn't society, though, this is business. This is why companies hire lawyers and pay for contracts with their suppliers, etc. Yes, the way Photobucket went about this is crass, clueless and rude, but users who just expected the service to "work" indefinitely are also at fault for doing so.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    In a general case I'd agree with you, but Photobucket is an exception. This would be like Yahoo shuttering their free email tier overnight and asking for payment.
  - ben0x539 9y ago
    The bar for being a business is pretty low, though. If they had the logistics and budget to pay for a lawyer, they probably wouldn't be hosting on photobucket anyway.
pi-rat 9y ago
This is a BIG (and breaking) change. It would cost the company ten minutes to send out a proper notice. Burying these changes deep down in a terms and conditions document is bad behaviour. Proper way to do this would be to: - Notify your customers about the change in an easy to read email and/or message when you log in. - Only apply the change to new uploads at first, then it's easily discoverable and handled by users. Inform them that you plan to do this for all hosted images. - Apply the change to older uploads a few months later. Hiding and rushing it just makes people angry. They won't pay if they feel you tricked them.
PeterisP 9y ago
It would be more accurate to not call them customers but users. There's a serious distinction, and the complaints explicitly are from business users claiming that they shouldn't be considered even potential customers.

michaelt 9y ago

Honestly, I'm very surprised that Amazon and Ebay aren't hosting all their own product images. After all, if there's a dispute over a listing, they need to be able to see it as it was at the time of the sale - which means storing copies of all the images. It would give them control over page-load times and avoid leaking data about customers' browsing habits. And both sites have obviously demonstrated the ability to host (and pay for the hosting of) user-submitted images, as they have much better revenue sources than Photobucket. (I agree it sucks about forum posts)

ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
>I'm very surprised that Amazon and Ebay aren't hosting all their own product images. They do. Amazon has it's own CDN. I guess users can link to third party images in the product content but the main images are hosted on Amazon CDN via AWS.
- yellowsir 9y ago
  i guess that was the point, they don't rehost 3th party images...
_e 9y ago
Users lose the ability to run their own analytics without third party image hosting.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Which strongly implies that Amazon, Ebay etc need to start offering good analytics to their users.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    Why? Amazon is THE marketplace to sell on. They don't need to keep adding features. Sellers are welcome to take their business elsewhere but don't have any reasonable alternative.

soulchild37 9y ago

Don't be a free user if you really care about the long term service provided by the provider : https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

mrkrab 9y ago
I don't think anybody cares about the long term service of Photobucket. Everybody knew that was going to happen. It has happened to all image uploaders in history, and it will keep happening forever, since image uploaders are 1) a money-losing business (people will flee as soon as you stop hotlinking) and 2) have no real value (how much time does it take you to write an image uploader? probably one of the first things you do when you're learning to code for the web)

reaktivo 9y ago

An issue that could have been solved by watermarked pictures.

autokad 9y ago
that sounds like a much better approach. Even if they needed to ditch the hosting of them all together, they could have water marked them and inform them in the water mark the cut-off date
slouch 9y ago
Unless the issue is bandwidth cost

nstart 9y ago

Curious why they felt the need to do this at all in this way. Their goal is to maximise profits. How does making people super angry about your service serve that purpose? And they had to know. They had to know the numbers of conversions after the ToS change and whether or not their was an uptick of people seeing this and converting. They had to know that they were going to affect a lot of people overnight. This was not accidental in any way. So what's the difference in money you'd make/lose by putting it up front and center all over your site saying "Photobucket is transitioning away from the free tier". A blog post? An email? A release to the press? At "worst" they'd find themselves in a situation where most people stop using their service. I put it in quotes because, this also means that the incredible cost of hosting people who never intended to pay also goes away. It's tough but hey, it's still a win for Photo bucket. At best, if done right, they might even earn the goodwill of people and convert more people over than they'd expected in the first place. Doing it this way can never get them anywhere more than "worst", and in the long run it'll probably be actually worse as people who might have considered paying will be spooked/pissed off and will vanish into the ether. I can't understand how anyone thought this was a good execution plan to maximise business profitability.

IgorPartola 9y ago
Maybe they are trying to cash out? Instead of building a sustainable model, they are banking on some people paying because their service is broken right now, and after the initial inrush of cash, as everyone leaves they will shutter the whole thing.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I can buy that. They've been an also-ran for a very long time now, ever since Imgur (at least!) came along and ate their lunch.
  - IgorPartola 9y ago
    And now I wonder how long it'll be until someone comes along and eats Imgur's lunch. Imgur is now a community, not just an image host, so there is some value there, but monetizing it from what I understand is a struggle. And a cheap image host alternative is very low cost of entry. I read somewhere that this particular business goes in a cycle of: dominant player starts trying to monetize, that pisses off the users, one of the users creates a new free/fast/easy-to-use clone and everyone migrates, and then that new company starts running an actual business and wants to monetize, resetting the cycle. I am sure this is the case with more than just image hosting, but image hosting in particular takes like 20 hours and a few hundred bucks to get started and scales very poorly as you get into multiple millions of users.

orless 9y ago

An earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626

kzahel 9y ago
Another earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695955

Neliquat 9y ago

Given that their site now brings my pc to its knees with popups and other garbage, good riddance.

SparkleBunny 9y ago

They've been shit for a while now. Switch to imgur and be done with it.

SippinLean 9y ago
Imgur has been riddled with ads and slow load times for quite a while, the mobile experience is especially terrible.
- SparkleBunny 9y ago
  That's your fault for not using uBlock Origin.

jeffdavis 9y ago

https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/

paulpauper 9y ago

terrible site full of malware-laden ads. imgur.com is way better for free image hosting

Companion 9y ago

I am more shocked sites like Amazon/eBay allow users to link to third party sites, what if they decided to change it to porn or something if they got hacked? I am surprised they don't download and rehost the images themselves...