What you say doesn't prove that is horrible as a photo site. Yes, you're right, exploring through 'ratings' often leads to garbage if one has some better taste

What you say doesn't prove that is horrible as a photo site. Yes, you're right, exploring through 'ratings' often leads to garbage if one has some better taste in photography, as in most of photo rankings and contests on the web. That doesn't mean that it doesn't meet it's purpose as a photo sharing website. Also, besides it's native explore/search functions there are tools around flickr where you can explore photos through different parameters, try f.ex. using my buddy's tool http://fffflckr.com/ http://fffflckr.com/ it grabs 'favorites of your favorites', it's quite handy and it's easier to find sth you probably will like. I've used their API many times for some experiments, and if you feel you got a way to find great content, it'll be probably very easy to build a tool for that. That's also a great advantage of flickr.