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Whatever happened to Flickr?

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Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#81

Post by dr_dshiv »

ipaddr wrote: post #44
pythonic_hell wrote: post #3

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 e…

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.

Founded by the same people who turned a failed video game into Slack.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#82

Post by lotsofpulp »

hakfoo wrote: post #76
lotsofpulp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 segm…

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'…

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#84

Post by cycomanic »

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#85

Post by neilk »

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#86

Post by KineticLensman »

wott wrote: post #38
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with UX now compared to before?

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 se…

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 :-)

[0] https://flickr.com/photos/kinetic-lensman/

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#87

Post by glenstein »

ksec wrote: post #45
petilon wrote: post #19

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 mis…

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#88

Post by Tylast »

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#89

Post by kaichanvong »

simonw wrote: post #17
neom wrote: post #8

"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.

Citation needed on that. Flickr had absolutely explosive growth in the mid-to-late 2000s. DeviantART always struck me as a much more niche community.

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).

Both have communities.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#90

Post by cycomanic »

tandav wrote: post #83

Cool kids moved from flickr to unsplash

>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?

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