[Steve_PPP]

Random online news:

The worst part of this debacle, according to Ghacks.net, is the fact Photobucket users were apparently given no warning of the change. The subscription features simply changed, and images stopped loading without explanation.

There's hope this is a mistake, or that Photobucket's management will realize the scale of the problem they have created with this change. But if that doesn't happen, expect to see that Photobucket broken link image above many times in the coming months.

But this change has also done something terrible for all of us, even people who never even had a Photobucket account: It’s completely broken the internet. Vast swaths of blogs and personal websites from the mid-00s are now full of missing images, replaced with a hideous error message.

This is a crushing loss of internet archaeology. Photobucket's heyday coincides with the height of personal blogging: Free and easy software like Blogger and WordPress made it finally accessible for people with virtually zero technical skills, and reading tools like Google Reader and De.lic.ious made it easy to follow and read blogs. Message boards and Yahoo Groups still thrived, Reddit and 4chan were just picking up steam. People needed a place to host the budding memes like lolcats or Blingees! This was a brief moment of internet history, maybe only 2005–2009, before Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr homogenized the look and feel of the internet and eliminated the need for normal people to have a photo hosting site like Photobucket. The internet felt more spread out, with more random treasures to find — there were tons of different sites to go to, to find, to create. If the GeoCities stage was the awkward teen years of the internet, and today is the mature adult version, that brief Photobucket-heavy phase was the college period where it spread its wings, smoked Parliament Lights while talking endlessly about Tarantino, and tried to pull off a fedora. The internet was big enough to be interesting but small enough to still feel intimate. It was really fun, and now it's disappearing.

I feel sorry for the lolcats