Missing Links - The Rising Cost of 3rd-Party Image Hosting
It's 2006 and you just bought a used Nissan 240sx off Craigslist. It just needs a few repairs that you can easily do in your own garage and you'll pass inspection. The problem? You aren't quite sure how to replace the parts and the Haynes Manual covers too wide of a range for your specific question. What do you? You join a forum.
In the early to mid 2000's before everyone had a how-to Youtube channel, your best bet for finding answers to questions for your hobbies was in an online forum. Car forums were popular at the time and were a great place to find information on car clubs, how to fix your ride, and deals on parts. In 2008 my friends started a car club with it's own forum for the Austin area. The website and club only lasted about 3 years but it was fun.
Like most forums we had no money. The bigger ones with sponsors and such used expensive forum software like vBulletin. But for most of us with limited money used the self hosted option: phpBB. There were forums for everything back then. Today you would join a Discord or Facebook group for the same reasons, but those aren't public. A forum let anyone go through the posts and see the information.
This is the important bit. Back in the mid 2000's when you googled a question, you weren't given a youtube link - you were given a list of blog posts and forum topics that had your answer. Say I have my old 240sx and I need to know how to install the used MOMO steering wheel I bought on eBay. I go to google and type "How to remove steering wheel 240sx." What shows up?
Today it's a bunch of Youtube links but the first real link is in fact, a NICOclub forum post from 2006 and you'll notice something off about it. The post has text instructions with massive spaces between them. Why? There were once images there to show you what to do.
For years 3rd party image hosts like Photobucket and Flickr would allow anyone to upload images and link them to other websites like these forums. Sometime around 2014 these free webhosts stopped allowing you to use hotlinks like this without a paid account. No big deal, most people had tons of photos and it was worth the $5 a month or whatever to keep the links up. But soon costs rose beyond that of casual users, and folks moved on to other options like Imgur.
No big deal right? You still have all your old photos in that Photobucket and Flickr account right? Nope. If you had either of those back in the day you probably get the same emails I do about your photos being deleted forever if you don't pay up. You can log into your Photobucket account but you can't see and download your photos without a paid account.
So if I can't access the images, neither can the old hotlinks from forum posts long ago. That's what the blank spaces are from in the earlier image. So how do I change the steering wheel out in my car? Well, thankfully there are videos now. But what about information that isn't as valuable on the Youtube algo? Personal photos.
Have we already lost a generation of images from the internet? From 2005-2013 I used a digital camera exclusively for any photos I took. Some made it to Photobucket but the majority of them I piled into a Pro Flickr account because the paid storage was worth it. (Facebook at the time didn't have high rez images.) But at some point I switched from Flickr to Instagram and Facebook to share photos with friends and family. The photos stayed on my iPhone in cloud storage. I didn't need to upload to Flickr or pay for the ability to link the images.
Then Flickr too put limits on free accounts. At some point they sent out the dreaded "You have too many photos for a free account, remove them or we will start deleting them." emails. This was bad. I had to try and export years of photos, thousands, to my computer. Flickr would send you a download link to a zip file of your images. Sometimes those zipped files were corrupted. I lost a chunk of them in the process. I made the mistake of relying on one service without backing things up on my end.
When I use the Internet Wayback Machine, often I get the bare bones of the website I'm visiting as very few of images have been cached. It's just not feasible in most cases. Images are huge and require decent storage space. Storage space costs money. Is it inevitable that places like Imgur and Instagram start charging subscription fees for users too? Get the verified dot by your username in exchange for keeping all your photos?
The future is $5 a month forever.