> (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.
I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.
It's likely running on the original infrastructure from acquisition, is full of EOL dependencies, and likely wasn't well-secured to begin with even before the takeover.
Any changes to regulatory requirements are also likely ignored. The EULA is probably full of all sorts of falsehoods about how they maintain the site. ("We use commercially standard methods to secure and blah blah blah ...")
Keeping these kinds of zombie sites online is not a win-win situation.
IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.
Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.
[*] assuming chad doesnt lie about having my stuff as OP claims in this case
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.
You got a Pentium III and a DSL connection? Run a website! Run an IRC server!
2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.
That's basically what Web 2.0 was.
when you make a contract with facebook or any other large site you're making a contract with a legal team tasked with protecting their money
at a certain point scale only works through oppression