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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

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 5y ago
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...
- julius_deane 5y ago
  - reduce freeloading - increase price for paid accounts - focus on serving paid customers > un-sustainable — the orange website
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- muststopmyths 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
  I don't see how your conclusion follows from the text you quoted
- derefr 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- vr46 5y ago
  They said. I never had a single picture removed, going back to 2005.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Just checked. Also still have all my pictures going back to 2004. Glad that this was used only for actual abusers. The website does show me a warning now though.
    - vr46 5y ago
      I couldn't upload more pictures starting more recently, until I was a Pro subscriber again.
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  I was a paying flickr pro customer for years but when they basically tripled the price on me for zero extra service I could no longer afford it. Which sucks, because it was one of the few photo places that actually respected the users a little bit. Now I just don't/can't share photos.
ipaddr 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Founded by the same people who turned a failed video game into Slack.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Discord was an internal comm system for a game studio too
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Conclusion: We, as an industry, should ditch everything else and just throw all our R&D money at video games. (But seriously, whatever pivots most readily and allow fastest development probably is a good point of investment)
      - naravara 5y ago
        Video games now seem to have a lot of the same driving power in tech that porn used to.
  - geef 5y ago
    Instagram was also originally a video game that had a photo sharing feature
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      I think that is misleading. Burbn, the foursquare clone that brcame Instagram, had points —but I don't think a reasonable person would call it a video game. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/instagram-used-to-be-called-brbn/373815/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/insta...
yesimahuman 5y ago
Yea Flickr is awesome. The community is just other people who love photography, nothing more. It’s almost entirely positive and welcoming. The site is also a joy to use. A rarity in today’s social network world.
SilasX 5y ago
It doesn't feel that much different to me. It's bloated with trackware and adware and overclever operability-breaking cruft just like any other site now.
yosito 5y ago
I also moved away from Facebook. Moved my photos to a Photoprism instance on a VPS synced between all my devices with Nextcloud. Couldn't be happier. And I'm not paying Flickr's crazy fee of $60/year just to host some photos.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I'm not sure one could do it in the UK for the equivalent of $60. Does that cost include backups?
  - yosito 5y ago
    I pay quite a bit more than $60 for the VPS, but the point is that I'm paying for a lot more than simple photo storage. $60 a year is a lot just to store my photos.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    VPS? No. "Root" server? Hetzner gives you a range of options for 30 Euro[0], starting with 2TB RAID1 and 16GB RAM. You can do your own backups on a separate hosts for another 30 Euro, and if you ditch RAID there you will have anywhere from 3TB to 6TB of usable space. [0] https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb

ianlevesque 5y ago

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...

julius_deane 5y ago
- reduce freeloading - increase price for paid accounts - focus on serving paid customers > un-sustainable — the orange website
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
muststopmyths 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
I don't see how your conclusion follows from the text you quoted
derefr 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
vr46 5y ago
They said. I never had a single picture removed, going back to 2005.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Just checked. Also still have all my pictures going back to 2004. Glad that this was used only for actual abusers. The website does show me a warning now though.
  - vr46 5y ago
    I couldn't upload more pictures starting more recently, until I was a Pro subscriber again.
boondaburrah 5y ago
I was a paying flickr pro customer for years but when they basically tripled the price on me for zero extra service I could no longer afford it. Which sucks, because it was one of the few photo places that actually respected the users a little bit. Now I just don't/can't share photos.

ipaddr 5y ago

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 5y ago
Founded by the same people who turned a failed video game into Slack.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Discord was an internal comm system for a game studio too
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Conclusion: We, as an industry, should ditch everything else and just throw all our R&D money at video games. (But seriously, whatever pivots most readily and allow fastest development probably is a good point of investment)
    - naravara 5y ago
      Video games now seem to have a lot of the same driving power in tech that porn used to.
- geef 5y ago
  Instagram was also originally a video game that had a photo sharing feature
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I think that is misleading. Burbn, the foursquare clone that brcame Instagram, had points —but I don't think a reasonable person would call it a video game. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/instagram-used-to-be-called-brbn/373815/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/insta...

yesimahuman 5y ago

Yea Flickr is awesome. The community is just other people who love photography, nothing more. It’s almost entirely positive and welcoming. The site is also a joy to use. A rarity in today’s social network world.

SilasX 5y ago

It doesn't feel that much different to me. It's bloated with trackware and adware and overclever operability-breaking cruft just like any other site now.

yosito 5y ago

I also moved away from Facebook. Moved my photos to a Photoprism instance on a VPS synced between all my devices with Nextcloud. Couldn't be happier. And I'm not paying Flickr's crazy fee of $60/year just to host some photos.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I'm not sure one could do it in the UK for the equivalent of $60. Does that cost include backups?
- yosito 5y ago
  I pay quite a bit more than $60 for the VPS, but the point is that I'm paying for a lot more than simple photo storage. $60 a year is a lot just to store my photos.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  VPS? No. "Root" server? Hetzner gives you a range of options for 30 Euro[0], starting with 2TB RAID1 and 16GB RAM. You can do your own backups on a separate hosts for another 30 Euro, and if you ditch RAID there you will have anywhere from 3TB to 6TB of usable space. [0] https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb