Freemium, Paywalls, "Who Owns My Stuff" and Other Modern Day Treachery
Lately, I have been getting an increasingly urgent string of emails from online photo storage provider Photobucket.
Once Upon A Time — when I was more active in hobby related online forums of various kinds — I used Photobucket as a place to store images I used in posting to these forums.
Red beach glass. It has NOTHING to do with this post, but at the same time EVERYTHING to do with this post! Read on!
Lots of people use(d) this particular storage service, because it was free, and it generated automatic message board code you could insert into message board text.
Our Free Service Now Costs Money!
The urgent emails I keep getting are basically a result of Photobucket letting me know that their service is no longer going to be free and that I will need to start a paid subscription. Furthermore my stored content (some of which has been there since the late 1990s) will be unavailable to me unless I pay the subscription.
In recent years, it seems like more and more of these previously "free" services (which always HAD a "premium" version where you could pay for a beefed up account) have started charging subscription fees, and they somewhat take your content "hostage" by requiring that you to pay in order to not lose potentially many years of stored images and graphics.
Cobalt blue beach glass
In my case, I don't honestly care and I'm going to not take a paid subscription regardless of whether it is annoying to me or not annoying to me. I don't really use message boards anymore.
Even if that were not the case, I'd probably tell them to "go stuff it," because I am sick and tired of being nickeled-and-dimed to death by misc. $4.99 subscription fees on everything from photo storage to almost meaningless apps on my phone.
When taken in isolation it's easy to reason that "$4.99 a month is very little," but multiply by dozens or even hundreds you're soon enough bleeding to death just as badly as you would be with the interest on excessive consumer debt!
A 100-year old US Parcel Post stamp
Leaving People in the Lurch
However, for some active users that I know of — particularly on certain Hobbyist forums that are still very active — I have little doubt that this is a major imposition because they may have hundreds or thousands of images that are active inside their Message Board content, and that's now suddenly going to cost money.
And I know many of them are retired people on limited fixed income, so now they are kind of screwed.
Orange beach glass
Who Owns Your Content, Baybee?
Which sort of brings to mind the frequent discussions around here about Web 2.0 versus Web 3.0 and "who owns your content," because although the images that are in my Photobucket account are clearly mine, I evidently don't actually own them in the capacity that they are stored on the third party platform.
Which isn't to say that I don't own the originals, which are still here on my computer. And which — for shits and grins — I'm using to illustrate this Web 3.0 blog post! Because I can.
It's just a small example of how the whole "who owns your content" situation isn't always just about the potential of being deplatformed on a venue like YouTube, Twitter or Facebook for being controversial and not following the "Accepted Narrative," it can also be something very subtle and small like being faced with the reality that your perfectly innocuous photos — most of these are of old postage stamps and beach glass — also are "not yours" and can be "taken hostage" at a moment's notice!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2023.07.14 11:30 PDT
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Annoying indeed.
The same goes for all the emails about new small print ( rules and regulations ) in almost every company/ 'service'.
Web 3 for the win!
Amazing photos, by the way :^)
Ah yes!
"Important notice: We've updated our terms and conditions, please read and agree to same."
Very annoying.
All those tiny subs do add up! And EVERYTHING screams SUB, SUB, SUB - often with little value. I guess they need to make money somehow but surely they should have some kind of grandfather rule where if you've been using their service for THAT long, then you deserve it for free!
More likely their thinking is that I've been using the service for so long that moving my stuff will be enough hassle that I will have no choice but to accept a paid subscription!
But you're right, so many of these things have no value at all...
Ive ruthlessly gone through old photos deleting duplicates and poor images so I don't have to buy more Google storage! Digital hygiene is hard work.
It's definitely very time consuming... which I find ironically irritating because the point of all this technology was to save us time!
Photobucket has been nagging me for a good while, too. They make it sound incredibly urgent, too. It's like the phishing spam that insists I need to ACT NOW or lose thousands of dollars so please click the hyperlink and enter info! So disgusting.
It's gross, I agree. And this is not the third photo storage facility that has pulled this stunt in just the last five years.