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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I just tired of most of the community aspect of flickr aside from folks I already knew IRL. I found a lot of groupie-ism and, as you note, group stuff that was at least spam-ish. As with other things about flickr, I guess I'm not really sure what the "right" flickr looks like and how you achieve that at profitable scale. And, to be honest, I've never had a lot of interest in community photo meetings and so forth locally either.

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True, I doubt it's possible to have much of a community at the scale that Flickr is aiming for. You can do it with a niche little photography site, but anything operating at mass-market sizes will eventually turn into a lot of people spamming groups and internet jokes at each other because that sort of behavior feeds on itself and gets you more active users to generate money from.

I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy?

OTOH I have no idea if they're profitable or not.

>I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy?

It's fashionable to bash on flickr because it's "languished" and, one redesign aside, hasn't moved a whole lot in a long time. I've certainly taken casual swipes at them myself.

However, the truth is that--while I can imagine some features I'd like--it works pretty well and has a lot of great photography. At the end of the day, it's entirely possible that I wouldn't like it if they were constantly taking the site in new directions because social or mobile or big data or whatever the current hype is.

Absolutely. There's a huge trend of websites redesigning and shuffling around just for the sake of doing it, and in the rare cases where you can still access older interfaces (I'm thinking of GMail here) it's totally arguable that the old ones are better. If you have a service that works well, staying the same is nothing to be ashamed of.

I haven't been putting any of my photography online for a couple of years now (aside from sharing to friends on Facebook), but the thought had cross my mind recently. It's a tossup between hosting them on my own site or going somewhere else where it can be "social" and more importantly, more broadly visible.

For me, flickr works because I can drag photos that I've processed in Lightroom to the jfriedl publishing service, hit publish, and they go up to flickr where I can share them or people can just stumble across them. I have no doubt the discoverability is better than if I put them on my own site and I do indeed have people contacting me from time to time to use a photo for something or other. (And doubtless, many uses that I don't know about.)

It's not a big thing but the very modest price, the low friction, and contributing to the commons in however small a way work for me.

Left for the same reasons - it was interferring with my photography. Around the same time, other services like Smugmug and Zenfolio got better (I think Smugmug is now a little more up to date than ZF's look, but not originally).

Flickr decided for a long time to not prioritize the best photo display possible and limited photo size and wouldn't offer things like black backgrounds.

And now I may get an infinite less number views, I don't have to deal with the comments, and photography is no longer associated with gamification (when do I post this for the most views to hit explore, etc).

Flickr has a bit of a "look" to what is popular, and while I'm big on good photo processing and the history of the dark room, what makes it today is often too processed, too HDR, and so on, and playing the "game" is not something I'm interested in.

In the early days of Flickr, people DID look more at all the photos in groups they posted to, and that was pretty great.

Getting more people into photography is great though - just shouldn't be about numbers.

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