[HN Gopher] Whatever happened to Flickr?
___________________________________________________________________
Whatever happened to Flickr?
Author : alok-g
Score : 131 points
Date : 2021-12-27 07:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techspot.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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).
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| dawolf- wrote:
| 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.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Yahoo, that's what happened. Yahoo and their stupid Yahoo login.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| > 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.
| neilk wrote:
| 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.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Hah. Whatever happened to Instagram?
|
| 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.
| myko wrote:
| Instagram still doesn't have an iPad app
|
| Bizarre considering they have some of the finest iOS developers
| in the world
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Talk about razor sharp focus. Maybe that's why they're worth
| billions?
| deanc wrote:
| 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.
| Jenk wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| > _transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even
| attributing the photographers_
|
| I would love to know what you're talking about here.
| rcpt wrote:
| The Yahoo login thing killed me. But I did like the idea of
| "flickr: photo sharing for people who have Yahoo.com email
| addresses"
| petre wrote:
| Death through association.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| They're no longer owned by Yahoo/Oath and are now part of
| SmugMug.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| petre wrote:
| It got ads, aka cancer, which is most cases leads to death. Add
| an annoying UX into the mix, Verizon, Oath and failure to exist
| becomes a reality.
| smm11 wrote:
| Flickr out-Myspaced Myspace.
| ssss11 wrote:
| Yahoo
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Instagram seems to be doing quite well.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| 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.
| ianhawes wrote:
| Github
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Time will tell.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| What's the positive result here?
| neom wrote:
| "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.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I find that hard to believe.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviantArt#cite_ref-34
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr#/media/File:How_many_pu...
|
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| kaichanvong wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I like the map feature. Discovering what's going on at the
| mokent wherever is kinda fun.
| tjr225 wrote:
| I used to use Flickr, but iCloud storage is cheaper and more
| convenient.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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?
| leephillips wrote:
| Do you need to be an Apple citizen?
| colecut wrote:
| Google photos is also pretty cheap and convenient.
| marwis wrote:
| With Google Photos you can't download
| uncompressed/original files and exif location tags are
| always stripped.
| myko wrote:
| > uncompressed/original files
|
| Even with the paid plan? I'm pretty sure I selected an
| "originals" option in Google Photos - do they not
| actually use the originals?
| leephillips wrote:
| Yikes. So it's just, what--some kind of sharing site?
| That makes it useless for backup.
| leephillips wrote:
| Google storage is 2 TB for $100/yr. Flickr is unlimited
| for $72/yr.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I have iCloud storage hooked up to my pc for file syncing,
| so no
| grumblepeet wrote:
| 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.
| greyface- wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
| krallja wrote:
| The lesson here is, if Stewart Butterfield starts another
| MMO, _get on the rocket_.
| soneca wrote:
| But not on the game art or game design department, apply to
| internal tools team.
| ollien wrote:
| Oh man I remember Glitch! I remember waiting for weekends
| where it was up so I could play. I had no idea it pivoted
| into Slack. Thanks for sharing!
| greyface- wrote:
| Never forget that feeling of wonder. :)
|
| RIP Glitch
| Tylast wrote:
| 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.
| severak_cz wrote:
| This is the same problem as with Imgur and it's various clones -
| https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| stemlord wrote:
| 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.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| mikotodomo wrote:
| My parents used flickr. I never found out what it does.
| biztos wrote:
| 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].
|
| [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield
|
| [3]: https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE
| shostack wrote:
| 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).
| mthoms wrote:
| IIRC SmugMug was family owned and run. Perhaps it still is?
| shostack wrote:
| 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.
| mam4 wrote:
| 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)
|
| Source: i moved to onerive in 2019
| leephillips wrote:
| I just took a look at Onedrive. 1TB for $60/year. Flickr is
| unlimited for $72/yr, and has an API and other conveniences
| specialized to images.
|
| > onedrive
| mam4 wrote:
| 6T for 99 dollars with family pack. More than necessary
|
| And its not only images. Images are 20% of my cloud only
| leephillips wrote:
| So you agree that "same price" is incorrect. But, true of
| course, Flickr is just for photographs.
| tandav wrote:
| Cool kids moved from flickr to unsplash
| cycomanic wrote:
| >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?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Well, a credit "would be appreciated", so they're - maybe -
| paying in that most valued of currencies, the "exposure
| buck".
| ringworld wrote:
| 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.
| Jabed30 wrote:
| LeonidasXIV wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| mthoms wrote:
| 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.
| kaichanvong wrote:
| 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.
| epa wrote:
| Marissa Mayer, thats what. [1]
| https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17264274/flickr-smugmug-yahoo-...
| bborud wrote:
| You can blame Marissa Mayer for a lot of things. But Flickr was
| doomed the second they were acquired by Yahoo!.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| > 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.
| dpark wrote:
| > _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.
| bborud wrote:
| This post made me have another look at Flickr, where I have a pro
| account just for the sake of my old images not disappearing.
|
| It just isn't worth what I'm paying. I'm better off setting up my
| own static site.
| petilon wrote:
| 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".
| ksec wrote:
| 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.
| geodel wrote:
| > I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO.
|
| Really? What was her operational expertise?
| ksec wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| >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.
| Lammy wrote:
| > the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project
| was to reverse an existing decline
|
| Also known as the "glass cliff"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| petilon wrote:
| > _I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for
| Yahoo's decline._
|
| Not strange at all. That's literally what a CEO gets paid
| to do: to not be in decline.
|
| Microsoft was in decline when Satya took over too. It is
| no longer in decline. He knows how to do the job, and he
| is doing it.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.)
| objektif wrote:
| It is always the boards fault.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| What's the problem with UX now compared to before?
| wott wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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/
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| 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.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to
| Flickr in the good old days
|
| Hmm... Checking the 500px's homepage and profiles it has
| the 'modernised' points that wott mentions.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| (3) people love to generalize
|
| ;)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| hakfoo wrote:
| 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."
| amyjess wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
|
| Then Instagram happened.
| kaichanvong wrote:
| good point! Instagram happened!
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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
| kaichanvong wrote:
| 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
| simonw wrote:
| Flickr was a mass market social network back in ~2007 if
| you squint at it in the right way.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| But pre-smartphones, a lot of this was a very different
| population.
| et-al wrote:
| 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/
|
| And basically any hobby niche that had any aspect of
| photo documentation probably created a Flickr group.
| Trainspotters, of course. Vintage computers? Sure!
| https://www.flickr.com/groups/vintagecomputers/pool/
|
| These groups were better than anything Instagram has to
| offer because there were lengthy discussions and
| moderation tools. Even today, it's impossible to search
| for a photo using 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 is critical in
| gaining and maintaining market share.
| neilk wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://qr.ae/pGzfWU
|
| https://qr.ae/pGzfWd
|
| 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.
|
| https://qr.ae/pGzfiw
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| pythonic_hell wrote:
| 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.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| 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...
| muststopmyths wrote:
| 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 :-)
| derefr wrote:
| 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.")
| jcun4128 wrote:
| > 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?
| garbagetime wrote:
| I don't see how your conclusion follows from the text you
| quoted
| julius_deane wrote:
| - reduce freeloading
|
| - increase price for paid accounts
|
| - focus on serving paid customers
|
| > un-sustainable
|
| -- the orange website
| [deleted]
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Founded by the same people who turned a failed video game
| into Slack.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I heard Tinder was originally going to be a coupon app before
| they pivoted.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Twitter was a side project that took over the office.
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