Whatever happened to Flickr? • Hacker News Board

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#131

Post by ghaff » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #102

ghaff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to squint very very hard. 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 Flic…

Flickr had a follow button, and everything revolved around the stream of photos taken by your friends and family. There was even a song written about it! http://rolandtanglao.com/2005/02/12/i-love-my-flickr-friends...

But pre-smartphones, a lot of this was a very different population.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#132

Post by acdha » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #109

ianlevesque wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#133

Post by acdha » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #29

tomcooks wrote: post #25

Yahoo, that's what happened. Yahoo and their stupid Yahoo login.

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). The real damage came later.

> 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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#134

Post by micromacrofoot » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #81

ipaddr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Discord was an internal comm system for a game studio too

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#135

Post by rocqua » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

jcun4128 wrote: post #120

derefr wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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. Or is it just using bandwidth?

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#136

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

grumblepeet wrote: post #61

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…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#137

Post by DonHopkins » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #119

cycomanic wrote: post #84

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…

Smugmug was pretty cool except for the Comic Sans (-ish) logo. That thing was so hideous and amateur many people just didn't take them seriously.

Hey, I shipped a game that used Comic Sans all throughout, and it did ok in spite of the ugly font!

https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/awrb09/just_a_frie...

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.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playd...

It could be worse: Wingdings redrawn in the style of Comic Sans to create the "worst font ever":

https://boingboing.net/2021/12/29/wingdings-redrawn-in-the-s...

"Comic Dings" Font Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATI2q7M_eMU

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#138

Post by fleddr » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:36 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #90

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 crea…

"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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#139

Post by yesimahuman » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#140

Post by KarlKemp » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #59

tjr225 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use Flickr, but iCloud storage is cheaper and more convenient.

The iCloud 2TB plan is $120/yr in the US. Flickr is unlimited for $72/yr. Does iCloud have an API for interacting with your images?

There's PhotoKit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit

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.