7 ms·

Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff

203 points by alexleavitt 15y ago

thomasgerbe 15y ago
Why? Flickr is one of last Yahoo products people I know sometimes still use. Facebook does a poor job at retaining high res pictures, few non-photographer friends use 500px, G+ doesn't have as much control, and Instagram is only for specific mobile photos.
- ja27 15y ago
  It's the only Yahoo product I've spent a dime on. In fact, except for Netflix, I've spent more on Flickr than any other online service and I'm a cheap bastard. That said, I did downgrade and stop paying them last year.
  - ja27 15y ago
    I guess I should say that the reason I gave up on them is because of their layoffs and stagnation. I lost faith in their ability to survive.
- haunted 15y ago
  You've summed up the alternatives pretty well. I wanted to move from Flickr to 500px, but I feel like my Hipstamatic snapshots simply don't belong there, considering the caliber of talent on display there. I ended up settling for Instagram, even though I'm not too big on it.
- sp332 15y ago
  I can strongly recommend Smugmug as a Flickr replacement. $40/year for unlimited photo storage and bandwidth. They handle high-res photos at full resolution, and their thumbnails are less fuzzy than Facebook. (Actually you can change the amount of sharpening on a per-gallery basis, and the default is a good start.)
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    Smugmug is only a viable replacement for Flickr if your content stays within their absurdly strict and conservative acceptable content policy. I've photographed a lot of burlesque events, and although none of the photos contain overt nudity, the mere presence of a breast with nipple concealed is enough to get your photos summarily removed by Smugmug's staff.
    - sp332 15y ago
      Ah, interesting. I've never tried it, but that's good to know.
      - msbarnett 15y ago
        It's tragic in that they otherwise have a very nice service and I would very much welcome the ability to give them my money; they're taking themselves out of the running for rather a lot of photographers.
    - gatlin 15y ago
      Maybe that's true for public photos; I know of a photographer who frequently snaps shots of wild and crazy college-town happenings and from my inspection, by your rules she should have been canned a few hundred times now.
      - sp332 15y ago
        I checked, it is in their Terms of Use http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/terms http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/terms A. General Terms 13. User Content a. User Content that is... obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually suggestive... including without limitation Photos, Videos or other User Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
- webwanderings 15y ago
  Flickr is not the only last Yahoo product, people still use Yahoogroups (I do) and it seems to be working...on autopilot may be!
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  Flickr is good, I agree (speaking as someone with two separate personal pro accounts) but I think Yahoo has more in the arsenal than that. I recently returned to Yahoo Mail after a long absence, and to be honest, I like it. Honestly, for me I genuinely prefer it to GMail which just feels clunky in comparison now. Yahoo may have a rather chequered management history with these products, but the actual products themselves (in these two cases as the ones I actually use) remain good IMHO.
  - ilamont 15y ago
    Long-time Yahoo mail user here (it's actually hard for me to admit this; I've noticed in software/tech circles that Yahoo increasingly has a stigma attached to it, not unlike AOL in '90s.) Anyway, one big difference I notice with Gmail and Yahoo mail is Google actively develops and improves the parts of the service that is visible to users. Every few months there is a significant update (recent ones that come to mind: G+ integration, new inbox design, some new templates, etc.). Yahoo mail not only fails to add/integrate new services, it doesn't even bother with basic tweaks that it can see over on the competition (Gmail). For instance, Gmail has this very prominent and useful feature: "Always show images from xyz@blah.com". Yahoo mail? It's still on a message-by-message basis. It's irritating, but also kind of sad -- Yahoo has a popular service that's still used by millions of people, but doesn't seem to care. The same can be said about Flickr, too.
    - eftpotrm 15y ago
      Yeah, I'll give GMail that. Yahoo's image handling does seem a little hit and miss - I've got some senders to always show, somehow, but it's not as good. But every time I use GMail now I find myself using keyboard shortcuts from Yahoo and wondering why they don't work. The interface jusst seems ugly and crude. Filtering I don't find as good - sorry, I've tried their labelling system, I disagree it's better and the setup interface is poor. I've noticed the spam folder grabs a lot more false positives, too. GMail is good, sure, but I odn't in any way regard it as a stand-out leader. Yahoo Mail may not be improving as fast as we'd like but it's frankly still a very good product.
mtjl79 15y ago
It's called a "sandwich". It's the right move to make, emotions aside. Squeeze from top and bottom, and the middle goes. The middle is where you can make most improvements and cut costs in organizations. That is where most improvement is made fastest FYI. It's where you start. Higher and lower levels stay - while the middle layer is squeezed and improved first. Sometimes that means layoffs.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - 54mf 15y ago
    I think you got downvoted because, while it may be a standard move, it's a very, very foolish one.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - mtjl79 15y ago
      Sometimes, you need to cut off an arm to save a body. And how do you or I know it is foolish or not? This is one persons opinion. Do you have their financials to look through? Do you really know why pink slips were given? How do you know Yahoo! isn't preparing Flickr for sale and trying to clean up balance sheet? I don't. A huge culture loss absolutely, I agree.
      - r00fus 15y ago
        > Sometimes, you need to cut off an arm to save a body. Why not sell the arm (more like tentacle)? Flickr has a huge fanbase and great street cred, if it's not sustainable to keep it, why not sell it? The only answer I can think of is that the tough decisions are not being made.... what's being decided is how to keep the cash flow going until the inevitable external acquisition, mining brand value. I've lived in this kind of corporate mentality. Expect Yahoo to be sold soon - just wonder who's buying.
Volscio 15y ago
Flickr deadpool?
ja27 15y ago
This post makes an important general point. Developers and management don't appreciate and respect upper-tier support people nearly enough.
chrismealy 15y ago
If you have photos on flickr, get them off NOW.
- jlarocco 15y ago
  That was the first thing to pop into my mind. The second thing was dread. I have 7700+ photos on Flickr, and they're all 3648x2736 and 4272x2848. I can't imagine transferring to something else not being a giant hassle. Anybody know a good replacement service with import from Flickr?
  - creativityhurts 15y ago
    You can export them with this Python script http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/ http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/ or with Bulkr (paid version)
    - cadab 15y ago
      just tried that script and all the images it downloaded couldnt be viewed. Anyone else tried it? or have an alternative?
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - cadab 15y ago
        I ended up modifying the script where it saves the image, added an issue to the git hub page.
    - joelhooks 15y ago
      I paid the $30 for Bulkr Pro, and am currently grabbing all my photos for migration to OpenPhoto (with my own s3 account).
      - jmathai 15y ago
ghshephard 15y ago
Reading between the lines, it sounds like there is outsourcing of Flickr customer support to (presumably lower paid) third-party (or possibly off-shored) These sentences from the post, in particular, caught my attention: "Not only do you have the patience of a saint (imagine getting asked the same 3 questions, 50 times a day, every day)" " You literally can't buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can." Sounds like these were Tier-1 support people (or worse, Tier 2/3 support people doing Tier-1 jobs) For a company in Yahoo's position, In-house Tier-1 support is a luxury they can't afford. And, while I don't mean to sound insensitive - a well educated/technical team can come up to speed pretty quickly - within a period of a few weeks, on Tier-1 issues. You work hard to hold onto your Engineering-Support (the people that are familiar with the code base) - but the "Same 3 questions, 50 times a day" skill set can be bought/outsourced. You can't help but empathize with the people being let go - it sucks to be Riffed. But, if the rumors that I'm hearing from inside Y! are accurate - this is just the first in a big string of layoff notices we'll be hearing about in the next several weeks from Sunnyvale.
- martey 15y ago
  The essay explicitly seems to suggest that are not Tier 1 support: "Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members." Not knowing how Yahoo! structures its support personnel, I assume that the "highest level" is not also Tier 1, although I could be wrong. Still, I think the rest of the essay is more of a general paean to website customer support people, and has less to do with the specifics of Flickr.
- Isofarro 15y ago
  Yahoo has only two main approaches to dealing with user-generated content moderation: * a Bayesian filter based moderation engine. Requires loads of resources, political clout to convince the product owner of that system to allocate resources to your own property, and a long lead time to train the filters. Not much scope to adjust the filters * A "customer complaint" mechanism (flag this comment type links), that go to a customer service centre (in the Phillipines, I think), and they endeavour to look at complaints, and potentially do something within 24 to 48 hours. Editors on typical Yahoo properties are reminded that they themselves are not allowed to delete or remove comments from the site since that exposes Yahoo to accusations of censorship. Although, a number of editors and engineers quietly ignore that decree and try to clean up their properties individually. Neither of these options are workable. I've not seen a successful case study of the filter approach, and we've all seen what happens with the 24/48 hour response time of the first party support - the trolls and the spam stay around, and only get cleaned out (if they ever are) way after the topicality of the thread has finished. Yahoo News continues to suffer horribly with these methods. Out of all Yahoo properties, only Flickr seem to have had a handle on community moderation. They were the leading light on that during my time at Yahoo. Yahoo simply does not understand the nature of community and believes that moderation can just be automatically applied. It's not an organisation geared towards providing a human face. Flickr has always been the exception here, showing the value that can be achieved by human empowered community nurturing. Sadly, no more.
aresant 15y ago
I would love to see a Flickr balance sheet. "Where good companies go to die" is the story of most acquisitions but Flickr still feels like it has great potential. Why don't big companies figure out a "entrepreneurial outreach" program or something - stick in a good driver with a big incentive for turning around, or carve out as independent similar to Reddit in Conde?
- harryf 15y ago
  A little story about Flickr... I work for a local search engine in Switzerland - http://www.local.ch http://www.local.ch Back in 2007 we were really interested in integrating content from flickr in much the same way as Panoramio is on Google Maps. Interested enough to pay reasonable license or usage fees. But as it clearly states here http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ (not much has changed since 2007) > The Flickr API is available for non-commercial use by outside developers. Commercial use is possible by prior arrangement. Although we weren't going to make money with it _directly_, we are a for-profit business, and having content from flickr would have made us more attractive to users. So we followed the official procedure to request use for the API for commercial reasons - http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html > Currently, commercial use of the API is allowed only with prior permission. Requests for API keys intended for commercial use are reviewed by staff. If your project is personal, artistic, free or otherwise non-commercial please don't request a commercial key. If your project is commercial, please provide sufficient detail to help us decide. Thanks! We did, carefully describing what we wanted to use it for. Reaction: zero. Nothing. Not even an automated acknowledgement. And OK if we _really_ _really_ wanted their content, we would have found someone who knows someone but it wasn't _that_ important to us - it was just a nice feature we wanted to add part of our site. But that's not the point... Building revenue streams around flickr is a no-brainer. They could provide channels, complete with payment, to help photographers sell their content or in crowdsourcing; commission work via flickr "I want pictures of all the storefronts in the high street of this town". But if you ignore the people trying to give you their money...
  - bradly 15y ago
iskander 15y ago
Like several other people here, flickr is one of the few web services I pay for. It's hard to imagine that it's not profitable. So why does Yahoo treat it so poorly?
- haunted 15y ago
  Maybe they simply don't consider it profitable enough? Flickr's done a remarkably bad job with taking advantage of the exploding popularity of mobile photography. The iPhone is the most-used camera on Flickr, yet their iOS app is mediocre. Instagram ate their lunch and they don't even seem to care.
  - leoedin 15y ago
    If they'd innovated when they really were at the peak of photo sharing (2007 maybe), then they could have easily captured those markets. As it is, nothing about flickr has changed in 5 years. That's a generation in internet terms. I couldn't find an exact number, but any user of Facebook knows that they've had at least 3 or 4 major facelifts in that time, along with a number of smaller component changes. Flickr had the market, but was killed by a lack of innovation. In the vein of many tech acquisitions, it was probably caused by politics.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      It's a bit cynical, but as a Flickr user I'm somewhat happy that it's stayed the same over the past 5 years, because I'd give it a 90% chance that if Yahoo had initiated a major overhall, they would've screwed up something major that I liked/used.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    Or it is a cash cow and we are funding the rest of the crappy empire. Time to stop subscribing I think.
georgieporgie 15y ago
I subscribed to Flickr for three or four years. I think it's the only Internet service I've ever paid for. I stopped paying because I realized that 1) my friends only check Facebook anyway and 2) they did nothing to improve the site or tools in the years I subscribed. They rewrote the Flickr Uploadr and made it into a buggy, crashing, unbelievably slow POS. It reeked of "I want to try this!" (XUL, I believe) instead of solid engineering and innovative design.
aristus 15y ago
I used to sit next to those folks. Salt of the earth. WTF, Yahoo. They made Flickr human.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  > Salt of the earth. What does this expression mean?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - mixmastamyk 15y ago
    salt of the earth - noun, an individual or group considered as representative of the best or noblest elements of society. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/salt+of+the+earth http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/salt+of+the+earth
dmethvin 15y ago
> When sites get larger, both in members and staff, the gap tends to grow between the people that build the site and the people that use it. If you want to know why products slowly degrade and eventually die, that is the best answer you will ever find. Developers need to have input from real-life users in order to make the product better. Jobs was right to say that "people don't know what they want", but they surely know what bothers them about the products and services they use.
isaacbowen 15y ago
So not to overtly threadjack, but I built https://secure.fracken.com/ https://secure.fracken.com/ as a lifeline for anyone who feels the need to jump ship from Flickr - sends everything to Dropbox, first 100 photos are free, everything else is a flat USD$1/batch. It's an MVP, but it works. Seemed apropos.
- latchkey 15y ago
  While I appreciate what you've done here, it doesn't solve the real problem that I think that most people would have. Downloading the files is easy. The real issue is putting them up somewhere else. If your system moved them from Flickr to say, G+, then I'd pay you money. Otherwise, I don't see the purpose of this service as dropbox is more expensive than Flickr for storage and doesn't really have the same hosting options.
  - isaacbowen 15y ago
    It exists solely for the transition - if Flickr's the only source for these photos, then (assuming you have a sufficiently hefty Dropbox account) this tool will at least get those files safely back in your hands. What you do with them afterwards is of course up to you, but this wasn't intended to solve a migration problem.
    - latchkey 15y ago
      Transition to what? What problem does this product solve?
      - brlewis 15y ago
        The photo-sharing site I made, OurDoings, will pull photos from a shared Dropbox folder and delete them after posting, allowing you not to be limited by your Dropbox quota. Hopefully someday lots of photo-sharing sites will have this option.
danso 15y ago
I'm a pretty big Flickr user, but out of all the online services I've used, it is one of the most un-innovative. Very little has changed since I signed up for Pro 2 years ago. Given Yahoo's other problems, this is only a sign for the worse.
- danso 15y ago
  For anyone in my predicament, here's a handy comparison guide I found while looking for an alternative: http://aaronhockley.com/photo-sharing-comparison-2012/ http://aaronhockley.com/photo-sharing-comparison-2012/ 500px is looking pretty though I wish it had a mobile app for uploading...the lack of geotagging is also annoying. G+ also seems nice. Might as well throw everything in my uber-online presence...
  - kmfrk 15y ago
    If you are looking to just host your own and don't feel the need to directly interact in a community, OpenPhoto looks really interesting: http://theopenphotoproject.org/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/. I've thought about rolling my own and using it as an opportunity to learn rails, because these things are so simple to do nowadays, but OpenPhoto looks like an interesting offering.
koevet 15y ago
Flickr "added value" lies in its huge community of photographers, the forums, the favorites and the comments. I could move my shots from Flickr to any other service tomorrow but it will take a very long time to reboot the community. This is actually very sad and I hope this does not mean the beginning of the end for Flickr,
arctangent 15y ago
I was a very active participant in the GNE [1] project created by the Ludicorp team before they went on to make Flickr and followed their progress closely for a while. They sold to Yahoo for what would probably pass as a pittance these days - I seem to recall a figure of $30m being mentioned. Things didn't go so great after that. Yahoo botched it, as they have often seemed to do. It was always obvious to me that Flickr (publicly) died the day Stewart Butterfield handed in a resignation letter written in his typically eccentric style [2]. Stewart and some of the original GNE/Flickr team have a new project called Glitch [3] now. Not my cup of tea, but I wish them the best. [1] http://www.gnespy.com/museum/ http://www.gnespy.com/museum/ [2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-resignation-letter http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-res... [3] http://www.glitch.com/ http://www.glitch.com/
four12 15y ago
I have looked at several other photo hosting services (Smugmug, Zenfolio, 500px, etc.) and while they all do a competent job at hosting photos, it is the communities that have developed on Flickr that I would miss. Yes, other sites have their own communities, but leaving one for another is like moving to a strange new town that you don't know anybody in.
alecco 15y ago
With webhosting at 10 bucks per month i don't see the need.
chucklarge 15y ago
Etsy would be very happy to hear from any of these folks. Reach out to us or me.
- earl 15y ago
  chuck: fyi, your email address is not public. You have to copy it into the about area if you want other users to be able to see it. Other than that, AFAIK HN has no way to contact users.
- timcederman 15y ago
  For other HN folks, why the interest from Etsy - I know of at least 2 ex-Flickr folks who've gone to Etsy (including Kellan, Flickr's architect).
geneticmaterial 15y ago
i really wish flickr would get bought off of yahoo by google. i enjoy its interface.
- Drbble 15y ago
  First thing Google would do is ruin the UI in the name of "unification" with Plus. Second thing they would do is kill off all the nonfree features and support only the ad-supported use case. Third thing they would do is congratulate the exec who eliminated customer service staff.
X-Istence 15y ago
I just re-upped my subscription for another two years. Hope I don't regret that.
monkeypizza 15y ago
flickr has added almost nothing new in about 5 years. However, I use it more than ever - with autopager it's incredible. I also wrote a greasemonkey script which replaces the default size image with the large size image on page load (and removes spaceball.gif). It's way better. They should implement autopager in js and leave it on by default for the entire site - I bet total photo views would go up 50% permanently. From places where flickr is slow, this makes the site way, way more usable. The community is incredible, and they have huge followings all over the world - you can easily stumble into really active nonenglish groups. I wonder if they ever realize how many people use the service. Regarding keys, I once wrote a client which downloaded about 60m full size images over about 2 years for a job. All on a non-commercial key. We kept roughly within the usage limits, and they never seemed to notice. The change I remember from the past few years was that they changed the photostream navigation tool on the right side of a photo - now, it remembers where you came from, and that controls which one is open by default. So if you were browsing someone's favorites, the navigator for the favorites will be open (even though you already saw that thumbnail on the previous page). In the past version, the photostream of the person's page you were on was always open no matter where you came from. Now, you are always a click away from seeing even the next photo's thumbnail. This is a bad change for me, cause I always use tabs to browse flickr anyway, and so I just came from a screen containing all the favorite thumbnails. Now, you often end up on someone's photostream, with no other of their thumbnails displayed.
hellweaver666 15y ago
I've been a Flickr Pro user for a number of years now, but this year I didn't renew my subscription. The reason was that I realised, I didn't need all the social crap that goes with Flickr. If I want to share photos for viewing with my friends and Family it pretty much happens on Facebook now as they don't 'get' Flickr. I still needed somewhere to backup photos online however (because I'm paranoid like that), so I jumped on the SnapJoy Beta the day they announced it and I'm getting on with them quite well at the moment. It'd be nice if they had some kind of Facebook integration so I could share photos straight from SnapJoy to FB without having to upload them twice but I can live without that at the moment as long as I know my photos are safe.

203 points by alexleavitt 15y ago

Why? Flickr is one of last Yahoo products people I know sometimes still use. Facebook does a poor job at retaining high res pictures, few non-photographer friends use 500px, G+ doesn't have as much control, and Instagram is only for specific mobile photos.

ja27 15y ago
It's the only Yahoo product I've spent a dime on. In fact, except for Netflix, I've spent more on Flickr than any other online service and I'm a cheap bastard. That said, I did downgrade and stop paying them last year.
- ja27 15y ago
  I guess I should say that the reason I gave up on them is because of their layoffs and stagnation. I lost faith in their ability to survive.
haunted 15y ago
You've summed up the alternatives pretty well. I wanted to move from Flickr to 500px, but I feel like my Hipstamatic snapshots simply don't belong there, considering the caliber of talent on display there. I ended up settling for Instagram, even though I'm not too big on it.
sp332 15y ago
I can strongly recommend Smugmug as a Flickr replacement. $40/year for unlimited photo storage and bandwidth. They handle high-res photos at full resolution, and their thumbnails are less fuzzy than Facebook. (Actually you can change the amount of sharpening on a per-gallery basis, and the default is a good start.)
- msbarnett 15y ago
  Smugmug is only a viable replacement for Flickr if your content stays within their absurdly strict and conservative acceptable content policy. I've photographed a lot of burlesque events, and although none of the photos contain overt nudity, the mere presence of a breast with nipple concealed is enough to get your photos summarily removed by Smugmug's staff.
  - sp332 15y ago
    Ah, interesting. I've never tried it, but that's good to know.
    - msbarnett 15y ago
      It's tragic in that they otherwise have a very nice service and I would very much welcome the ability to give them my money; they're taking themselves out of the running for rather a lot of photographers.
  - gatlin 15y ago
    Maybe that's true for public photos; I know of a photographer who frequently snaps shots of wild and crazy college-town happenings and from my inspection, by your rules she should have been canned a few hundred times now.
    - sp332 15y ago
      I checked, it is in their Terms of Use http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/terms http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/terms A. General Terms 13. User Content a. User Content that is... obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually suggestive... including without limitation Photos, Videos or other User Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
webwanderings 15y ago
Flickr is not the only last Yahoo product, people still use Yahoogroups (I do) and it seems to be working...on autopilot may be!
eftpotrm 15y ago
Flickr is good, I agree (speaking as someone with two separate personal pro accounts) but I think Yahoo has more in the arsenal than that. I recently returned to Yahoo Mail after a long absence, and to be honest, I like it. Honestly, for me I genuinely prefer it to GMail which just feels clunky in comparison now. Yahoo may have a rather chequered management history with these products, but the actual products themselves (in these two cases as the ones I actually use) remain good IMHO.
- ilamont 15y ago
  Long-time Yahoo mail user here (it's actually hard for me to admit this; I've noticed in software/tech circles that Yahoo increasingly has a stigma attached to it, not unlike AOL in '90s.) Anyway, one big difference I notice with Gmail and Yahoo mail is Google actively develops and improves the parts of the service that is visible to users. Every few months there is a significant update (recent ones that come to mind: G+ integration, new inbox design, some new templates, etc.). Yahoo mail not only fails to add/integrate new services, it doesn't even bother with basic tweaks that it can see over on the competition (Gmail). For instance, Gmail has this very prominent and useful feature: "Always show images from xyz@blah.com". Yahoo mail? It's still on a message-by-message basis. It's irritating, but also kind of sad -- Yahoo has a popular service that's still used by millions of people, but doesn't seem to care. The same can be said about Flickr, too.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    Yeah, I'll give GMail that. Yahoo's image handling does seem a little hit and miss - I've got some senders to always show, somehow, but it's not as good. But every time I use GMail now I find myself using keyboard shortcuts from Yahoo and wondering why they don't work. The interface jusst seems ugly and crude. Filtering I don't find as good - sorry, I've tried their labelling system, I disagree it's better and the setup interface is poor. I've noticed the spam folder grabs a lot more false positives, too. GMail is good, sure, but I odn't in any way regard it as a stand-out leader. Yahoo Mail may not be improving as fast as we'd like but it's frankly still a very good product.

mtjl79 15y ago

It's called a "sandwich". It's the right move to make, emotions aside. Squeeze from top and bottom, and the middle goes. The middle is where you can make most improvements and cut costs in organizations. That is where most improvement is made fastest FYI. It's where you start. Higher and lower levels stay - while the middle layer is squeezed and improved first. Sometimes that means layoffs.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- 54mf 15y ago
  I think you got downvoted because, while it may be a standard move, it's a very, very foolish one.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - mtjl79 15y ago
    Sometimes, you need to cut off an arm to save a body. And how do you or I know it is foolish or not? This is one persons opinion. Do you have their financials to look through? Do you really know why pink slips were given? How do you know Yahoo! isn't preparing Flickr for sale and trying to clean up balance sheet? I don't. A huge culture loss absolutely, I agree.
    - r00fus 15y ago
      > Sometimes, you need to cut off an arm to save a body. Why not sell the arm (more like tentacle)? Flickr has a huge fanbase and great street cred, if it's not sustainable to keep it, why not sell it? The only answer I can think of is that the tough decisions are not being made.... what's being decided is how to keep the cash flow going until the inevitable external acquisition, mining brand value. I've lived in this kind of corporate mentality. Expect Yahoo to be sold soon - just wonder who's buying.

Volscio 15y ago

Flickr deadpool?

ja27 15y ago

This post makes an important general point. Developers and management don't appreciate and respect upper-tier support people nearly enough.

chrismealy 15y ago

If you have photos on flickr, get them off NOW.

jlarocco 15y ago
That was the first thing to pop into my mind. The second thing was dread. I have 7700+ photos on Flickr, and they're all 3648x2736 and 4272x2848. I can't imagine transferring to something else not being a giant hassle. Anybody know a good replacement service with import from Flickr?
- creativityhurts 15y ago
  You can export them with this Python script http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/ http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/ or with Bulkr (paid version)
  - cadab 15y ago
    just tried that script and all the images it downloaded couldnt be viewed. Anyone else tried it? or have an alternative?
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - cadab 15y ago
      I ended up modifying the script where it saves the image, added an issue to the git hub page.
  - joelhooks 15y ago
    I paid the $30 for Bulkr Pro, and am currently grabbing all my photos for migration to OpenPhoto (with my own s3 account).
    - jmathai 15y ago

ghshephard 15y ago

Reading between the lines, it sounds like there is outsourcing of Flickr customer support to (presumably lower paid) third-party (or possibly off-shored) These sentences from the post, in particular, caught my attention: "Not only do you have the patience of a saint (imagine getting asked the same 3 questions, 50 times a day, every day)" " You literally can't buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can." Sounds like these were Tier-1 support people (or worse, Tier 2/3 support people doing Tier-1 jobs) For a company in Yahoo's position, In-house Tier-1 support is a luxury they can't afford. And, while I don't mean to sound insensitive - a well educated/technical team can come up to speed pretty quickly - within a period of a few weeks, on Tier-1 issues. You work hard to hold onto your Engineering-Support (the people that are familiar with the code base) - but the "Same 3 questions, 50 times a day" skill set can be bought/outsourced. You can't help but empathize with the people being let go - it sucks to be Riffed. But, if the rumors that I'm hearing from inside Y! are accurate - this is just the first in a big string of layoff notices we'll be hearing about in the next several weeks from Sunnyvale.

martey 15y ago
The essay explicitly seems to suggest that are not Tier 1 support: "Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members." Not knowing how Yahoo! structures its support personnel, I assume that the "highest level" is not also Tier 1, although I could be wrong. Still, I think the rest of the essay is more of a general paean to website customer support people, and has less to do with the specifics of Flickr.
Isofarro 15y ago
Yahoo has only two main approaches to dealing with user-generated content moderation: * a Bayesian filter based moderation engine. Requires loads of resources, political clout to convince the product owner of that system to allocate resources to your own property, and a long lead time to train the filters. Not much scope to adjust the filters * A "customer complaint" mechanism (flag this comment type links), that go to a customer service centre (in the Phillipines, I think), and they endeavour to look at complaints, and potentially do something within 24 to 48 hours. Editors on typical Yahoo properties are reminded that they themselves are not allowed to delete or remove comments from the site since that exposes Yahoo to accusations of censorship. Although, a number of editors and engineers quietly ignore that decree and try to clean up their properties individually. Neither of these options are workable. I've not seen a successful case study of the filter approach, and we've all seen what happens with the 24/48 hour response time of the first party support - the trolls and the spam stay around, and only get cleaned out (if they ever are) way after the topicality of the thread has finished. Yahoo News continues to suffer horribly with these methods. Out of all Yahoo properties, only Flickr seem to have had a handle on community moderation. They were the leading light on that during my time at Yahoo. Yahoo simply does not understand the nature of community and believes that moderation can just be automatically applied. It's not an organisation geared towards providing a human face. Flickr has always been the exception here, showing the value that can be achieved by human empowered community nurturing. Sadly, no more.

aresant 15y ago

I would love to see a Flickr balance sheet. "Where good companies go to die" is the story of most acquisitions but Flickr still feels like it has great potential. Why don't big companies figure out a "entrepreneurial outreach" program or something - stick in a good driver with a big incentive for turning around, or carve out as independent similar to Reddit in Conde?

harryf 15y ago
A little story about Flickr... I work for a local search engine in Switzerland - http://www.local.ch http://www.local.ch Back in 2007 we were really interested in integrating content from flickr in much the same way as Panoramio is on Google Maps. Interested enough to pay reasonable license or usage fees. But as it clearly states here http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ (not much has changed since 2007) > The Flickr API is available for non-commercial use by outside developers. Commercial use is possible by prior arrangement. Although we weren't going to make money with it _directly_, we are a for-profit business, and having content from flickr would have made us more attractive to users. So we followed the official procedure to request use for the API for commercial reasons - http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html > Currently, commercial use of the API is allowed only with prior permission. Requests for API keys intended for commercial use are reviewed by staff. If your project is personal, artistic, free or otherwise non-commercial please don't request a commercial key. If your project is commercial, please provide sufficient detail to help us decide. Thanks! We did, carefully describing what we wanted to use it for. Reaction: zero. Nothing. Not even an automated acknowledgement. And OK if we _really_ _really_ wanted their content, we would have found someone who knows someone but it wasn't _that_ important to us - it was just a nice feature we wanted to add part of our site. But that's not the point... Building revenue streams around flickr is a no-brainer. They could provide channels, complete with payment, to help photographers sell their content or in crowdsourcing; commission work via flickr "I want pictures of all the storefronts in the high street of this town". But if you ignore the people trying to give you their money...
- bradly 15y ago

iskander 15y ago

Like several other people here, flickr is one of the few web services I pay for. It's hard to imagine that it's not profitable. So why does Yahoo treat it so poorly?

haunted 15y ago
Maybe they simply don't consider it profitable enough? Flickr's done a remarkably bad job with taking advantage of the exploding popularity of mobile photography. The iPhone is the most-used camera on Flickr, yet their iOS app is mediocre. Instagram ate their lunch and they don't even seem to care.
- leoedin 15y ago
  If they'd innovated when they really were at the peak of photo sharing (2007 maybe), then they could have easily captured those markets. As it is, nothing about flickr has changed in 5 years. That's a generation in internet terms. I couldn't find an exact number, but any user of Facebook knows that they've had at least 3 or 4 major facelifts in that time, along with a number of smaller component changes. Flickr had the market, but was killed by a lack of innovation. In the vein of many tech acquisitions, it was probably caused by politics.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    It's a bit cynical, but as a Flickr user I'm somewhat happy that it's stayed the same over the past 5 years, because I'd give it a 90% chance that if Yahoo had initiated a major overhall, they would've screwed up something major that I liked/used.
- justincormack 15y ago
  Or it is a cash cow and we are funding the rest of the crappy empire. Time to stop subscribing I think.

georgieporgie 15y ago

I subscribed to Flickr for three or four years. I think it's the only Internet service I've ever paid for. I stopped paying because I realized that 1) my friends only check Facebook anyway and 2) they did nothing to improve the site or tools in the years I subscribed. They rewrote the Flickr Uploadr and made it into a buggy, crashing, unbelievably slow POS. It reeked of "I want to try this!" (XUL, I believe) instead of solid engineering and innovative design.

aristus 15y ago

I used to sit next to those folks. Salt of the earth. WTF, Yahoo. They made Flickr human.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
> Salt of the earth. What does this expression mean?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  salt of the earth - noun, an individual or group considered as representative of the best or noblest elements of society. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/salt+of+the+earth http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/salt+of+the+earth

dmethvin 15y ago

> When sites get larger, both in members and staff, the gap tends to grow between the people that build the site and the people that use it. If you want to know why products slowly degrade and eventually die, that is the best answer you will ever find. Developers need to have input from real-life users in order to make the product better. Jobs was right to say that "people don't know what they want", but they surely know what bothers them about the products and services they use.

isaacbowen 15y ago

So not to overtly threadjack, but I built https://secure.fracken.com/ https://secure.fracken.com/ as a lifeline for anyone who feels the need to jump ship from Flickr - sends everything to Dropbox, first 100 photos are free, everything else is a flat USD$1/batch. It's an MVP, but it works. Seemed apropos.

latchkey 15y ago
While I appreciate what you've done here, it doesn't solve the real problem that I think that most people would have. Downloading the files is easy. The real issue is putting them up somewhere else. If your system moved them from Flickr to say, G+, then I'd pay you money. Otherwise, I don't see the purpose of this service as dropbox is more expensive than Flickr for storage and doesn't really have the same hosting options.
- isaacbowen 15y ago
  It exists solely for the transition - if Flickr's the only source for these photos, then (assuming you have a sufficiently hefty Dropbox account) this tool will at least get those files safely back in your hands. What you do with them afterwards is of course up to you, but this wasn't intended to solve a migration problem.
  - latchkey 15y ago
    Transition to what? What problem does this product solve?
    - brlewis 15y ago
      The photo-sharing site I made, OurDoings, will pull photos from a shared Dropbox folder and delete them after posting, allowing you not to be limited by your Dropbox quota. Hopefully someday lots of photo-sharing sites will have this option.

danso 15y ago

I'm a pretty big Flickr user, but out of all the online services I've used, it is one of the most un-innovative. Very little has changed since I signed up for Pro 2 years ago. Given Yahoo's other problems, this is only a sign for the worse.

danso 15y ago
For anyone in my predicament, here's a handy comparison guide I found while looking for an alternative: http://aaronhockley.com/photo-sharing-comparison-2012/ http://aaronhockley.com/photo-sharing-comparison-2012/ 500px is looking pretty though I wish it had a mobile app for uploading...the lack of geotagging is also annoying. G+ also seems nice. Might as well throw everything in my uber-online presence...
- kmfrk 15y ago
  If you are looking to just host your own and don't feel the need to directly interact in a community, OpenPhoto looks really interesting: http://theopenphotoproject.org/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/. I've thought about rolling my own and using it as an opportunity to learn rails, because these things are so simple to do nowadays, but OpenPhoto looks like an interesting offering.

koevet 15y ago

Flickr "added value" lies in its huge community of photographers, the forums, the favorites and the comments. I could move my shots from Flickr to any other service tomorrow but it will take a very long time to reboot the community. This is actually very sad and I hope this does not mean the beginning of the end for Flickr,

arctangent 15y ago

I was a very active participant in the GNE [1] project created by the Ludicorp team before they went on to make Flickr and followed their progress closely for a while. They sold to Yahoo for what would probably pass as a pittance these days - I seem to recall a figure of $30m being mentioned. Things didn't go so great after that. Yahoo botched it, as they have often seemed to do. It was always obvious to me that Flickr (publicly) died the day Stewart Butterfield handed in a resignation letter written in his typically eccentric style [2]. Stewart and some of the original GNE/Flickr team have a new project called Glitch [3] now. Not my cup of tea, but I wish them the best. [1] http://www.gnespy.com/museum/ http://www.gnespy.com/museum/ [2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-resignation-letter http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-res... [3] http://www.glitch.com/ http://www.glitch.com/

four12 15y ago

I have looked at several other photo hosting services (Smugmug, Zenfolio, 500px, etc.) and while they all do a competent job at hosting photos, it is the communities that have developed on Flickr that I would miss. Yes, other sites have their own communities, but leaving one for another is like moving to a strange new town that you don't know anybody in.

alecco 15y ago

With webhosting at 10 bucks per month i don't see the need.

chucklarge 15y ago

Etsy would be very happy to hear from any of these folks. Reach out to us or me.

earl 15y ago
chuck: fyi, your email address is not public. You have to copy it into the about area if you want other users to be able to see it. Other than that, AFAIK HN has no way to contact users.
timcederman 15y ago
For other HN folks, why the interest from Etsy - I know of at least 2 ex-Flickr folks who've gone to Etsy (including Kellan, Flickr's architect).

geneticmaterial 15y ago

i really wish flickr would get bought off of yahoo by google. i enjoy its interface.

Drbble 15y ago
First thing Google would do is ruin the UI in the name of "unification" with Plus. Second thing they would do is kill off all the nonfree features and support only the ad-supported use case. Third thing they would do is congratulate the exec who eliminated customer service staff.

X-Istence 15y ago

I just re-upped my subscription for another two years. Hope I don't regret that.

monkeypizza 15y ago

flickr has added almost nothing new in about 5 years. However, I use it more than ever - with autopager it's incredible. I also wrote a greasemonkey script which replaces the default size image with the large size image on page load (and removes spaceball.gif). It's way better. They should implement autopager in js and leave it on by default for the entire site - I bet total photo views would go up 50% permanently. From places where flickr is slow, this makes the site way, way more usable. The community is incredible, and they have huge followings all over the world - you can easily stumble into really active nonenglish groups. I wonder if they ever realize how many people use the service. Regarding keys, I once wrote a client which downloaded about 60m full size images over about 2 years for a job. All on a non-commercial key. We kept roughly within the usage limits, and they never seemed to notice. The change I remember from the past few years was that they changed the photostream navigation tool on the right side of a photo - now, it remembers where you came from, and that controls which one is open by default. So if you were browsing someone's favorites, the navigator for the favorites will be open (even though you already saw that thumbnail on the previous page). In the past version, the photostream of the person's page you were on was always open no matter where you came from. Now, you are always a click away from seeing even the next photo's thumbnail. This is a bad change for me, cause I always use tabs to browse flickr anyway, and so I just came from a screen containing all the favorite thumbnails. Now, you often end up on someone's photostream, with no other of their thumbnails displayed.

hellweaver666 15y ago

I've been a Flickr Pro user for a number of years now, but this year I didn't renew my subscription. The reason was that I realised, I didn't need all the social crap that goes with Flickr. If I want to share photos for viewing with my friends and Family it pretty much happens on Facebook now as they don't 'get' Flickr. I still needed somewhere to backup photos online however (because I'm paranoid like that), so I jumped on the SnapJoy Beta the day they announced it and I'm getting on with them quite well at the moment. It'd be nice if they had some kind of Facebook integration so I could share photos straight from SnapJoy to FB without having to upload them twice but I can live without that at the moment as long as I know my photos are safe.