Show HN: I made a private self-destructing image hosting site in Golang

A maker showed off picburn, a super-simple photo-sharing site with a spicy promise: upload an image, send a private link, and it vanishes after a timer runs out or a view limit is hit. No account, no sign-up, no endless ad maze. On paper, the crowd should’ve loved the convenience. Instead, the real fireworks started in the comments, where users immediately went from “neat idea” to full-on panic mode.

The first mini-scandal? A classic internet gotcha: someone tested the “view once” setting and declared it off by one. They opened the image, then opened it again in an anonymous browser, and it still showed up before finally disappearing on refresh. For a product built around self-destructing secrecy, that’s the kind of bug that makes commenters kick the tires extra hard.

But the biggest drama wasn’t the bug — it was the morality-and-law pile-on. Multiple commenters warned that even temporary image hosting could attract nightmare uploads, from copyright violations to illegal material. One basically said, in the gentlest possible doom voice, “I’d take it down immediately.” Another warned that bad actors will abuse the tool, whether the creator likes it or not. Amid the alarm bells, there was one wistful note of nostalgia, with someone missing the “good old days” of old-school upload sites. So yes, the app is about disappearing images — but the comments made one thing very clear: the legal worries are not disappearing at all.