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Whatever happened to Flickr?

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Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#171

Post by LilBytes »

0x640x6D wrote: post #170
1024core wrote: post #159

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 fe…

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…

This reads like an episode from Silicon Valley.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#173

Post by glenstein »

petilon wrote: post #145
glenstein wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

> blame is merely a function of the job title 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 somethi…

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#174

Post by ineedasername »

0x640x6D wrote: post #170
1024core wrote: post #159

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 fe…

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…

>El Paso

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?

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#175

Post by thakoppno »

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.

Ross Levinson perhaps?

He was the interim CEO immediately prior to her if I recall correctly.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#176

Post by kelseyfrog »

jfo wrote: post #168
dmd wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great little book, had it recommended to me by a fantastic music teacher of mine in graduate school.

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.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#177

Post by petilon »

dpark wrote: post #166
petilon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least she tried. 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…

> 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 proj…

> Sure, she owns the failed revamp though.

Thank you! That's the most important point.

> 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:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh...

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#178

Post by boondaburrah »

ianlevesque wrote: post #28
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…

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…

I was a paying flickr pro customer for years but when they basically tripled the price on me for zero extra service I could no longer afford it.

Which sucks, because it was one of the few photo places that actually respected the users a little bit. Now I just don't/can't share photos.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#179

Post by dpark »

petilon wrote: post #177
dpark wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 proj…

> Sure, she owns the failed revamp though. Thank you! That's the most important point. > 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…

> Thank you! That's the most important point.

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.)

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#180

Post by YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo »

leoh wrote: post #163
neilk wrote: post #85

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 exac…

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,…

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.
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