alt Hacker NewsI have received the email that my photobucket account is going to be deleted, so I've logged in after who knows how many years and got offered the same thing, to subscribe. Instead I've went to close the account and in the process (or somewhere else, don't remember exactly) there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service really), then I've closed the account. There was no need to subscribe.
Replies
Yes.
Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account.
At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent.
The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO.
(But not giving a preview of the account you're reclaiming isn't a good UX obviously, not going to defend that!)
Photobucket has been sending me an email every few months that my account is due to be deleted. It's been at least two or three years.
I'd love them to delete my account because there's nothing in it, but apparently it's just an outright scam
I did the same thing. I contacted support via email who told me to go through the deletion process and near the end, there would be an option to save your photos free of charge. I downloaded my photos, looked through them, then deleted the account.
This is the real tip. Thank you.
I had gone through a whole process probably 2 years ago now to "recover" my account that I lost the original email and forgot the password. I eventually got into the account before they paywalled it, and procrastinated downloading everything because I couldn't find a good way to do it in bulk.
Interestingly, you can request the download, and then just NOT delete your account, which is what I plan on doing out of spite. My 81MB of ~600 cringe avatar edits from Gaiaonline circa 2007 will forever take up that tiny space on their servers as they hope and pray that one day I might toss them $5.
> there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service really), then I've closed the account. There was no need to subscribe.
Does Photobucket make it clear that this is an option, or did you discover it by accident? I don't get that sense from TFA. If it was unclear, this is still a shitty dark pattern. The wording implies that in order to "relive" your images you must subscribe...
[dead]
Yeah, makes sense. I think it's just a little honeypot for fools that don't do their research. 1 prompt to Claude would have saved me the pain, probably. ("Research" isn't even that hard nowadays!)
I predict that in the future, when you cancel an LLM subscription, they will threaten that unless you pay, to fully delete your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data.
You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...