Broken Bits

A lot of stuff happened in 2024, but one of the most annoying, yet under-the-radar things involved the long-forgotten image-sharing service Photobucket.

Based on their email habit, they really wanted me to pay attention to them.

For a 13-month period between September 2023 and October 2024, I would get weekly or even biweekly messages from the service, warning me my account was facing an imminent threat of deactivation. (I wasn’t alone.)

The solution to this problem? Pay Photobucket a bunch of money. Now, the thing with Photobucket was that it was initially pitched to people as a way to upload images to forums. That’s how I used it … 20 years ago. I am a fan of archival, but even I realize the value prop of those images is minimal enough that there’s not much of a need for me to go back and grab them.

Image hosting is kind of on my mind right now: As a part of the redesign effort I launched at the end of the year, I am 100% moving away from Imgix in favor of a self-hosted image transform tool, and I just finished a key part of that transition this week. (Whoot!)

Anyway, I bring up Photobucket because we’re seeing a way more popular service that has more than a few gray hairs on its scalp do something very similar. That service? Bitly. If you were on Twitter in the early 2010s, you used it to save links. So did I. It was an important service, and one that nearly got disrupted by the overthrow of a dictator. (It also has a useful utility: If a link was particularly long and gnarly—say, it has a load-bearing selection of URL modifiers—a shortened link is a great way to keep the thing together so it doesn’t fall apart.)

However, taking your eye off the ball highlights how enshittification can sneak under the radar. Recently, the company announced a surprising change to its terms of service, also in a random email, that it would be making a change affecting free users:

We are making some adjustments to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that will affect you as a user of Bitly’s free plan.

Beginning in the next month, when your audience interacts with your Bitly links or QR Codes, they may see a preview page prior to being directed to the destination URL. The page includes information about the link destination and may include advertising.

Other link shorteners did similar things to this long ago. In fact, for some of them, it was their model. But Bitly doing this is a real shame, because its role has long been akin to plumbing. But apparently keeping pipes working doesn’t pay very much anymore.

Bitly has essentially taken its prime position in the link ecosystem and used it to exploit its customers, particularly those who worry about archival or link rot. And because it’s not a spring chicken anymore, it likely has to do it if it wants to stay in business, because what it is selling is a decaying commodity.

And when broken down, it did so for the same reasons as Photobucket spammed me: They are carrying around the weight of vintage legacy content, and it can be difficult to maintain long-term. After all, how many people are clicking on short Twitter links posted 15 years ago?

Essentially, the fault of Bitly’s business model is that, over time, the storage bill will always increase, because there are always more links. And because they were the first to develop the model, their legacy build, which presumably needs constant maintenance, probably costs more than it would if you developed Bitly as a new product.

On that latter point: Hosting this stuff is actually fairly cheap these days. Self-hosting makes it possible for mere mortals to do things like run link-shortening services for just a couple of bucks a month, or even free on a home server. (The cool self-hosted software service Pikapods doesn’t have a link shortener among its array of apps, but maybe it should get one.) And even if you don’t want to pay for such a service, social networks now handle the link-shortening for you these days.

The result is that most people don’t need Bitly anymore. But Bitly has a trick to get around this: If you want to export your data to put on a shoebox and avoid spamming your users with ads, you must pay them money for the honor.

How much? $35. That’s the cost of a single month of their “Growth” service, They have a cheaper plan, called “Core,” but it’s only available as an annual subscription, and it does not offer the ability to export links. It’s like they took notes from Apple’s stair-step pricing strategy.

Technically, there are methods to work around this. After all, you can still access the forwarded links manually, grab the URLs, and just put them in a new service. But clearly, that’s more work, and it’s designed to keep you put.

With that said, it‘s worth giving a shout to companies that do this right. As a part of my aforementioned image export, I noticed that I had around 1,000 images sitting on Cloudinary, a service I stopped using at least half a decade ago, on their free plan. Unlike Photobucket, all the links still worked. Even though I was a cost center to them, I was able to extract the links using their API (which was capped at 500 requests per hour) and save them elsewhere, and then put some regex requests into my Eleventy install to fix the links so they point to the new places.

There is no reason Cloudinary has to do that. They could have charged me $35+ for that transaction, just like Bitly wants to. But they didn’t, and it allowed me to save information that I could have lost had I not caught that. Though I don’t use them anymore, I can say my last interaction with them was positive.

No matter what spin you put on this—friend of the site Jon Henshaw of Coywolf sarcastically painted it as unlocking a new revenue stream—it sucks for the end user. Maybe it was inevitable, but Bitly, if they’re going to do this, should at the very least make it possible to export links without paying them for the honor.

But that’s not the game they’ve chosen to play.