16 ms·

How Yahoo Killed Flickr (2012)

238 points by uptown 10y ago

iamthepieman 10y ago
Last time I tried to use Flickr was when they upped (or removed?) their storage limit and I was looking for a way to move several old hard drives worth of photos to the cloud. I couldn't even sign up for a yahoo account because they required a mobile number. Am I the only one without one? I have to imagine they are missing out on a large chunk of people by requiring that but maybe not since Microsoft is the same way when you sign up for Azure. Just tried again and they still require a valid mobile number (not google voice or skype).
- tommoor 10y ago
  People that have an internet connection but no phone number? I think you're in the minority of the minority there.
  - dom0 10y ago
    mobile
  - detaro 10y ago
    Have none? Probably not that many (although Flickr probably is comparatively interesting for a large part of that demographic). Willing to share with a random service on the other hand...
    - criley2 10y ago
      It's a security measure which protects the unlimited storage feature, among other things. What if someone wants to use random burner accounts to store gigabytes of child pornography? That's a lot harder to achieve if they have to buy a burner mobile phone for each account, and each burner phone has the potential to be tracked to the point of sale to use video and other techniques to catch the predator. Mobile number verification is a very cheap and powerful way to cut out the vast majority of bad actors.
      - bigbugbag 10y ago
        Phone number requirements is a very effective tool of surveillance and surveillance capitalism but it's also incredibly effective at keeping potential users out of your business. Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose.
        criley2 10y ago
        "Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose." Sure. Let's see, Facebook requires phone number verification: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net... Facebook is #1 most popular social network. Okay, WhatsApp is #2 service: Requires Phone Number verification Youtube, #3: No phone number verification, service is full of fake accounts, trolling, bigotry, and state propaganda and is seen as one of the worst communities in internet history #4: Facebook Messenger: Phone Number Verification #5: WeChat: Phone Number Verification #6: QQ: Optional phone verification, but operated under am authoritarian government which strictly regulates user bases, use of networks, messages made, etc. (AKA they hire armies of people to manually monitor and police the service) Perhaps I'm failing to see your point...?
  - dorkygator 10y ago
    yahoo doesn't accept voip numbers for signup. I moved my mobile number to a voip provider and got a data only plan because it is way cheaper. I have hit a few roadblocks here and there, but end up saving 50% on my phone bill.
  - iamthepieman 10y ago
    I have a phone number, just not a "mobile" one or whatever that means to yahoo's verification setup.
    - rocky1138 10y ago
      Many telephone companies will read texts aloud if sent to a landline number. Sometimes I text my parents that way.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure the majority on the planet does not have a phone number. Anyways do you think it is a sound business practice to refuse minorities because they are minorities ? Long tail says otherwise. After a few years of having my own internet access I got rid of the now irrelevant phone number, in the recent years it started to become a requirement for surveillance capitalism reasons and services that provide phone numbers for registration or verification started popping up right and left.
    - upvotinglurker 10y ago
      "[World Bank] Report Says 75 Percent Of World's Population Have Mobile Phones" http://www.rferl.org/a/report-says-75-percent-of-worlds-population-have-mobile-phones/24648234.html http://www.rferl.org/a/report-says-75-percent-of-worlds-popu...
- probably_wrong 10y ago
  I have a Flickr account without a phone number, but I've had it for a long time. It's the same with GMail, though, so it's hardly a Yahoo thing.
- wvenable 10y ago
  It doesn't matter if you're not the only one. Somebody did the math and determined that people without mobile numbers weren't worth the support cost. It sucks to be the wrong side of that math but it happens to a lot of people for a lot of different things. Developers tend to try and include everyone but that is often a mistake -- the benefit rarely outweighs the cost.
  - fwn 10y ago
    > Somebody did the math and determined that people without mobile numbers weren't worth the support cost. While I'd normally agree I'm not sure that Yahoos decision making process should be the role model regarding optimizing user growth. Their lack of users was not a minor issue.
  - iamthepieman 10y ago
    Based on this article and the general decline of Flickr's userbase I think it's clear that the math was wrong.
    - wvenable 10y ago
      I highly doubt requiring mobile numbers was the flaw here.
      - bigbugbag 10y ago
        Requiring mobile numbers is still a flaw. Calculation is "make mobile phone number optional and have most of the users refuse to give it away because they know better and miss profit opportunity or make it mandatory and risk having a few fringe users use worthless numbers", so optimal profit per user is the chosen way when the company is driven by maximizing their own profit (actually shareholders) and do not care about people, communities and such.
- jandrese 10y ago
  Did you try putting a landline phone number in? Many times they'll check their database and see that it is a landline and use an automated call system instead of a text. Just don't be on a VOIP connection because that's what spammers use.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    My landline provider is using VoIP and has been for a decade. The good news is that it protects me from having a yahoo, google, facebook or any other accounts with stupid requirements to feed surveillance capitalism.
molecule 10y ago
(2012)
- spcelzrd 10y ago
  For those wondering why a five year old article is on HN today, you can thank Taylor Swift: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/856698334530109440 https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/85669833453010944...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
EGreg 10y ago
I think yahoo lost for a simple reason: it was really hard to make an account. You had to fill out tons of forms. Instead, they should have started with a very lightweight signup process and progressively deepened it as you were pulled back by activities you subscribed to. Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough. YUI and Pipes was great though!
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  > Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough. Not sure if it's ever been fixed but everytime I would go on the App I couldn't find half of the features, like I can join groups, but how do I make one? I could see that I could have family to share pictures with, but how do I add them. Also as many have said, requiring a Yahoo account is a drawback as well.
- toast0 10y ago
  > Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough. Maybe not well enough, but they were certainly early enough; see this press release from 2001 [1], where they were making mobile search available (in 2001, Y! was using Google for search, so don't freak out about that part) As with many things Yahoo, they were there early, put in time and money, saw results that weren't great, so they backed off, and may have come back too late. PS, you can read old Yahoo! news releases to get good ideas for what to do today :) [1] https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=174311 https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=17431...
  - EGreg 10y ago
    I should have said smartphone apps
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Yahoo did not lost, they never even intended to enter the ring if they were aware there was a ring to enter. It's not only yahoo, all the big contenders do this: they buy a smaller but growing or holding interesting/competing asset to kill it, or poach employees or tech. Microsoft and google are notoriously been doing this, this is standard procedure to maintain dominant position and try to mitigate the lack of internal innovation and creativity that comes with being dominant.
roadbeats 10y ago
Del.icio.us and Tumblr is also acquired and killed by Yahoo. Also Geocities, like it's hard to serve some static files.
- dom0 10y ago
  Last time I checked Tumblr was still well and alive with two disjunct communities (tumblr-bullshit-feminism and porn curation).
  - eat_veggies 10y ago
    They also annexed deviant art's fan art/fanfiction community for tv shows and books.
- rubayeet 10y ago
  Del.icio.us was sold to AVOS systems. It changed hand a couple of more times and now owned by an entity called 'Delicious Media'. In its current state, it is almost non-functional. The bookmarklet for tagging links does not work, API and RSS feed are deprecated. I knew it was time to get out when I found the data export function to be broken. I wrote a scraper[1] to get my data out and export to some other service. [1] https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866cfd171 https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866c...
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    Do any bookmarklets for tagging links work anywhere? It seems like most services simple javascript bookmarklets were shut out by increasing security? At least I know the bookmarklet that I used for pinboard became nonfunctional in Firefox then Chrome for example.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      I still use pinboard. Still works fine for me modulo bitrot.
vermontdevil 10y ago
Don't forget Yahoo Pipes. Another great idea killed by Yahoo.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
systems 10y ago
i rely on flickr as my mobile photos backup should i be worried, and look for alternatives i know it is not very social a la instagram and all .. but it is really good to backup and store my photos and share them with family i hope they dont close it
- raamdev 10y ago
  Dropbox also has a pretty good mobile photos backup feature if you're a Dropbox user. My problem hasn't been where to backup photos but how the heck to manage (and make use of) tens of thousands of photos. I mean, 50 years from now when each of us has several hundred thousand photos, what exactly are we going to do with them all? And our children and grandchildren? Those are going to be pretty big (and ever-increasing) photo albums. We need better ways of managing and making use of them. Apple has made good progress here with Moments and facial recognition and grouping by location, but all of that is siloed in Apple's infrastructure.
  - y4mi 10y ago
    google has had the same functionality for years now in their google photos service. they randomly create compilations of your photos (if its enabled) and send you google plus updates like "do you remember that visit to [location] on [date]? we made an album for you!"
  - systems 10y ago
    well lets be realistic tagging is key now facebook has shown us it can automate tagging people at least with face recognition maybe it will be able to auto tag locations ... maybe it already does so the solution will be a combination of 1- discipline, spend the time tagging your own photos (technology can help here by making this task more user friendly and easier) 2- be reasonable, dont take or save 10s of thousands of photos .. learn and accept to delete (again technology can help here by suggesting what to delete , offer you almost identical photos and suggest to delete some) 3- automated tagging 4- skimming, loading and browsing should be super fast to allow photo skimming i dont see solution outside of those 4 elements two rely on you .. manual tagging and deleting (and they can be technology assisted) two rely on technology .. auto tagging and skimming
shawnee_ 10y ago
Recently heard a talk by Thomas Friedman about how the year 2007 was a really interesting "inflection" year wrt all kinds of technology. The cost of making solar panels began to decline sharply in 2007. Airbnb was conceived in 2007 and change.org started in 2007. GitHub, now the world’s largest open-source software sharing library, was opened in 2007. And in 2007 Intel for the first time introduced non-Silicon materials into its microchip transistors, thus extending the duration of Moore’s Law — the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years. As a result, the exponential growth in computing power continues to this day. His talk was basically a rehash of everything he talks about here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in-a-hurricane.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in... Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007. Back when developer conferences were more or less free (for attendees), it hosted the first conference I attended as a newly transplanted person to SF... the "Open Source CMS Summit"... I think I still have some of the stickers it handed out to promote some of its then-recent acquisitions the original article discusses. Yahoo! was kind of one of the first companies to really actively engage and enable external developers (those not employed by Yahoo) as collaborative partners who probably could have helped Yahoo keep its then competitive advantage. Mozilla did this a bit earlier, yes... but not as a publicly-traded company. So part of its demise was due to impatient investors, for sure; however, I think the article makes a good argument for the implications of ignorance when it comes to fostering community. It's now ten years after this inflection point that Friedman talks about; and according to him, it's just getting started.
- dec0dedab0de 10y ago
  Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007 I know nothing about the company, but in ~2003 I remember associating yahoo with elderly people who didn't know how to use their computer. Granted, this could have been a side effect of doing tech support for a dial up ISP.
- jes5199 10y ago
  I agree that 2007 was a big year - that's also when the iPhone first came out. But I don't think "we're just getting started" - I think the opposite, that we've been coasting on the momentum that the innovations of 2007 provided, and we're gradually running out of new ways to use them.
kpennell 10y ago
From the bloody knife pic to the snark...this article lost me at paragraph 1
- zem 10y ago
  it was a very good article, but yes, the bloody knife pic was offputting
yesimahuman 10y ago
Regardless of the missed huge opportunity here, I actually love Flickr the product. It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography. That's not nearly as big of a market as consumer and beyond, but I'm glad Flickr exists as-is.
- acomjean 10y ago
  I still use it. Not enough but occasionally. I do like looking through what the 5 people I "follow" post once and a while. Plus I like the occasionally email that people have posted new photos. Generally I find them strong high quality photos. I find Instagram is more of "I am here" kind of photos.
- ghaff 10y ago
  While I have this nagging feeling that Flickr could have done more, it actually still works pretty well for me for what I use it for. I also can't help feeling that if Flickr/Yahoo! followed the "I coulda been a contender, I coulda been Facebook" advice that a lot of people are peddling, it would probably have crashed and burned and no longer been useful as Flickr.
- munificent 10y ago
  > It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography. 500px replaced Flickr as that for me. I was a long-time Flickr user back in the day because the community aspect helped me become a better photographer. I got feedback from other photographers, and got inspiration from their stuff. Now that Flickr is a ghost town, that aspect is dead. 500px has been a great substitute (though it has some strange biases towards lots of Russian model photography) for that.
patrickaljord 10y ago
Yahoo did not kill Flickr, Facebook did. Turned out the secret sauce to putting photos on the internet was the social interaction with your friends, not a bunch of photograph amateurs obsessed with lens quality (not that there's anything wrong with that), but that's not what regular folks care about and Facebook really took this aspect of the web by storm.
- beedogs 10y ago
  I'd say Instagram did a better job of killing Flickr.
  - nxsynonym 10y ago
    Agree with this. Outside of the normal complaints wedged against Flickr, people moved into a mobile-first world and left Flickr in the dust. If flickr wanted back in the game they'd have to jump in the mobile market and re-design their traditional web platform.
  - pier25 10y ago
    It could argued though that if Yahoo had cared about Flickr it could have become Instagram.
- et-al 10y ago
  > Turned out the secret sauce to putting photos on the internet was the social interaction with your friends Flickr actually did the social aspect well with their communities. What they missed was transitioning this social component to mobile. And the UI change around 2013 where they got rid of the grid layout and moved to some Pintrest collage / infinite scroll ostracized a lot of users.
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    Was there ever a community like, say, Reddit or Facebook Page. Flickr has become just professional photographer's closet. Unless you link the photo on FB/Instagram/Twitter, not that many people would go there to look for photos. Do you go there every time to find a photo? I do go there occasionally to look for open license photos to include in my presentations, but that's about it. Flickr could be made really useful if Yahoo provides a "make a photographer website" with Flickr backing as photo storage backend. Imagine I am looking for a wedding photographer nearby. I need to browse their work, want to know their rates, and even book time. Perhaps also an option to "sell my photo for use" and even a way to search for illegal usage of photo (it is a concern for many professional photographers).
ceejayoz 10y ago
On a related note, the iOS app has basically stopped working. Whatever APIs are driving it behind the scenes seem to be up maybe one out of four days. The rest of the time you just get a spinning icon. Time to move my photos off, I suppose.
whistlerbrk 10y ago
* make it impossible to sign in: check * break the batch uploadr in an effort to quickly release the new UI: check * don't respond to features in Google Photos people care about: check Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked. They concurrently had the new UI and the old one, but most damning of all as another user mentioned was the impossible miserable sign in process.
- randomsofr 10y ago
  Also signup was a pain.
- JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
  I want to use Flickr again but I don't have access to my Hotmail(!) account anymore. I don't even recognize the area code for the number they have on file for me. After exhausting those two options it sends you to the yahoo help website. The first page asks for your yahoo email address. I don't have a yahoo email address and one was never associated with my flickr that I am aware of. I've tried but have no clue how I can access my own photos again. I'm a customer just sitting here begging to use their service again and they don't want me to.
  - jfktrey 10y ago
    To be fair, it seems like it would be very difficult to guarantee you own the account without access to your email or phone number.
    - goldenkey 10y ago
      They wouldn't even give my parents' account back when I offered to send pictures of their drivers license / social security cards / passport in. All because they forgot a dumb "secret answer" question. Yahoo has beyond terrible customer service.
      - cat199 10y ago
scosman 10y ago
Note: this article is from 2012
narrowrail 10y ago
It seems to me that the Yahoo! brand was perceived as destroyed, and simply milked for as much short-term profit as was possible. Security was completely sacrificed, and there was never any vision for building brand loyalty despite having highly-loyal properties (e.g. tumblr/flickr/fantasysports/finance). Long-term value is not built with short-term thinking.
- emmelaich 10y ago
  Yeah, the Yahoo home page reminds me of the old advertisement laden Altavista site. It takes 9 seconds to finished load and always sends my computer fan on.
rs86 10y ago
"Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea." Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?
- ythn 10y ago
  That's an interesting question. I would say that articles are made out of two things: words and spin. The author writes the words, and the words make the reader spin. Words are like a poem; they have to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art...
- claudiulodro 10y ago
  Yep. You get better SEO for lengthier, "more comprehensive" articles and often freelance writers get payed per word.
- mifeng 10y ago
  You're not the target audience for this article. It's the average, non-technical Gizmodo reader. To that person, this paragraph conveys the insight that both code and coders aren't fungible. You'd be surprised how many non-techies believe that they are.
- paulcole 10y ago
  >Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing? You used 2 sentences instead of 1. Why?
  - wmeredith 10y ago
    You took the words right out of my mouth :) > Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing? I also found this amusing.
Lagged2Death 10y ago
I know that "killed" and "murdered" etc. are hyperbole, but I wonder if they might be toxic, bad hyperbole. Flickr is still bigger and more important than anything I'll ever be able to take credit for. Any random reader of this comment will almost certainly have to admit the same. So Flickr is a hit with photo hobbyists, and general-interest snapshot-sharing happens elsewhere. Big deal. That only makes Flickr "dead" if you have a very narrow vision of what it means to run a business, of what it means to succeed.
tedmiston 10y ago
(2012)
tomc1985 10y ago
How is flickr dead? * I still have my 1TB. * I can still upload straight from Lightroom * I can still share private photos with friends via URL, or make them public, or hotlink Seems fine to me.
- Fangatafoa 10y ago
  Myspace isn't dead either. I mean I can log in and there are people on there I'm sure.
  - petre 10y ago
    No it's just much like Detroit, only without criminality.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  it's dead because users have left and eyeballs look the other way. To me flickr died when it made it a pain to download pictures that were displayed right in front of me in my browser, breaking a basic web feature. Never came back.
pwenzel 10y ago
It's 2017 and I still use my Flickr account because I can't find an equivalent service that maintains the level of photo metadata, privacy settings, and archive capability that Flickr does. I have close to 11,000 items personal photos and videos in there (60GB), and it is constantly growing, yet searchable. I also have a myriad of tools to back up my Flickr photos and metadata to Dropbox, which I do periodically. People love to nitpick about it, but I still find Flickr enormously useful, and have been paying for Pro for nearly a decade. I try to be proactive and open to alternative photo services, but migrating to something else at this point seems like be a huge hassle. I wish they didn't have old and new UI mixing though. Yahoo could definitely polish that.
- rhizome 10y ago
  If you want to know how it would feel if it was more consistent, the Flickr (partial) redesign was done by the same guy who did the Chow(hound) most recent redesign. I don't think much of him.
  - acdha 10y ago
    I hesitate to question anyone's abilities before you know what constraints they had to work under. Designers often get the blame for internal management chaos, and a lot of executives feel qualified to make major design decisions.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      A dev and a designer require the same primary quality: being able to manage the scope and the conflicting requests from the environment.
      - acdha 10y ago
        Well, yes, but they also have a job to do. If whoever is in charge mandates something your options may be to do it or find another job, and not everyone is financially comfortable walking away. I'm not saying everything is great, only that it's far more common for something wrong to be explained by factors you aren't aware of than someone to be utterly unqualified to hold their job.
srott 10y ago
I'm curious what was the story of Dabble DB, and why they killed it.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable. "That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn't give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users." It is kind of amazing that it did not occur to them that the users were the one who created this index and would have continued to do so.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  Agreed. The hubris in that statement is almost palpable. They're essentially saying the didn't give a shit about the cause of the result they were buying.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Welcome to humanity. I doubt Facebook cares a lot of its users as well. They are living off the network effects of an incumbent monopoly.
- VT_Drew 10y ago
  Seems very similar to DIGG.com's story.
  - jameskegel 10y ago
    And soon to be Reddit's story with their pending redesign which removes all CSS from subreddits among other things that only serve advertisers rather than the community.
    - bostonvaulter2 10y ago
      What really?!? Completely removing all the sub-reddit CSS will kill so much of the individual subreddit personalities.
Nition 10y ago
This link doesn't seem to work from Australia and New Zealand, it redirects to https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US which is just the main page. For anyone else who can't read it, here's a Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULAztHYJ:gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULA... I'm not sure whether it's intentionally region blocked or if the site is just stupid.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Gizmodo is stupid, and automatic redirect due to localization is even more stupid.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 10y ago
And the question remains, what becomes of Flickr in a post Verizon world?[1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-moves-next-for-flickr https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-mov...
papabrown 10y ago
Way too many examples of this over the years. First one that I can remember off the top of my head was AOL buying Global Network Navigator (GNN). Great resource. AOL took their dial up subscribers and killed the website. Of course, AOL switched it's focus away from dial up once it went unlimited shortly after so the entire acquisition did nothing but to make a valuable resource disappear. AOL and Yahoo have been buying up companies, killing them, and then writing off the losses for years. This spans multiple management teams. It's inbred into the system. It cracks me up that these two companies with years and years worth of fail between them, are somehow going to combine and become a winning organization. Full Disclosure: I worked for a company purchased by AOL in the early 1990's, they immediately came in and ramped it up to about 120 people, and then killed it and fired everyone less than a year later. That one was over an internal power struggle at AOL. One management team loved the idea, bought the company, and then lost political power. His replacement came in and killed everything his predecessor had been working on.
archonics 10y ago
The day I was forced to sign up for a yahoo account was the day they lost me...after finally finding a crappy yahoo user id which was sooo much less cool than my three letter initials flickr id I got when it was in beta, I failed the recatpcha 4 times, cursed them a dozen times, and said goodbye forever.
archonics 10y ago
The day I was forced to sign up for a yahoo account was the day they lost me...after finally finding a crappy yahoo user id which was sooo much less cool than my three letter initials flickr id I got when it was in beta, I failed the recatpcha 4 times, cursed them a dozen times, and said goodbye forever.
sverige 10y ago
Now, can someone please tell me who is fucking up Photobucket? It has been impossible for me to login to my account for a couple of months, even though I know the credentials are correct. I've been using imagen.one instead, but that's not what I would prefer.
fizzychicken 10y ago
I've had a Flickr pro account since 2006. I'm not that into photography, I use it as a means to share pictures with extended family around the world. For that purpose it does pretty much everything I need it to, I don't use any of the 'social' aspects of it. What I do hate is having it tied to a yahoo account which I don't use (other than signing in to flickr) and would rather close, and that downloading a dump of all of my photos for my own backup is not a simple task. If I could find something that would cost me the same amount (30$USD ish per year) that offered the same level of privacy control I would probably switch.
- MrFoof 10y ago
  I believe Smugmug's basic plan may be what you're looking for. They've been around for 15 years (and I believe some of the founder's articles have been on HN), so should be in it for the long haul.
  - fizzychicken 10y ago
    I like what they are doing at that site and some of the options they have available but the ability to use access controls only kicks in at the power user level which is $70 per year and that's a key thing for me.
petre 10y ago
Oh man, they put ads in between my photos. You would see some three photos then an ad. That's when I removed all of my content, my account, everything (try doing that on fb).
yannovitch 10y ago
Well, I agree with lots of the points in the article, but I am one of the user who never used Flickr for their social capabilities, all their groups which could allow you to get discovered by pro photographs, or as a gallery, but mainly for their unlimited storage and their (a bit horrible tbh) api. I am one of these old school guy who still want to believe in the power of the personal website, and so my main tool to convince people to pay me to photograph them for their wedding is still my photography website. With Flickr and a plug-in like Justified Image Gallery for WordPress, I can use Flickr basically as the storage backend for all my pictures (and I still do). As I have dozens of thousands of pictures, it's useful. As such, I don't care that much to have thousands of followers to tell me my photos look beautiful, I know they are. And I don't think personally that to have thousands of subscribers will bring me much more paying opportunities. To be contacted by big firms to do corporate photography requires to put the time and energy to build a much bigger following in the likes of the dozens and dozens of thousands of followers, something I'm just not interested in, I still have a day job after all... But still, what I would have liked with Flickr would have rather be to go much higher end in the pro market. For example, I would have loved to be able to have the equivalent of my lightroom catalog online. I would have loved to be able to upload my raw photographs rather than only jpegs. That would have been a differentiating factor worth a lot to me. I don't care about having a Facebook bis or an instagram bis. And I would have loved to be able to rsync or ftp my pictures, gosh, batch upload or processing is still a pain in the a.

238 points by uptown 10y ago

Last time I tried to use Flickr was when they upped (or removed?) their storage limit and I was looking for a way to move several old hard drives worth of photos to the cloud. I couldn't even sign up for a yahoo account because they required a mobile number. Am I the only one without one? I have to imagine they are missing out on a large chunk of people by requiring that but maybe not since Microsoft is the same way when you sign up for Azure. Just tried again and they still require a valid mobile number (not google voice or skype).

tommoor 10y ago
People that have an internet connection but no phone number? I think you're in the minority of the minority there.
- dom0 10y ago
  mobile
- detaro 10y ago
  Have none? Probably not that many (although Flickr probably is comparatively interesting for a large part of that demographic). Willing to share with a random service on the other hand...
  - criley2 10y ago
    It's a security measure which protects the unlimited storage feature, among other things. What if someone wants to use random burner accounts to store gigabytes of child pornography? That's a lot harder to achieve if they have to buy a burner mobile phone for each account, and each burner phone has the potential to be tracked to the point of sale to use video and other techniques to catch the predator. Mobile number verification is a very cheap and powerful way to cut out the vast majority of bad actors.
    - bigbugbag 10y ago
      Phone number requirements is a very effective tool of surveillance and surveillance capitalism but it's also incredibly effective at keeping potential users out of your business. Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose.
      - criley2 10y ago
        "Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose." Sure. Let's see, Facebook requires phone number verification: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net... Facebook is #1 most popular social network. Okay, WhatsApp is #2 service: Requires Phone Number verification Youtube, #3: No phone number verification, service is full of fake accounts, trolling, bigotry, and state propaganda and is seen as one of the worst communities in internet history #4: Facebook Messenger: Phone Number Verification #5: WeChat: Phone Number Verification #6: QQ: Optional phone verification, but operated under am authoritarian government which strictly regulates user bases, use of networks, messages made, etc. (AKA they hire armies of people to manually monitor and police the service) Perhaps I'm failing to see your point...?
- dorkygator 10y ago
  yahoo doesn't accept voip numbers for signup. I moved my mobile number to a voip provider and got a data only plan because it is way cheaper. I have hit a few roadblocks here and there, but end up saving 50% on my phone bill.
- iamthepieman 10y ago
  I have a phone number, just not a "mobile" one or whatever that means to yahoo's verification setup.
  - rocky1138 10y ago
    Many telephone companies will read texts aloud if sent to a landline number. Sometimes I text my parents that way.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure the majority on the planet does not have a phone number. Anyways do you think it is a sound business practice to refuse minorities because they are minorities ? Long tail says otherwise. After a few years of having my own internet access I got rid of the now irrelevant phone number, in the recent years it started to become a requirement for surveillance capitalism reasons and services that provide phone numbers for registration or verification started popping up right and left.
  - upvotinglurker 10y ago
    "[World Bank] Report Says 75 Percent Of World's Population Have Mobile Phones" http://www.rferl.org/a/report-says-75-percent-of-worlds-population-have-mobile-phones/24648234.html http://www.rferl.org/a/report-says-75-percent-of-worlds-popu...
probably_wrong 10y ago
I have a Flickr account without a phone number, but I've had it for a long time. It's the same with GMail, though, so it's hardly a Yahoo thing.
wvenable 10y ago
It doesn't matter if you're not the only one. Somebody did the math and determined that people without mobile numbers weren't worth the support cost. It sucks to be the wrong side of that math but it happens to a lot of people for a lot of different things. Developers tend to try and include everyone but that is often a mistake -- the benefit rarely outweighs the cost.
- fwn 10y ago
  > Somebody did the math and determined that people without mobile numbers weren't worth the support cost. While I'd normally agree I'm not sure that Yahoos decision making process should be the role model regarding optimizing user growth. Their lack of users was not a minor issue.
- iamthepieman 10y ago
  Based on this article and the general decline of Flickr's userbase I think it's clear that the math was wrong.
  - wvenable 10y ago
    I highly doubt requiring mobile numbers was the flaw here.
    - bigbugbag 10y ago
      Requiring mobile numbers is still a flaw. Calculation is "make mobile phone number optional and have most of the users refuse to give it away because they know better and miss profit opportunity or make it mandatory and risk having a few fringe users use worthless numbers", so optimal profit per user is the chosen way when the company is driven by maximizing their own profit (actually shareholders) and do not care about people, communities and such.
jandrese 10y ago
Did you try putting a landline phone number in? Many times they'll check their database and see that it is a landline and use an automated call system instead of a text. Just don't be on a VOIP connection because that's what spammers use.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  My landline provider is using VoIP and has been for a decade. The good news is that it protects me from having a yahoo, google, facebook or any other accounts with stupid requirements to feed surveillance capitalism.

molecule 10y ago

(2012)

spcelzrd 10y ago
For those wondering why a five year old article is on HN today, you can thank Taylor Swift: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/856698334530109440 https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/85669833453010944...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

EGreg 10y ago

I think yahoo lost for a simple reason: it was really hard to make an account. You had to fill out tons of forms. Instead, they should have started with a very lightweight signup process and progressively deepened it as you were pulled back by activities you subscribed to. Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough. YUI and Pipes was great though!

giancarlostoro 10y ago
> Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough. Not sure if it's ever been fixed but everytime I would go on the App I couldn't find half of the features, like I can join groups, but how do I make one? I could see that I could have family to share pictures with, but how do I add them. Also as many have said, requiring a Yahoo account is a drawback as well.
toast0 10y ago
> Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough. Maybe not well enough, but they were certainly early enough; see this press release from 2001 [1], where they were making mobile search available (in 2001, Y! was using Google for search, so don't freak out about that part) As with many things Yahoo, they were there early, put in time and money, saw results that weren't great, so they backed off, and may have come back too late. PS, you can read old Yahoo! news releases to get good ideas for what to do today :) [1] https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=174311 https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=17431...
- EGreg 10y ago
  I should have said smartphone apps
bigbugbag 10y ago
Yahoo did not lost, they never even intended to enter the ring if they were aware there was a ring to enter. It's not only yahoo, all the big contenders do this: they buy a smaller but growing or holding interesting/competing asset to kill it, or poach employees or tech. Microsoft and google are notoriously been doing this, this is standard procedure to maintain dominant position and try to mitigate the lack of internal innovation and creativity that comes with being dominant.

roadbeats 10y ago

Del.icio.us and Tumblr is also acquired and killed by Yahoo. Also Geocities, like it's hard to serve some static files.

dom0 10y ago
Last time I checked Tumblr was still well and alive with two disjunct communities (tumblr-bullshit-feminism and porn curation).
- eat_veggies 10y ago
  They also annexed deviant art's fan art/fanfiction community for tv shows and books.
rubayeet 10y ago
Del.icio.us was sold to AVOS systems. It changed hand a couple of more times and now owned by an entity called 'Delicious Media'. In its current state, it is almost non-functional. The bookmarklet for tagging links does not work, API and RSS feed are deprecated. I knew it was time to get out when I found the data export function to be broken. I wrote a scraper[1] to get my data out and export to some other service. [1] https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866cfd171 https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866c...
- dv_dt 10y ago
  Do any bookmarklets for tagging links work anywhere? It seems like most services simple javascript bookmarklets were shut out by increasing security? At least I know the bookmarklet that I used for pinboard became nonfunctional in Firefox then Chrome for example.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I still use pinboard. Still works fine for me modulo bitrot.

vermontdevil 10y ago

Don't forget Yahoo Pipes. Another great idea killed by Yahoo.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

systems 10y ago

i rely on flickr as my mobile photos backup should i be worried, and look for alternatives i know it is not very social a la instagram and all .. but it is really good to backup and store my photos and share them with family i hope they dont close it

raamdev 10y ago
Dropbox also has a pretty good mobile photos backup feature if you're a Dropbox user. My problem hasn't been where to backup photos but how the heck to manage (and make use of) tens of thousands of photos. I mean, 50 years from now when each of us has several hundred thousand photos, what exactly are we going to do with them all? And our children and grandchildren? Those are going to be pretty big (and ever-increasing) photo albums. We need better ways of managing and making use of them. Apple has made good progress here with Moments and facial recognition and grouping by location, but all of that is siloed in Apple's infrastructure.
- y4mi 10y ago
  google has had the same functionality for years now in their google photos service. they randomly create compilations of your photos (if its enabled) and send you google plus updates like "do you remember that visit to [location] on [date]? we made an album for you!"
- systems 10y ago
  well lets be realistic tagging is key now facebook has shown us it can automate tagging people at least with face recognition maybe it will be able to auto tag locations ... maybe it already does so the solution will be a combination of 1- discipline, spend the time tagging your own photos (technology can help here by making this task more user friendly and easier) 2- be reasonable, dont take or save 10s of thousands of photos .. learn and accept to delete (again technology can help here by suggesting what to delete , offer you almost identical photos and suggest to delete some) 3- automated tagging 4- skimming, loading and browsing should be super fast to allow photo skimming i dont see solution outside of those 4 elements two rely on you .. manual tagging and deleting (and they can be technology assisted) two rely on technology .. auto tagging and skimming

shawnee_ 10y ago

Recently heard a talk by Thomas Friedman about how the year 2007 was a really interesting "inflection" year wrt all kinds of technology. The cost of making solar panels began to decline sharply in 2007. Airbnb was conceived in 2007 and change.org started in 2007. GitHub, now the world’s largest open-source software sharing library, was opened in 2007. And in 2007 Intel for the first time introduced non-Silicon materials into its microchip transistors, thus extending the duration of Moore’s Law — the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years. As a result, the exponential growth in computing power continues to this day. His talk was basically a rehash of everything he talks about here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in-a-hurricane.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in... Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007. Back when developer conferences were more or less free (for attendees), it hosted the first conference I attended as a newly transplanted person to SF... the "Open Source CMS Summit"... I think I still have some of the stickers it handed out to promote some of its then-recent acquisitions the original article discusses. Yahoo! was kind of one of the first companies to really actively engage and enable external developers (those not employed by Yahoo) as collaborative partners who probably could have helped Yahoo keep its then competitive advantage. Mozilla did this a bit earlier, yes... but not as a publicly-traded company. So part of its demise was due to impatient investors, for sure; however, I think the article makes a good argument for the implications of ignorance when it comes to fostering community. It's now ten years after this inflection point that Friedman talks about; and according to him, it's just getting started.

dec0dedab0de 10y ago
Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007 I know nothing about the company, but in ~2003 I remember associating yahoo with elderly people who didn't know how to use their computer. Granted, this could have been a side effect of doing tech support for a dial up ISP.
jes5199 10y ago
I agree that 2007 was a big year - that's also when the iPhone first came out. But I don't think "we're just getting started" - I think the opposite, that we've been coasting on the momentum that the innovations of 2007 provided, and we're gradually running out of new ways to use them.

kpennell 10y ago

From the bloody knife pic to the snark...this article lost me at paragraph 1

zem 10y ago
it was a very good article, but yes, the bloody knife pic was offputting

yesimahuman 10y ago

Regardless of the missed huge opportunity here, I actually love Flickr the product. It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography. That's not nearly as big of a market as consumer and beyond, but I'm glad Flickr exists as-is.

acomjean 10y ago
I still use it. Not enough but occasionally. I do like looking through what the 5 people I "follow" post once and a while. Plus I like the occasionally email that people have posted new photos. Generally I find them strong high quality photos. I find Instagram is more of "I am here" kind of photos.
ghaff 10y ago
While I have this nagging feeling that Flickr could have done more, it actually still works pretty well for me for what I use it for. I also can't help feeling that if Flickr/Yahoo! followed the "I coulda been a contender, I coulda been Facebook" advice that a lot of people are peddling, it would probably have crashed and burned and no longer been useful as Flickr.
munificent 10y ago
> It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography. 500px replaced Flickr as that for me. I was a long-time Flickr user back in the day because the community aspect helped me become a better photographer. I got feedback from other photographers, and got inspiration from their stuff. Now that Flickr is a ghost town, that aspect is dead. 500px has been a great substitute (though it has some strange biases towards lots of Russian model photography) for that.

patrickaljord 10y ago

Yahoo did not kill Flickr, Facebook did. Turned out the secret sauce to putting photos on the internet was the social interaction with your friends, not a bunch of photograph amateurs obsessed with lens quality (not that there's anything wrong with that), but that's not what regular folks care about and Facebook really took this aspect of the web by storm.

beedogs 10y ago
I'd say Instagram did a better job of killing Flickr.
- nxsynonym 10y ago
  Agree with this. Outside of the normal complaints wedged against Flickr, people moved into a mobile-first world and left Flickr in the dust. If flickr wanted back in the game they'd have to jump in the mobile market and re-design their traditional web platform.
- pier25 10y ago
  It could argued though that if Yahoo had cared about Flickr it could have become Instagram.
et-al 10y ago
> Turned out the secret sauce to putting photos on the internet was the social interaction with your friends Flickr actually did the social aspect well with their communities. What they missed was transitioning this social component to mobile. And the UI change around 2013 where they got rid of the grid layout and moved to some Pintrest collage / infinite scroll ostracized a lot of users.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Was there ever a community like, say, Reddit or Facebook Page. Flickr has become just professional photographer's closet. Unless you link the photo on FB/Instagram/Twitter, not that many people would go there to look for photos. Do you go there every time to find a photo? I do go there occasionally to look for open license photos to include in my presentations, but that's about it. Flickr could be made really useful if Yahoo provides a "make a photographer website" with Flickr backing as photo storage backend. Imagine I am looking for a wedding photographer nearby. I need to browse their work, want to know their rates, and even book time. Perhaps also an option to "sell my photo for use" and even a way to search for illegal usage of photo (it is a concern for many professional photographers).

ceejayoz 10y ago

On a related note, the iOS app has basically stopped working. Whatever APIs are driving it behind the scenes seem to be up maybe one out of four days. The rest of the time you just get a spinning icon. Time to move my photos off, I suppose.

whistlerbrk 10y ago

* make it impossible to sign in: check * break the batch uploadr in an effort to quickly release the new UI: check * don't respond to features in Google Photos people care about: check Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked. They concurrently had the new UI and the old one, but most damning of all as another user mentioned was the impossible miserable sign in process.

randomsofr 10y ago
Also signup was a pain.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
I want to use Flickr again but I don't have access to my Hotmail(!) account anymore. I don't even recognize the area code for the number they have on file for me. After exhausting those two options it sends you to the yahoo help website. The first page asks for your yahoo email address. I don't have a yahoo email address and one was never associated with my flickr that I am aware of. I've tried but have no clue how I can access my own photos again. I'm a customer just sitting here begging to use their service again and they don't want me to.
- jfktrey 10y ago
  To be fair, it seems like it would be very difficult to guarantee you own the account without access to your email or phone number.
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    They wouldn't even give my parents' account back when I offered to send pictures of their drivers license / social security cards / passport in. All because they forgot a dumb "secret answer" question. Yahoo has beyond terrible customer service.
    - cat199 10y ago

scosman 10y ago

Note: this article is from 2012

narrowrail 10y ago

It seems to me that the Yahoo! brand was perceived as destroyed, and simply milked for as much short-term profit as was possible. Security was completely sacrificed, and there was never any vision for building brand loyalty despite having highly-loyal properties (e.g. tumblr/flickr/fantasysports/finance). Long-term value is not built with short-term thinking.

emmelaich 10y ago
Yeah, the Yahoo home page reminds me of the old advertisement laden Altavista site. It takes 9 seconds to finished load and always sends my computer fan on.

rs86 10y ago

"Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea." Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?

ythn 10y ago
That's an interesting question. I would say that articles are made out of two things: words and spin. The author writes the words, and the words make the reader spin. Words are like a poem; they have to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art...
claudiulodro 10y ago
Yep. You get better SEO for lengthier, "more comprehensive" articles and often freelance writers get payed per word.
mifeng 10y ago
You're not the target audience for this article. It's the average, non-technical Gizmodo reader. To that person, this paragraph conveys the insight that both code and coders aren't fungible. You'd be surprised how many non-techies believe that they are.
paulcole 10y ago
>Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing? You used 2 sentences instead of 1. Why?
- wmeredith 10y ago
  You took the words right out of my mouth :) > Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing? I also found this amusing.

Lagged2Death 10y ago

I know that "killed" and "murdered" etc. are hyperbole, but I wonder if they might be toxic, bad hyperbole. Flickr is still bigger and more important than anything I'll ever be able to take credit for. Any random reader of this comment will almost certainly have to admit the same. So Flickr is a hit with photo hobbyists, and general-interest snapshot-sharing happens elsewhere. Big deal. That only makes Flickr "dead" if you have a very narrow vision of what it means to run a business, of what it means to succeed.

tedmiston 10y ago

(2012)

tomc1985 10y ago

How is flickr dead? * I still have my 1TB. * I can still upload straight from Lightroom * I can still share private photos with friends via URL, or make them public, or hotlink Seems fine to me.

Fangatafoa 10y ago
Myspace isn't dead either. I mean I can log in and there are people on there I'm sure.
- petre 10y ago
  No it's just much like Detroit, only without criminality.
bigbugbag 10y ago
it's dead because users have left and eyeballs look the other way. To me flickr died when it made it a pain to download pictures that were displayed right in front of me in my browser, breaking a basic web feature. Never came back.

pwenzel 10y ago

It's 2017 and I still use my Flickr account because I can't find an equivalent service that maintains the level of photo metadata, privacy settings, and archive capability that Flickr does. I have close to 11,000 items personal photos and videos in there (60GB), and it is constantly growing, yet searchable. I also have a myriad of tools to back up my Flickr photos and metadata to Dropbox, which I do periodically. People love to nitpick about it, but I still find Flickr enormously useful, and have been paying for Pro for nearly a decade. I try to be proactive and open to alternative photo services, but migrating to something else at this point seems like be a huge hassle. I wish they didn't have old and new UI mixing though. Yahoo could definitely polish that.

rhizome 10y ago
If you want to know how it would feel if it was more consistent, the Flickr (partial) redesign was done by the same guy who did the Chow(hound) most recent redesign. I don't think much of him.
- acdha 10y ago
  I hesitate to question anyone's abilities before you know what constraints they had to work under. Designers often get the blame for internal management chaos, and a lot of executives feel qualified to make major design decisions.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    A dev and a designer require the same primary quality: being able to manage the scope and the conflicting requests from the environment.
    - acdha 10y ago
      Well, yes, but they also have a job to do. If whoever is in charge mandates something your options may be to do it or find another job, and not everyone is financially comfortable walking away. I'm not saying everything is great, only that it's far more common for something wrong to be explained by factors you aren't aware of than someone to be utterly unqualified to hold their job.

srott 10y ago

I'm curious what was the story of Dabble DB, and why they killed it.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable. "That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn't give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users." It is kind of amazing that it did not occur to them that the users were the one who created this index and would have continued to do so.

wmeredith 10y ago
Agreed. The hubris in that statement is almost palpable. They're essentially saying the didn't give a shit about the cause of the result they were buying.
- devoply 10y ago
  Welcome to humanity. I doubt Facebook cares a lot of its users as well. They are living off the network effects of an incumbent monopoly.
VT_Drew 10y ago
Seems very similar to DIGG.com's story.
- jameskegel 10y ago
  And soon to be Reddit's story with their pending redesign which removes all CSS from subreddits among other things that only serve advertisers rather than the community.
  - bostonvaulter2 10y ago
    What really?!? Completely removing all the sub-reddit CSS will kill so much of the individual subreddit personalities.

Nition 10y ago

This link doesn't seem to work from Australia and New Zealand, it redirects to https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US which is just the main page. For anyone else who can't read it, here's a Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULAztHYJ:gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULA... I'm not sure whether it's intentionally region blocked or if the site is just stupid.

bigbugbag 10y ago
Gizmodo is stupid, and automatic redirect due to localization is even more stupid.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 10y ago

And the question remains, what becomes of Flickr in a post Verizon world?[1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-moves-next-for-flickr https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-mov...

papabrown 10y ago

Way too many examples of this over the years. First one that I can remember off the top of my head was AOL buying Global Network Navigator (GNN). Great resource. AOL took their dial up subscribers and killed the website. Of course, AOL switched it's focus away from dial up once it went unlimited shortly after so the entire acquisition did nothing but to make a valuable resource disappear. AOL and Yahoo have been buying up companies, killing them, and then writing off the losses for years. This spans multiple management teams. It's inbred into the system. It cracks me up that these two companies with years and years worth of fail between them, are somehow going to combine and become a winning organization. Full Disclosure: I worked for a company purchased by AOL in the early 1990's, they immediately came in and ramped it up to about 120 people, and then killed it and fired everyone less than a year later. That one was over an internal power struggle at AOL. One management team loved the idea, bought the company, and then lost political power. His replacement came in and killed everything his predecessor had been working on.

archonics 10y ago

The day I was forced to sign up for a yahoo account was the day they lost me...after finally finding a crappy yahoo user id which was sooo much less cool than my three letter initials flickr id I got when it was in beta, I failed the recatpcha 4 times, cursed them a dozen times, and said goodbye forever.

archonics 10y ago

sverige 10y ago

Now, can someone please tell me who is fucking up Photobucket? It has been impossible for me to login to my account for a couple of months, even though I know the credentials are correct. I've been using imagen.one instead, but that's not what I would prefer.

fizzychicken 10y ago

I've had a Flickr pro account since 2006. I'm not that into photography, I use it as a means to share pictures with extended family around the world. For that purpose it does pretty much everything I need it to, I don't use any of the 'social' aspects of it. What I do hate is having it tied to a yahoo account which I don't use (other than signing in to flickr) and would rather close, and that downloading a dump of all of my photos for my own backup is not a simple task. If I could find something that would cost me the same amount (30$USD ish per year) that offered the same level of privacy control I would probably switch.

MrFoof 10y ago
I believe Smugmug's basic plan may be what you're looking for. They've been around for 15 years (and I believe some of the founder's articles have been on HN), so should be in it for the long haul.
- fizzychicken 10y ago
  I like what they are doing at that site and some of the options they have available but the ability to use access controls only kicks in at the power user level which is $70 per year and that's a key thing for me.

petre 10y ago

Oh man, they put ads in between my photos. You would see some three photos then an ad. That's when I removed all of my content, my account, everything (try doing that on fb).

yannovitch 10y ago

Well, I agree with lots of the points in the article, but I am one of the user who never used Flickr for their social capabilities, all their groups which could allow you to get discovered by pro photographs, or as a gallery, but mainly for their unlimited storage and their (a bit horrible tbh) api. I am one of these old school guy who still want to believe in the power of the personal website, and so my main tool to convince people to pay me to photograph them for their wedding is still my photography website. With Flickr and a plug-in like Justified Image Gallery for WordPress, I can use Flickr basically as the storage backend for all my pictures (and I still do). As I have dozens of thousands of pictures, it's useful. As such, I don't care that much to have thousands of followers to tell me my photos look beautiful, I know they are. And I don't think personally that to have thousands of subscribers will bring me much more paying opportunities. To be contacted by big firms to do corporate photography requires to put the time and energy to build a much bigger following in the likes of the dozens and dozens of thousands of followers, something I'm just not interested in, I still have a day job after all... But still, what I would have liked with Flickr would have rather be to go much higher end in the pro market. For example, I would have loved to be able to have the equivalent of my lightroom catalog online. I would have loved to be able to upload my raw photographs rather than only jpegs. That would have been a differentiating factor worth a lot to me. I don't care about having a Facebook bis or an instagram bis. And I would have loved to be able to rsync or ftp my pictures, gosh, batch upload or processing is still a pain in the a.