Rest in pie
Back in 2009, and probably even well before that, we (Mark & Rihards) were in need of a way to quickly share temporary images and text documents with each other without worrying about having to delete them.
Usually this would be something like an unfinished design needing quick feedback, or a screenshot of an Internet Explorer 6 bug in the latest version of a website we were working on, or just a text file containing debug information.
The available tools back then felt too clumsy and cumbersome to use, required registration, were filled with advertisements, and none of them had the expiry feature built in. The feature at Upload Pie’s very core was making sure that the files that you share get automatically deleted after a specific period of time.
To put things in perspective 2009 feels like a life time ago
- President Obama had just been elected & Flight 1549 crash-lands in the Hudson River
- Netflix was still shipping out as many DVDs as they were streaming them online
- Bitcoin had just been launched
- iPad, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Minecraft, Telegram & Discord hadn’t been launched yet
- Internet Explorer had more than 50% share of the browser market (Safari around five percent and Chrome even less)
- Twitter was in its early days, Spotify wasn’t available in the US yet
- Imgur had just launched, but didn’t have most of its features it does now
- Ask Jeeves was still around and very(?) popular
Little did we know that our little site that we primarily built for our own use would soon become rather popular.
Big portions of pie
At its height it was in the top of 20,000 most visited sites according to Alexa.com (a service that has now been discontinued as well) with hundreds of active users in real-time, thousands of files being served at the same time, and weekly emails from agencies wanting some kind of partnership (usually to display ads or sell products). It had close to half a million users every year around that time.
When something gets popular it also starts to attract attention from people who you do not want on your site. We don’t mean trolls, pranksters, or even folks trying to DDoS the site but rather the criminal kind. With them using the site it also got noticed by various government law agencies, be it FBI (not many people get called by the FBI), Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, CyberTipline, Metropolitan Police of London and various other city Police Departments.
Over the years we’ve released multiple updates to Upload Pie which addressed these issues (or at least tried to), but ultimately if someone wanted to misuse the site there wasn’t anything that could be done to stop them (at least not back then). To address it fully we would have had to hire a team of moderators who would review each upload and that just wouldn’t make sense for a site that was created as a free to use hobby project by two very busy people.
So where are we now?
For the past several years neither of us have used the site as there’s easier ways to do the things we built UploadPie to help with. It looks to be the case with everyone else as well. The numbers have dwindled over the years. There’s still about 50,000 active users every year, but that’s quite far from what it was.
Time has come to sunset Upload Pie
Would we do it all over again? Hard to say. We’re sure it was useful for many people and was the perfect tool for the time, but it also facilitated and contributed to things it was never built for.
We’d like to finish on a positive note though.
What the internet needs now more than ever is deshittification and rewilding.
Less AI slop, more hand crafted awesomeness with personality.
Less walled gardens, more open platforms and ecosystems.
Less algorithms that push hateful incendiary content meant to keep us engaged and doom scrolling, more content that’s fun and engaging and doesn’t exist just to be monetised, to be sold, with the aim of maximum profits.
If you'd like to contact us feel free to send an email to hello@uploadpie.com.