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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

As an enthusiast photographer, she did one great thing in my book: She oversaw the attempted revitalization of Flickr. The old Flickr product and UI had stagnated for the better part of a decade, and under her administration, Yahoo rebooted a lot of the core experience. Some parts were rebooted more successfully than others, but on the balance, it was for the better.

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She did the bare minimum that needed to be done to keep flickr alive, I'm not sure it's worthy of praise. Flickr is currently comatose or dead, given that they haven't updated their mobile app in over a year, let alone anything else on the site. Yahoo could've used flickr to pre-empt YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram all in one, but Yahoo instead neglected it and ran it into the ground. I feel bad for the engineering talent that Yahoo wasted, but the executive leadership deserves nothing but scorn. They missed so many huge opportunities.

Flickr's a tough case. You make it Instagram or Facebook, even successfully, and it's not Flickr. I know I've personally bitched about Flickr stagnating but, when I think about it, I'm not sure how I really want it to change. It's a hosting--and, to some degree, sharing--site mostly for people who are relatively serious about photography. I can think of a few changes I'd like but I suspect that the original Flickr vision is fundamentally a niche market at this point.

The ads on flickr wrecked it 4 me

Would you pay for a (higher) subscription?

No I don't even have any photos on there I just use it to browse photography stuff and the ads are tasteless. Yes I realize it's not free to run. I'm still not a fan of this change and think there must be a better way.

If I may use the full benefits of hindsight, I wonder if Yahoo, instead of Google, ought to have been the company to go all-in on a social network competitor to facebook, (and I don't mean 360°). Yahoo had more organic components of a social community across its properties than Google ever did. If they wanted to mature into something that was more than a media company, that seems to me like the path to take.

Of course it's easy to say that. I have much more faith in Google's ability to execute on that front than Yahoo, and look what happened to G+. So who knows if they could have done it right.

Flickr was the only service that insisted I should stop paying the yearly fee and switch to a free plan. Shortly afterwards they drove me away for good with some silly zoom and pan effect on photo views.

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