At the beginning of 2021 I completely move my life away from facebooks ecosystem. As a hobbies photographer I moved from Instagram to Flickr, I wish I had done it earlier!
Flickr as a tool is very focused on creators. Once you start using it you realize that the company isn't optimizing for clicks and content consumption. This results in a product and community who’s standard of quality is leagues ahead of anything else one the internet. The idea of “an influence” just doesn’t exist within Flickr. It actually reminds me a lot of the internet before the FAANG monopolies.
They’ve identified a niche in the market and they are now striving to serve that niche the best they can. IMO Flicker is a radical tech company operating complete counter to the omnipresent hyper growth “conquered the world” mindset that pervades tech. I think they would make a good case study of how to build an online community that doesn’t try to optimize for engagement.
Doesn't sound like a successful or even self-sustaining online community though:
> In 2019, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of free users, except for the newest 1,000 and Creative Commons images.
> User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images as a result. In 2020, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $60 per year, saying that the site was still losing money.
> It would appear that an old community of professional photographers is keeping the site alive. Unless SmugMug can sell Flickr to a bigger company or come up with a new and revolutionary feature, however, the site's remaining years may be few...
So, I was really pissed off when they said they'd start deleting pictures instead of hiding them like the old Flickr. I was never going to re-upload all my pictures if I decided to go Pro again in the future. So I thought Flickr was effectively dead to me.
However, in the 2 years since they announced that, all my 6000+ photos were still there.
I never checked to see how many were still publicly visible, though. I wonder if they exposed only the newest 1000 public photos. That might account for the "63% of images lost" stat above.
Finally, this fall I needed a photo-sharing site again and decided I still like Flickr with its shitty "new" UI better than most other sites. I particularly like collections of albums and the maps of photos.
Plus, the overall UI for browsing an album is simple. No annoying sales-catalog style layouts.
I have OneDrive for my camera uploads (habit carried over from Windows Phone) and other private uploads, but anything I want to share publicly will go on Flickr.
They had a pretty good sale on Black Friday, so I ended up signing up for a year.
Still keep backups of my photos locally of course and I am ready to bail if they change it to look like Smugmug :-)
I bet what they actually did, is to only delete pictures from accounts that were clearly created by systems that used images as steganographic containers for arbitrary private data storage. (The use of such systems is why Google Photos — originally offering unlimited storage — had to later limit free storage to 5GB.)
Flickr had to make it clear that any free-tier user could potentially be impacted; but in practice the impact was limited to users who were actually abusing the system (though in a way that was previously "within the letter of the law.")
> steganographic containers for arbitrary private data storage
I'd be curious how you sell that. I understand you can have some API to take whatever data, put it into the images, upload the images, reverse for use. But some portal somewhere is like "buy secret storage" or something? I guess it is worth the processing/possible data loss efficiency.
You build an app that will create your backups for you using your free image sharing account. Or maybe instead of backups it's for big filetransfers, or sharing somewhat secret documents.
The main point is to make use of the effective endless storage, rather than to store things hidden in plain sight.
I remember also back when GMail first became available to people by invitation, and at the time the amount of storage you were given, while not as impressive by today’s standards, was pretty significant at the time. And someone created a system to allow you to backup files from your computer onto your GMail. I wonder if that system inspired Google to build Google Drive.
Here’s an article from the time, and an excerpt from said article:
> As many of you know, Gmail is Google's free web mail service that gives you 2+ Gigs of free storage for your email and attachments. Now that is a lot of storage; actually more storage than most people really need. So what can we do with all that extra storage you may be wondering? What if I told you that we could use all this extra storage to act as an online hard drive for you to store files?
> GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.
Windows XP. Good times :)
If Google did take inspiration from it when later creating Google Drive then maybe that’s even where they took the name for Google Drive from.
Speaking of Google, storage space, and that time period, here’s a comic strip I remember from back then :)
It's a self-sustaining online community of paid users. Like an MMO. Who cares about free users?
Unlike in a social network, free use of Flickr is not the point of Flickr. It's just a free-tier teaser to get you to understand the site, get used to it, and then start paying once you want to use it for anything "real." Like the free tier of e.g. Dropbox.
Flickr has more of a social-network aspect than Dropbox: it benefits enormously from people uploading high-quality photography or, especially, offering good feedback on other people's uploads. People love to upload photographs and see other people react favorably, and you especially want a way to share your photos with your friends and family even if they never end up uploading anything. There's also a cultural angle: young photographers want to be able to share their work and get feedback but they may not have money — but that high-school kid uploading pictures from their photography class is potentially creating both great content and will turn into a Pro account when they have money.
What they want to do is cap that: upload a few things you think about, don't use Auto-Uploadr to transfer 50GB of blurry lunch photos nobody will ever access. I've wondered whether the answer might be something like the old-school BBS ratios: have a free tier but allow people to get more based on the cumulative number of times people look at / star your work (with some care to avoid mutual promotion rings) or gift you a Pro subscription. If there's not a way to get cash out of the system, that could avoid unintentionally turning into OnlyFans while allowing people to contribute to the community.
Flickr was a failed video game that turned a feature into a product. For all those that say you can't pivot this raducally I would say sometimes you can.
I think that is misleading. Burbn, the foursquare clone that brcame Instagram, had points —but I don't think a reasonable person would call it a video game.
Conclusion: We, as an industry, should ditch everything else and just throw all our R&D money at video games. (But seriously, whatever pivots most readily and allow fastest development probably is a good point of investment)
He made it out! You made my day. Nah. My month! The backstabbing and minimizing and rewriting of history that happened with him and Twitter is such a trigger for me lol.
Edit: Unfortunately, that’s a different Noah Glass. Olo was founded in 2005. Noah was working for Odeo in 2005-2006. We can only imagine what the other cofounders would’ve done to Olo based on how he was thrown out of Odeo/Twitter.
Yea Flickr is awesome. The community is just other people who love photography, nothing more. It’s almost entirely positive and welcoming. The site is also a joy to use. A rarity in today’s social network world.
It doesn't feel that much different to me. It's bloated with trackware and adware and overclever operability-breaking cruft just like any other site now.
I also moved away from Facebook. Moved my photos to a Photoprism instance on a VPS synced between all my devices with Nextcloud. Couldn't be happier. And I'm not paying Flickr's crazy fee of $60/year just to host some photos.
"Root" server? Hetzner gives you a range of options for 30 Euro[0], starting with 2TB RAID1 and 16GB RAM.
You can do your own backups on a separate hosts for another 30 Euro, and if you ditch RAID there you will have anywhere from 3TB to 6TB of usable space.
I pay quite a bit more than $60 for the VPS, but the point is that I'm paying for a lot more than simple photo storage. $60 a year is a lot just to store my photos.
I don't fully remember the details, but my understanding is that the thing that most hurt Flickr was internal Yahoo politics around mobile apps.
The Flickr team were understandably very keen to get a great mobile app released - but Yahoo had a separate division (I think called "Connected Life") which had the internal monopoly on mobile development - and the Flickr team weren't allowed to release their own application independently of that team.
Simon is correct. There are a few Quora threads about this with information from insiders. Kellan Elliot-McCrea has the most complete answers about the failure to jump to mobile:
And here's another thread, started by a former Yahoo executive, Ravi Dronamraju, with lots of replies from the founders of various acquired startups (del.icio.us, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc). It is very illuminating. They're showing you in public what the discussion was often like in private.
While Instagram and Flickr (at least in theory) serve a different audience.
Flickr is for the professional or aspiring amateur photographer, to manage their photos and build show cases. Maybe even selling their photos online. Instagram is a mass market social network
You don't need to squint: Flickr Groups were a major part of the Flickr experience. E.g. Hardcore Street Photography (HCSP) had meetups and even published several books: https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/
These groups were better than anything Instagram has to offer because there were lengthy discussions and moderation tools. Even today, it's still impossible to search for a photo using a union of two tags on Instagram.
It's a pity that Instagram has beat out Flickr, but it's also a testament that ease of UX matters and is critical in gaining and maintaining market share.
Certainly lots of people who used Flickr for free online photo storage are on Instagram today. But the social network aspect of Flickr was always pretty focused on the prosumer and, perhaps to a lesser degree, pro base who were willing to pay an annual fee.
It's not clear to me that Flickr (and now Flickr/Smugmug) could have co-existed on the same service as Instagram. So the Flickr could have been Instagram narrative, which if true would have been great for the founders, would also have been awful for the most serious users of the Flickr service.
Seems Instagram has sort of evolved into something that many professional photographers use to market their work/services too.
I found my wedding photographer on Instagram, as did a lot of my friends. Instagram is just the starting point of course, but since so many people use it * it seems like a natural place to market photography services.
Later, my wife wanted to do a photoshoot of us on our trips to Paris and Hawaii. We found local professional photographers there via Instagram also.
* IIRC Instagram is considered "uncool" by younger generations, so who knows where things will be many years down the road.
I never aspired being the amateur photographer; simply hoped to connect, keep portraits (with permission ofc), delete accordingly, create good image/picture and more. Sometimes happening photos happened to be full of life/fun! Looking back; my photography naturally changed. Hopefully a few people found it. For me it was a process, going towards a dark room of being/keeping creative!
Flickr seemed a place for aspirations; people requesting and connecting.
-instagram is a quick snap, photograph; for me, at times. Seems more personal
Butterfield (one of the founders of Flickr, and later, Slack) is quite a character.
He and Caterina (Fake, the other co-founder of Flickr) were working on a game, a so-called "Game Never Ending" when they realized that they needed to come up with a way for people to store screenshots and share them. Thus, Flickr was born (this is why some URLs in Flickr had ".gne" extensions).
Yahoo acquired Flicker in 2005, and a few years later, both Butterfield and Fake left.
Butterfield then went back to his game. In the process of developing the game, he realized that he needed a good, reliable chat system: and hence Slack was born.
I wonder if he's back working on the game, which, really seems like a "game never ending" for him...
I interviewed for an engineer role at Flickr right after they were acquired by Yahoo. It was a full day grueling interview in one of the San Jose towers with all the originals, Cal, Allspaw, Kellan, etc.
The last interview was with Stewart. He walked in with his laptop and pulled up my resume and saw that I was from Texas. He asked if I'd ever been to Marfa. He then asked if I'd ever been to El Paso. He then asked if I'd ever heard the song El Paso by Marty Robbins. We then sat there and listened to El Paso for the entire song. Then we made some more chit-chat and that was the end of my interview.
I didn't get the gig but I did find out my flight back to DFW was first class so that was nice.
That seems surreal. Maybe by that point Stewart figured that anyone passed through to him had the technical chops, and the rest was about personality & culture fit?
This song in particular? Not much. The entire conversation, assuming it was more than 5 minutes of listening to the song? Perhaps whether or not you can get along with the person. I'm not saying that's what was going on: I think it's entirely possible that it was just some general weirdness. Or Stewart had already decided the person wasn't getting the job & wasn't going to waste time on tech talk when they could have a pleasant conversation about something else. I don't know, but I think there are other plausible explanations than the "weirdness" one. But massively wealthy tech founders are often an odd bunch, so "weirdness" certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I had a (very) small part in it -- in 2001, I was chatting with Caterina, and recommended the book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse. She then recommended it to Stewart, who found in it at least one of his inspirations for GNE.
Genuinely interested in hearing what other people get out of it. I couldn't get past Carse's overwrought use of chiasmus. After finally reaching the end, he places a coy little phrase which falls flat because he spilled the beans 66 sections earlier and it irks me to this day.
I agree that the prose and structure is not the strong point.
I appreciated it for giving a clearly articulated alternative to zero sum competitive games. It helped me think about the playfulness of cooperative creativity in a new more holistic way, as well as the idea that it’s worth doing things that you’ll never reach an end of.
I don’t doubt that if I read it again I’d share your criticisms though, it’s a thin volume with a very sweet idea at the core of it, at the end of the day.
Did you know that Flickr actually started out as an online multiplayer game, with file sharing as one if its features. The game flopped, but the file sharing bit was redeveloped into Flickr. Some of the files used to have .GNE in their url's, with GNE standing for 'Game Never Ending' which was the same of the game. See https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending for reference.
Looks like the game is going to be ending soon though...just remembered I'm a paid member, better go cancel that.
Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders, then went on to give the MMO thing another shot, starting one called Glitch in 2009. In 2012, it was deemed unprofitable, and they pivoted, re-developing their internal communication tools into Slack, which was wildly successful.
There are a couple of threads here that argue Marissa Mayer was the problem. I don't think that can be true.
Mayer took the reins at Yahoo in 2012.
Facebook had crushed Flickr in desktop-shared photos by 2009 or so, and over 2010-2012 or so, Instagram had created a whole new photo experience for mobile that Flickr missed. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012.
Mayer may or may not have exacerbated problems with Flickr. I don't actually know. But there's no way she was the precipitating factor.
Some of the posters blaming her are linking to articles that don't even mention her. The article just happens to use a photo of Mayer because she was the CEO at the time Flickr was sold to SmugMug.
Blaming Marissa Mayer for everything to do with Yahoo really pisses me off. Yahoo was a sinking ship, Mayer tried to save it, she couldn't. The obsession with blaming her feels extremely sexist to me. Regardless of whether it is sexist, people need to lay off of her. Blame is a boring, pathetic game that silently drowns and shuts down the minds of its participants over time. Sometimes people are good in a situation, sometimes they ain't. And sometimes the best person can't save a truly messed up place. I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand.
Because if you tell everyone that you are gonna "save" something repeatedly, publicy, even if you know you have failed and it turns out that you are doing the opposite people get sceptical about you and your character.
Flickr is great. With a modest yearly fee I get unlimited storage to back up all my pictures. With one click I can generate a URL for any album to share it. Phone pictures are backed up automatically: I take a picture, it gets copied to Flickr.
I’m not sure I understand the article. I don’t see the fact that Flickr is not Instagram to be a disadvantage.
The UI is bad and always was bad. But it’s easy to upload a whole directory of images at once, and they have an API.
MORE: Every now and then I go there just to browse the public photographs. There’s way too much over-processed fantasy-type imagery for my taste, but also invariably some great stuff, I’m always impressed by the talent of the photographers there.
Personally, I don’t think Flickr is best used as an image dump or photo backup service, so it’s not apples to apples. Curating your best photos and sharing those with others as well as engaging on their best photos is where Flickr shines (i.e. the community aspect)
It's somewhat different than the Flickr API, so it's hard to compare. The Flickr API is great in that it gives you access to everything a user can do on the site. It's really sad that this approach has mostly died (Instagram doesn't have any API, does it?)
PhotoKit is impressive in its own way, allowing third-party apps to hook into library management and destruction-free editing. It doesn't give you much control of the synchronization with iCloud. Or, from a different perspective, the sync happens transparently in the background and doesn't need handholding.
IMO they serve very different purposes. Google Photos has very good search and collaborative album building. The result is that you can take random photos of your life and still get value out of it later. It's not archival quality, but it's extremely accessible, which makes up for it, imo.
It's funny how the article glosses over smugmug and almost make them sound like some company that didn't know about this space. Smugmug was there from the beginning and always was the "better flickr", except they did not have (or only very limited, don't quite remember) free accounts. Now smugmug was never aiming to create a social network, but instead wanted to create a website for photographers to exhibit and share their photos. IIRC they grew slowly and never had big VC investments, but are definitely very good at what they do, it's just not a photo sharing service for the masses.
Slack (which was founded by the same founder as Flickr, Stewart Butterfield) seems to be doing ok with their Penis Swastika Logo, so it just goes to show how hard it is to predict which designs will be popular.
Flickr is great when, and arguably designed for, uploading photos from your computer. This after you dumped your DSLR's photos and edited them. The primary source of photos is now a phone, so services designed around that fare better.
Also, the professional photographer market doesn't really want to share all of their photos to everyone. SmugMug was better at allowing a photographer to control access to their photos and charge for access. Then the photographer puts a few up on Insta for publicity and advertising. Flickr was kind of caught in the middle, really designed for the pro-sumer DSLR owner, who are disappearing.
From the looks of it, most people I know who got their first DSLR, including myself, got used or hand-me downs from other photographers who were upgrading their setup for a newer and better body.
I use flickr as a member of a community that is a very niche subset of photography which still has a home there. The best thing about flickr as a user is that it's somewhat low-profile these days. However there are numerous aspects of the UI that result in a frustrating UX:
- Ads injected when clicking through photos of a gallery in carousel mode
- Slow page loads
- Pages seem to have their own discrete loading system (some redundant web app nonsense) that often hangs indefinitely until the page is refreshed at which point it loads in ~2 seconds flat
- Very limited ability to search and filter gallery content (in order to see most-liked photos, one must search the site by user then select "sort by: interesting" from an almost hidden menu, but even then it's somewhat randomly sorted by like count
- One must open the inspector to get the raw image url: if I can't simply right-click > save as... images from your website, kindly go fuck yourself; it takes extra effort to undo this feature which is default to all browsers new and old
However I LOVE that they continue to paginate galleries instead of implementing infinite scrolling which is something I hate most about modern web design. Kudos to them for that.
I have some passing awareness of Flickr. I worked a while at 500px. What I heard at the time was that photographers put their good work on Flickr, everything into Google photos, and their best examples on 500px.
I also remember (IIRC) that Flickr did a site redesign going white background rather than the 'light table' black background. I'm not their target user but that would have ended it for me.
My conclusion would be that Flickr could have co-existed with Google photos serving a more active/engaged audience but not if they want to have the same brand (most used, approachable white background, etc).
I believe Flickr started off with a white background.
I also remember Flickr being an extremely popular site. Then, Yahoo acquired it. Then they started censoring it. Then they neglected it. Then Flickr became effectively a ghost town. Since then, apparently SmugMug has acquired it.
Used Flickr for years. Then Yahoo came along. Then the T&C's changed, transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even attributing the photographers. Then they introduced fees.
I've not uploaded anything since Yahoo bought them.
Mayer can’t be blamed for much at yahoo. She was brought in to save a sinking ship and it turned out to be unsalvageable. Steve Jobs couldn’t have turned that one around.
I think the main problem was that Mayer never managed to answer one simple question: "what is Yahoo supposed to be good at?".
I'm not sure the comparison to Jobs is fair since Marissa had very limited leadership experience and completely lacked Jobs' ability to drive product development (I've sat through her reviews and regardless of whatever myth has been created around her, I don't think she was a driver of progress so much as an annoying, unfocused, unpleasant micro-manager who limited everyone around her to her myopic vision. That attitude doesn't scale beyond a junior VP position).
Jobs actually did the one thing Marissa couldn't: he was exceedingly clear on what Apple was going to do well. Right down to simplifying the product strategy so much even consumers understood it.
But in all fairness, even with a clear vision, there were sharks in the water at all sides distracting the leadership from doing their job.
I think that’s fair. It’s the same struggle that Bartz had and Yang before her. As you said, there were sharks on all sides. Yahoo was no longer the leader in anything significant once Google showed up.
Even in hindsight it’s hard to see a winning play for Mayer’s Yahoo. Even if Mayer had been visionary enough to build something like Chrome at Yahoo, Google would have beaten them to delivery or overwhelmed them shortly after. (Chrome might have been a compelling move for Bartz, who could have done it early enough to actually beat Google out the door.) Maybe if she’d seen Instagram coming she could have turned Flickr into that, but it’s not clear that would have changed the trajectory much, given that Instagram itself only sold for a billion in 2012 and Yahoo was trying to justify its continued existence while sitting on top of 30 billion of Alibaba.
All this is to say that maybe Mayer is a terrible leader (I honestly don’t know), but I don’t see that she bears most of the blame for Yahoo collapsing.
I think a winning play would have had to be based on some of their existing strengths rather than start something entirely green-field. For instance, there was a surprising amount of good platform technology at Yahoo! that could have gone somewhere interesting with more juice behind it. (It was managed like a means to and end, not an end in itself. This is what set companies like Google apart from Yahoo, Lycos and all the early 2000s portal companies)
I'm not sure products like Flickr was salvageable. I think I would have just starter over with more stringent technical goals to allow for more flexibility in enabling a product strategy that could remain flexible. (First, it has to be able to serve images properly - at the very least).
A winning play would have needed at least 3 if not 4 years to bear fruit as well. Without opportunists trying to force their way into a controlling position. And that wasn't going to happen.
The problem with Yang, Bartz and Semel was that none of them were the kind of people who "get it". They were not part of Internet or tech culture so they lacked all instinct. On top of that, Semel was a greedy asshole I have absolutely no sympathy for.
> I think a winning play would have had to be based on some of their existing strengths rather than start something entirely green-field. For instance, there was a surprising amount of good platform technology at Yahoo! that could have gone somewhere interesting with more juice behind it.
I’m curious what you have in mind. I don’t see what they had that they could have built a multibillion dollar company on. And that was the real challenge. They needed to build a core business worth at least several (10-20?) billion to fend off an inevitable hostile takeover breakup.
> The problem with Yang, Bartz and Semel was that none of them were the kind of people who "get it". They were not part of Internet or tech culture so they lacked all instinct.
It’s weird lumping Yang in with those others. Yang definitely was part of Internet/tech culture. He founded Yahoo and was responsible for the bulk of the value of Yahoo, as it came out of his investment in Alibaba. But he certainly made a lot of missteps as well.
> It doesn’t make him (or Filo) someone who gets it.
I don’t know what this means. If “gets it” means “capable of growing a $40 billion company “, then the set of people who “get it” seems exceedingly small.
No it isn't really about money, but about having an instinct for products, users, quality, and which opportunities are important and which are not. Have those in place and financial success will eventually follow.
This doesn't mean it is easily achievable. It certainly isn't. The distinction lies in not being delusional about how the important customers see you. And Yahoo was, for most of the time I paid attention, horribly delusional.
If we're going to focus on financial success it is important to use the correct measuring stick. You have to look at the delta between the potential and the actual value realized. Conservatively, the potential for Yahoo was at least an order of magnitude higher than the peak value. It had money, it had the biggest email service in the world, it had lots of eyeballs, it owned a good chunk of the world's web search talent, it even owned certain key advertising patents.
And it managed to squander every single one of those advantages - without exception. It was fucking painful to watch and even more painful to be part of it. At least until I decided to leave because none of the products I cared about were actually good enough that I'd use them myself.
I remember one afternoon when I was trying to figure out a shortcoming in a Yahoo product - one of the five or so products featured prominently on the front page. I asked around who I should talk to and eventually I realized that the product had zero developers - they had all been absorbed into a team that was working on something entirely different. When poking around I was told that "the CEO uses the product and thinks it is fine - so it is done. There is no need for developers or any further development". This was Yahoo Calendar. If you think back to the early 2000s, calendar was the unsolved piece of the replace-Microsoft-Office problem. Calendar was strategically important for defending the email position. And they didn't even understand that. They had zero strategic understanding of the space their products were competing in. Of course they lost the position. As anyone who paid attention knew they would.
The peak value of Yahoo was only that high to begin with because of very fortunate investments early on. Not because they actually knew how to do products. They had no idea how to build product. Be it search, email, or advertising platform. Not for lack of technical talent, but due to grossly incompetent leadership and an organization stuffed chock-full of useless middle managers.
Yahoo had the potential. But not the leadership to realize it.
Also, keep in mind that Yahoo itself had a negative valuation at one point - it was worth less than the value of its assets.
> Mayer can’t be blamed for much at yahoo. She was brought in to save a sinking ship and it turned out to be unsalvageable.
Erm, why not? She got paid a ton and failed. She should be blamed.
Yahoo absolutely could have been turned around. Yahoo Japan shows that.
The problem, like so many CEOs, was lack of clear vision. When you are failing, you have to place the bet and drive it through. Sure, the probability is that you will lose but if you don't then losing becomes a certainty.
The problem is that this is anathema to anybody who who was good at the middle management game. You get ahead as a middle manager not by placing big bets but by mostly avoiding failure.
> Erm, why not? She got paid a ton and failed. She should be blamed.
Because it’s absurd to only blame the last person in a line of ceos who presided over more than a decade of decline.
> Yahoo absolutely could have been turned around. Yahoo Japan shows that.
Yahoo Japan was always special. It was not a wholly owned subsidiary and also did not experience the same decline. It wasn’t turned around. It didn’t need a turnaround.
What happened to Flickr? Marissa Mayer. She counted user experience as one of her core skills. She revamped Flickr's user experience. When she was done the site was unusable. I think she realized it, because along with releasing the new UX she compensated for its suckiness by upping free storage to 1TB. A couple of takeaways: (1) A lot of people who think they are good at UX, aren't. (2) When people in power make mistakes they rarely admit it or undoes their "improvements".
I think Flickr just never figured out what it was for.
I got whiplash from their spastic business decisions. At first it was unlimited storage, and then it became paid storage. It was good for a while and I paid, and then they released the 1TB plan which made my pro plan pointless (and IIRC they promised it’d stay that way forever), so I cancelled the pro plan, and then the next year they reneged and decided to limit the number of photos and started deleting things. Back and forth and back and forth. The end result is I couldn’t rely on Flickr to keep my pictures or even tell me whether I should pay or not, and if so what for.
The other major issue IMO was back when Flickr suddenly decided that “Flickr is for photos” and started actively blacklisting all artwork from search, with no clear definition of the lines between all the massive gray areas this idea opens up, like manually modified photos, digitally modified photos, photos of art, and pure art. I was using Flickr for both pure photos, and mixed photo-art, and pure art. Having a bunch of my images pulled down with very poor justification was pretty demotivating.
I don’t think UI/UX is in the top 3 reasons why I stopped actively using Flickr.
I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Not so much as a CEO or Product Designer.
I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google.
In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.
>I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google.
This is exactly right, and it perfectly highlights the dilemma of Yahoo that made it an unwinnable battle. "Being a media company" would have been a real answer, and a real decision that gave Yahoo a spirit and a direction, and it would have been a declaration that is really true to the soul of Yahoo. However, a media company is just a bad thing to be, and competing with Google was a losing battle.
Probably one of the biggest pieces of revisionist history out there today is that the decline of Yahoo was due to personal mismanagement from Marissa Mayer, when the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline, which was an impossible task. Once that reality is acknowledged, debate will ensue that tries to split the difference about how much is column a, how much is column b, but its beside the point when you step back and realize that Yahoo had fundamental challenges that transcended the tenure of any particular CEO.
I've said it before, but I think that if there were any masterstroke Yahoo could have made to revitalize the company, to accomplish what Google could not, Yahoo really could have successfully launched a social network to compete with Facebook. People had been loyal to Yahoo for decades, plus it had some superstar properties like Tumblr, Flickr and Delicious, along with what might be termed its "legacy" properties like Groups, Answers and their massive email userbase. By contrast Google didn't have anything that behaved like a true organic, living and breathing social network when it launched Plus (well, with the exception of Reader). The puzzle pieces were there.
I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Yahoo was racing downhill before Mayer was even considered for the CEO role there. I am doubtful anyone could have reversed Yahoo’s fortune. At least when Steve Jobs showed up to save Apple they had a core competency. Frankly Yahoo didn’t.
Yahoo failed to capitalize on search until Google was entrenched. They failed to invest properly in targeted advertising until Google owned that as well. They sat on strategic investments like Flickr until they were nearly dead. They could have sold to Ballmer’s Microsoft for an unjustifiable fortune and somehow they fucked that up, too. They could have bought Google for change and said no.
Yahoo lucked into success. It was literally started as a list of links. They realized people would pay a fortune for banner ads and raked in money hand over first until competent competitors appeared. They started Yahoo Mail which was a great idea but then made it feel low quality by sticking ads in outgoing email and then again just let it sit and rot. They bought a corporate mail app and then just sat on it, too. They didn’t even use it internally. Yahoo managed to treat every market opportunity the way Microsoft treated the post-iPhone mobile market.
I worked at Yahoo during part of this decline. The frustrating thing was that Yahoo couldn’t decide what they were. They kept calling themselves a media company but that didn’t seem to mean anything. They didn’t have a plan to really grow their media presence and they were investing crazy in rebuilding an ad system that they couldn’t convince people to switch to.
When Mayer came on board, lots of people (online at least) claimed that her real job was just to find an acquirer. That might not be far from the truth.
The previous CEOs were also paid to do that job, so yes, it’s extremely strange when people point to Mayer as the problem with Yahoo and not, say, Koogle or Semel, who presided over a decade of bad decisions.
It’s like Mayer was brought in to manage a burning building and everyone acts like she’s incompetent because the fire department couldn’t save what was left.
(P.S. Microsoft was not actually in decline under Ballmer by sane metrics. Microsoft revenue had been climbing consistently. Stock was flat for a very long time though.)
That's an ok eli5 explainer of what a CEO is, but the positions of Microsoft and Yahoo are not remotely analogous, and the blame of Marissa Meyer flies in the face of any kind of appropriate portionality or historical context.
I guess the part where I agree with you is the implicit acknowledgment that blame is merely a function of the job title, and not in any way correlated with any rational analysis of whether those expectations are realistic or accurate reflections of causality.
Marissa Meyer's name is indelibly linked to the Flickr fail. She promoted herself as a UX expert, then "improved" Flickr and ended up f??king it up.
Excerpt from NYT story: “My focus at Google has been to deliver great end-user experiences, to delight and inspire our end users,” Ms. Mayer said in an interview. “That is what I plan to do at Yahoo, give the end user something valuable and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.”
I'm just going to note that, as pointed out by the other person, this interpretation is riddled with misinterpretations of the articles, and it's elevating this in a way that's out of proportion to the broader structural forces that led to Yahoo's decline. And, again, the analogy to Microsoft is confused and incorrect, and, again, your comments below suggest that attribution of failure is a function of business norms and not any underlying logic that would satisfy any rational evaluation.
So, it's a good exercise in the confused and incoherent attempts to blame Marissa Mayer in particular for Yahoo's decline.
Right. Imagine if a large passenger jet loses all 4 engines at cruising altitude and then the rudder also stops working. The plane starts gliding toward the ground and the pilot is having no luck at getting it flying again. The pilot finally gives up and says “I can’t fly this thing” and walks away (or is told to walk away). The same thing happens with the copilot. The passengers then select a couple of other passengers with flight experience but they also can’t steer the thing meaningfully. Meanwhile the plane is still rapidly falling out of the sky.
Finally the passengers ask who else is willing to try. Someone steps forward and says, “I can do it. I’ve got experience with engine maintenance.” That person tries and fails to restart the engines and ends up crashing the plane into a field.
Who’s responsible for the plane crash? Is it really the last person who tried to pilot the thing? They took over when the plane had already dropped to 3000 feet. Sure, they clearly failed at the job of flying the heap of busted scrap metal. Maybe they also made a mistake by focusing on engine #3 when engine #4 was more promising in hindsight. But also they stepped in to fly a plane that was about to crash. A crash was the expected outcome at that point by anyone with a clue. It’s wrong to pin it all on them just because they were the last to try. Especially when one of the previous pilots turned down an offer from a huge passing airship to safely bring everyone on board. And maybe that last person is a really incompetent pilot. I’m just not sure how you establish that from what happened here.
(Can you tell that Mayer is the final pilot and Yang turned down the airship offer? It’s some subtle metaphor I’ve got going here.)
Flickr had already failed before Mayer ever showed up at Yahoo. They pretty much ignored it after the purchase aside from forcing yahoo logins.
Mayer’s failure with Flickr is the same as SmugMug’s: an inability to revive a dying product. At least she tried. But also Flickr was hardly the biggest problem at Yahoo.
There are no participation trophies in business. This isn't kindergarten. Before spending shareholder's money on an expensive project she should have checked if it makes sense to spend money on it. If she made the wrong call she alone is responsible for the mistake.
> They pretty much ignored it after the purchase aside from forcing yahoo logins.
Not true. They fully revamped the user experience, and Marissa Mayer was actively involved in the project.
> Before spending shareholder's money on an expensive project she should have checked if it makes sense to spend money on it.
What’s your experience turning failing businesses around? I’m not a huge fan but I find it conspicuous how successfully the CEOs who created the mess have shifted the blame to the one who was hired to fix what was known to be a failing business at the time.
> There are no participation trophies in business. This isn't kindergarten.
Thanks for the regurgitated platitudes. Your stern appraisal of CEOs is duly noted.
> Before spending shareholder's money on an expensive project she should have checked if it makes sense to spend money on it. If she made the wrong call she alone is responsible for the mistake.
On what basis do you assume Flickr’s revamp was an expensive project? I have no idea what it really cost, but to a multi-billion dollar company, I doubt it was really that much.
Sure, she owns the failed revamp though.
> Not true. They fully revamped the user experience, and Marissa Mayer was actively involved in the project.
“They” referred to the company prior to Mayer becoming CEO. Yahoo owned Flickr for 7 years before Mayer took over. Flickr felt stagnant for most of that time.
It’s really weird to be ratholing on Flickr as if it was the reason for Yahoo failing. If Mayer had ignored Flickr like the previous 2 CEOs, Yahoo would have failed just as surely and Flickr’s decline would have been just as rapid.
> It’s really weird to be ratholing on Flickr as if it was the reason for Yahoo failing.
Flickr is the topic of this thread. I don't think Flickr is the reason Yahoo failed, but I do think Marissa Mayer hastened Flickr's demise, and I do believe Ms Mayer's incompetence was the reason Yahoo couldn't be turned around. If you believe Ms Mayer was brought in to "manage a burning building" as opposed to turning it around, please read this story:
It’s really not. Flickr was already circling the drain like the rest of Yahoo. Mayer’s revamp failed but it’s not why block Yahoo failed. It’s not even why Flickr failed. Your pinning of the broader Flickr failure on Mayer is revisionist. The whole reason it needed a revamp was because was already dying.
> Flickr is the topic of this thread.
It wasn’t the topic of the comment I replied to from glenstein. We had a whole sub thread about Yahoo in general.
> I don't think Flickr is the reason Yahoo failed, but I do think Marissa Mayer hastened Flickr's demise, and I do believe Ms Mayer's incompetence was the reason Yahoo couldn't be turned around. If you believe Ms Mayer was brought in to "manage a burning building" as opposed to turning it around, please read this story:
There’s something really off about claiming that Mayer hastened the demise of Yahoo! and then linking to an article essentially saying she should have gutted it sooner.
(Maybe there was something buried at the bottom? I stopped reading because it was all old and well worn.)
Sorry I wasn't clear. COO not in terms of traditional Operation and company structure. But in terms of startup /company hierarchy, as the 2nd person in charge like Tim Cook in Apple and Sheryl Sandberg in Facebook. To Quote Sheryl
>“He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much,” Sandberg said of the 2007 meeting that lasted several hours with the chief operating officer of Apple Inc.
“That was his job with Steve (Jobs). And he explained that the job would change over time and I should be prepared for that.”
Marissa shares many similar traits as Tim Cook. Although she seems to be extremely ambitious which might limit the number of CEO she is willing to serve.
The same thing that happened to JC Penney (Ron Johnson). Buying a big name that was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea for the right company doesn't mean you magically get their success.
JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down.
Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store.
There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segment (how much customers are willing/able to spend).
Macy's seemed to slide significantly downmarket over the last few decades. I feel like, growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a place where they weren't, it was seen as an upper-tier product, a notch below Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, but decidedly fancier than Penney's or Sears. Then they either went acquisition-mad, or started rebranding other stores they owned (not sure which) because a local chain became Macy's, and it never lived up to that hype.
Now they're doing their own take on Kohl's Kash, which just screams "premium retail experience."
All a reflection of widening income/wealth gaps (but also technology consolidating many businesses). Macys used to have a purpose for middle class, but as fortunes have diverged, we are left with Nordstroms serving the 80th to 95th percentile, and then Macys and the rest fighting to retain market share of the bottom 4 quintiles that have been losing purchasing power.
Probably an acquisition. In 2005, Macy's bought May Department Stores, which owned a large number of regional department stores. May liked letting each chain have their own identity, but Macy's just wanted everything in their business to bear the Macy's name, so after the May acquisition closed storied brands such as Marshall Field's, Foley's, and Robinsons-May disappeared off the face of the Earth.
It used to be well organised grid-ordered thumbnails (regularly displayed even when from different aspect ratios) on a white background that made picture stand out, with titles and descriptions as first citizens. Ipernity (http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot) kept more or less that appearance, if you want to see).
Then in 2012 or 2013, they 'modernised' it into the current one: glued pictures with almost no separation and 100% screen occupation making an irregular patchwork; no title/description if you don't hover, I guess to accommodate a growing number of people who dumped their memory card without captioning their photos, and often without sorting them.
I think this gets at an insightful issue - In Flickr's heyday, much of its userbase was professional, aspiring, and amateur photographers who were effectively power users. They viewed Flickr as something like an extension of Lightroom, so they used it for storage but also curated their public profile, lists, etc in a sort of proto-Instagram way.
When Flickr repositioned post Yahoo acquisition, it felt like it was aiming for more of a Google Photos-type use-case that was very passive and "it just works", which felt very different from how it had been popular before. I think history bears out that this was a poor decision, we don't really have major players now that glue those styles of usage together like Flickr did. I think it just required a higher level of effort in both the software and the users, and once Flickr pushed away the audience that enjoyed that level of effort to try to acquire a more set-and-forget audience it lost the first and failed to appeal much to the second.
I think the old core Flickr userbase often went to 500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days.
I was actually surprised looking at it myself, I've never been a 500px user but have been linked to it before. It seems like they did a pretty big redesign in the last couple of years and... now push NFTs. Swell.
Yes. They also introduced infinite scrolling which meant that you could no longer jump to see the early part (or first photo) of a photostream (your own or anyone else's)
That and the attempt to introduce social media aspects: you got notifications that said 'here are some people you might know'. Which I never did. If they said 'here are some photographers whose work you might like' it would have been closer to the original intent.
Lots of annoyances like these drove me away from the site, and I never went back (or renewed my pro membership). Over time, they gradually undid the worst changes, but it was too late by then.
One thing that I did take away, though, was my Flickr username [0], which got repurposed for HN :-)
Truthfully, as a user, I like the patchwork approach, or maybe have gotten used to it due to others sites using a similar design (DeviantArt, 500px). Without text and border I find pictures stand out more. But they could've kept the old one as an option. Also having an option for always active title/description in the new one would've been nice.
I know it's unhealthy, but I harbor a fantasy in which the modest and user-loving folks from SmugMug[0] pivot Flickr into an all-encompassing portal system a la iMode[1] and drive the productivity vampire Slack[2] out of business, ideally leaving Mr Butterfield a few dollars shy of gull-wing doors[3].
Can confirm that SmugMug and Flickr people love their users and customers. Every single person I interacted with during my time there cared a great deal about the people and photos the service supported. Most people there were into photography themselves as well at some level (personally or professionally).
Correct and afaik it still is. There were also a few families that had multiple family members working there. It was (and presumably still is) exceptionally family friendly. Even by Bay Area tech standards.
After all this time, money, and engineering talent, they lack basic features like "Give me a URL to all the photos I (or any user) have tagged with X" that flickr has pretty much had since the neolithic era. Instagram is still basically a toy app that was lucky enough not to be mismanaged to death. Current flickr management has done what they can, but as a product flickr missed out because Yahoo never met a good idea that they didn't fail to execute on.
They aren't behind. They don't need it. Why bother maintaining another app when almost all the intended audience is on iPhone and the app (albeit simulated and not with a great experience) works on iPad anyway.
A lot of people are blaming Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, changing pricing, missing the boat on mobile, but I'm not convinced the model would have ever worked.
I don't see a specific period of time mentioned in the article which was the death blow for myself and a lot of colleagues; at one point in time instead of restricting it to amount, they restricted access to original size uploads on free accounts. Not just to viewers but content owners as well.
There was a mad scramble of script writing to get all your originals downloaded before the magic cutoff date (I have some laying around somewhere), it was one of my first interactions with python if i recall correctly. People such as myself were naive and had only Flickr storing all our originals - this was our storage method.
It was at that point we all moved on to whatever else having had the scare of using the service in our minds, leaving the friends who had Pro accounts (you could gift them to people back then, it was neat) stranded without an audience. Probably Instagram, back in the beginning IG prided themselves on iPhone-only high quality (no web, no Android) which was sort of the what Flickr Pro users were using anyways.
It seems to me that it's comparing apples and oranges. I use Instagram because everybody else uses Instagram. I use Flickr, because I'm into photography and I don't mean Iphone or Android photography. I mean photography in general.
Instagram is a mobile app. End of story. There is some web/desktop whatever, but it's a joke. I do most of the image manipulation on my laptop/desktop, so I want something that works there. I want to share a full sized result, not a 1080px preview. Mobile app is a welcomed bonus.
Instagram is not a site for photographers. It's an image centric social network. Photographers can use it to reach wider audience, but besides that it has zero features geared towards photography as such. It works for exactly 3 (yes, three!) image sizes and doesn't even show EXIF data.
Flickr was perfectly fine for years after the Yahoo! buyout that really made no change besides mandating the usage of a Yahoo! account to log in. I still have my Yahoo! email used just for that (unlike then-competitor hotmail, Yahoo! accounts didn't self-destruct after two weeks of inactivity).
> Flickr was perfectly fine for years after the Yahoo! buyout that really made no change besides mandating the usage of a Yahoo! account to log in
> The real damage came later.
That was the real damage: once Yahoo! bought them, things stagnated except for when they made it worse. The rest of the market didn't stand still while they were by all accounts fighting internal political battles.
I am a paying Flickr customer but only begrudgingly so. Part of it is that Flickr lives in a somewhat weird no-mans land where it is bad for photographers but also bad for casual users.
As a casual user to drop my photos anywhere Google Photos is just so much better. It identifies people and things pretty well, the upload is extremely well integrated into my phone and it is absolutely a no-brainer to have stuff there. Flickr's Android app is slow and clunky, for many years it was extremely bad at actually loading images (taking forever) and is missing all the features.
As a pro-user it is missing customizability that I could have a "professional profile" and it seems all the good and useful organizational features are in a different UI that's legacy and hasn't been updated ever since I started using the site (no new UI but also zero new features).
The whole "deleting photos" thing is also quite bad. While I obviously understand that SmugMug had to pull the rug because they can't bleed money like Yahoo was obviously doing it just left a bad taste in my mouth and the improvements that they did is mostly "look we made a movie". Which is fine and all and there's space for that for sure but maybe also improve the site?
I would like to like Flickr much more than I do. It feels like it had so much potential and a good community but now it is entirely a ghost town where you post to groups only to have comments show up saying "seen in group XYZ". There's still some extremely good photography on Flickr and it is not quite overrun my trends as Instagram seems to be but ehhh, I just wish it wouldn't be so unpleasant.
I remember Flickr was tremendously popular. It has everything going for it. Anecdotally, one year my wife asked for a paid membership - that indicated to me that they were doing something right as my wife was pretty hesitant to spend money on a service like that.
I recall they sort of stopped developing and enhancing it. It died on the vine from neglect. I do recall when Yahoo bought it there was some talk of “fixing Flickr” but I don’t think it ever happened.
I can't login to Flickr anymore. I tried my Yahoo account (just used for Flickr) but I'm I a loop. Flickr was, perhaps, where it all started with "social photo sharing" and I liked it. Last time I remember, my photos had over 10Million views.
I did do a Takeout but I like to still own my account there.
I used to give out a lot of Pro memberships to people, mostly students and early aspiring photographers, during the early days.
flickr has a great API.
I am using the flickr API to manage my photography portfolio website. I can organize everything (uploading, naming, ordering, etc.) using the flickr album tools and then just pull it into my site.
Having been a pro user of Flickr (a group of work colleagues suggested I look into it) for years the site Flickr continues to be "happening" for me; given this site link: http://flickr.kaivong.com.
The (techspot.com) headline... as ever, a good one! Though, I'm not one of those users at tech spot? However they are power-users of images -pictures (right?).
The cookies on Flickr? Given theres many other links for photography. Offering different directions for keeping your photography (personal or otherwise). For the best photographers? Be careful out there... it is photography!
Note: Techspot is a leading technology publication established in 1998.
I've seen a few new photo hosting applications creep up now and then in recent HN threads like this, but none have really hit the spot for me. I take photos as a hobby, nothing too serious, mainly if the weather is nice or we're on vacation. I have a Fujifilm X100F and an old Canon DSLR. I rarely use my Canon.
Fuji strikes a perfect balance between on-camera processing (film simulations), quality and mainly size - that it's become my primary driver. There is a subreddit with a plethora of monotonous, uninteresting images with white boards on reddit at /r/fujix. I miss the diversity and creativity of early flickr.
Google Photos is my go-to nowadays for hosting photos, and sharing with the family. Everyone I know has a google account, and sharing is super easy. Their UI is the best I have ever used - so quick and snappy and probably the most implementation of infinite scroll I've seen. But it's just that - nothing more.
What I really want is something that allows me to do everything. I want to be able to upload my RAW photos and not have to think about it in terms of space or cost (at least not at the current prices). I want to be able to edit them using powerful tools (as in Lightroom or Darktable [my current choice as i refuse to pay for lightroom]) in the same tool I use to upload and manage them. I want to be able to be part of a community of photographers and sharing my photos within that community or namespace/tag should be seamless and I should not have to think too much about the divide between my personal life and my online life. I should be able to really quickly take a family photo album and safely indicate that this is for public consideration outside of that album. I should be able to use machine learning to intelligently and automatically apply a vasty array of tags to my images, only using a cursory glance to validate them. I want it to intelligently classify locations, so if I'm travelling around Austria - I could just say show me photos from west tyrol without needing to enter the exact city or look at some poorly rendered and slow map.
The problem with the current solutions, are the division of tools, the division of disciplines, the cost of storage, the shitty UIs, and the difficulty in creating communities around interests, cameras and/or styles.
I refuse to pay for lightroom. I'd consider their fees if it gave me all I wish :) As it stands now it's software that offers you nothing for a subscription.
Flickr is awesome. As Instagram plays out, Flickr, and those that have paid for it for years, will be rewarded with full control over years and years and years of photos. I have full control of tens of thousands of photos I've taken since I was in high school. I LOVE Flickr. hey have excellent customer support, too. I'm less interested in the community aspect, though that is fun, as just the photo storage and organization product. It is indeed leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
Oh, Flickr. I have good memories created mainly from early communities.
Deleted all my pictures in 2015. Instagram killed photography. Facebook killed forums. Google killed RSS. I expect "web3" to kill the web as we know it.:)
People stopped caring about classical aesthetics and moved their attention towards dopamine hits, social validation tricks and GAS.
So for me photography is dead.
I still care around my Leica's, but nowadays all I look for is to capture some reference images for drawing or painting.
For me photography has been an on and off sort of thing.
I went through a phase prior to 2010 when I was serious about Flickr.
I tried to get back into it but the user interface seemed unacceptably slow on a DSL connection and it wasn't just that "big photos" were involved but some wider kind of bloat.
I got into the "photo sharing" business with my own sites that burned out spectacularly and left me paying AWS bills out of my home equity line of credit. I know a lot of people who crashed and burned with photo sites in that time frame, the real survivors were instagram, snapchat, and pinterest.
I had most of my lenses go bad and was down to just a 20mm prime on my Canon body. I lost interest in photography and when I got it back I couldn't find the body so I thought long and hard before jumping into the Sony mirrorless ecosystem. I got a number of quality zoom lenses, but never got my psychology around taking photographs seriously.
18 months ago I got a "free" inkjet printer and challenged myself to print something every day to keep things drying out. Since then it has been a voyage of discovery more than invention and I progressed from anime fan art to art reproductions to photographs I take myself. The central concept is the "three sided card" which is a physical object that has a "digital twin" on the web. My work is driven by the needs of the system and I've been drawn kicking and screaming into taking pictures again, including all of the subjects I couldn't somehow make myself do.
Has there ever been a postive result for the site being purchased be megaCorp? Sure, the founders make out like bandits, but has it ever been a net positive for the site itself?
I dunno - my experience using Instagram is that it is radically worse these days. The mobile app doesn't show a chronological feed, doesn't even show me everyone I follow, every 7-8th image is a sponsored ad, they relentlessly push reels which I have no interest in watching into my feed, etc. Even the upload process - which was their huge selling point originally - is slowly becoming more frictional.
photo.net is another photo sharing site that really missed the boat. It was basically the Unsplash of the 2000s, with tons of pros and wannabes showcasing their work, but the interface stagnated and I remember that there was violent opposition to allowing resolutions higher than 800x600 or so: all the photographers were petrified that their high-res images would be stolen and used in print ads.
"In 2007, Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded."
Uhm, as far as I remember it, Flickr never surpassed daily actives or daily uploads over DeviantART, not by a long shot. I'm quite sure the photo gallery did considerably more volume than Flickr.
Edit- shouldn't have used never: but in 2007 I don't believe that to be true.
If we have to compare "Flickr" versus "DeviantArt"...
Flickr has the cooler name. It sounds almost old-school camera community, from a place doing mid-price range that you could afford. You know it does a job, posting your level of image in a photo.
DeviantArt has the longer name! Sounds almost naughty, like it is away from any form of school. It has been a long-time since being online there for sharing my amateur level image of art (often computer-game based/almost fan-fiction).
I'd be quite surprised if that was true for the timeframe in question: the total number of images for 2015 were roughly the same as Flickr users had uploaded in a single year 8 years earlier.
One big confound arrived when Flickr started having automatic uploaders which meant that a lot of accounts had every photo someone took on their phone even if most of them never saw much activity. DeviantArt had deliberation in the upload path so I'd expect lower numbers but higher average quality.
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I was keeping a close eye on how we did in terms of web traffic at the time, especially when Flickr showed up on the scene, deviantART was in it's peak in 2005, we'd just released dAmn and started putting ajax on the website in a serious way, and release prints in 2006, I can't believe in 2007 Flickr was doing more volume than DeviantART, but it could be true, and I don't really have a way to know for sure, so for sure an anecdote. I know Chris the CTO at the time kicks around HN, maybe he'll chime in.
I shouldn't have used never, I don't really know what happened after 2011+, but at least I'd be willing to challenge 2007, but only based on my memory.
Edit: Probably another strike against my claim is they said dedicated photo share sites, and dA was an art community, I still suspect the photo gallery at the time was doing more than flickr combined, also, Flickr had it's fair share of Yiffy and Furries during that period.
I was an avid Flickr user before Yahoo seemed to degrade the quality. Specifically for me, many of the groups I was in all of a sudden allowed illustrations as valid photographs. These were NOT photographs....so I moved on from Flickr.
Without Flickr nonprofit advertising work would not be possible for me. Flickr has many users that offer open licensing, it's also used by various government orgs around the world and posts open licensing or public domain works.
One of the lesson learned from "The Innovator's Dilemma" is that a market can be disrupted only when it's overserved.
In 2007 not Flickr was awesome, and it was not the only game in town, there were other (minor) players, we the users had lots of free choices of where to store and share our photos. Crappy opportunity for just another photo service but fertile opportunity for a disruptive company to come in a takes its lunch.
The tldr seems to be that it failed to adapt to the changing user behavior induced by smartphones as massive disruptions in both how content was created and consumed.
>Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.
In other words Unsplash is a creative work donation site. I think this is a very different value proposition than flickr or smugmug.
Somewhere else on unsplash it says:
>Unsplash has quickly become the internet’s source of visuals—powering everything from Apple keynotes to high school Art projects. By contributing your images, you are pushing creativity forward every day.
So it's a website that companies like Apple don't have to pay license fees for images anymore?
"This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service."
This last line is funny, as they only added it later. They have all this fluffy language about how awesome and humanitarian it is when photos are free of rights or restrictions. Except of course when this freedom is used in a way they don't like.
Well basically if you are going to make people pay for a photo storage website with a good visualization but somewhat shitty upload system they are just going to flee to a "general file storage" cloud for the same price with a 'slightly shittier' way of viewing them, such as drive or onedrive.
(Especially if you threaten to delete already existing photos)
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Flickr as a tool is very focused on creators. Once you start using it you realize that the company isn't optimizing for clicks and content consumption. This results in a product and community who’s standard of quality is leagues ahead of anything else one the internet. The idea of “an influence” just doesn’t exist within Flickr. It actually reminds me a lot of the internet before the FAANG monopolies.
They’ve identified a niche in the market and they are now striving to serve that niche the best they can. IMO Flicker is a radical tech company operating complete counter to the omnipresent hyper growth “conquered the world” mindset that pervades tech. I think they would make a good case study of how to build an online community that doesn’t try to optimize for engagement.