It's tragic and I sympathize with the people and communities whose content has broken because of this, but... there's a very simple cardinal rule of Internet services:
If you're not the customer, you are the product.
The customer is the one who pays money. If you're not paying for a service, you are what the service sells.
Photobucket was selling its user base to advertisers. Imgur is doing the same thing. Photobucket probably wasn't making very much money from advertising, and was unwilling to keep up the service for free. Same thing is going to happen with Imgur eventually, once it runs out of venture capital money.
Online image hosting has a real monetary cost. If you're not paying for it, you can't have an expectation that it will always be there.
|