How Yahoo Killed Flickr (2012)
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently
by users, they were highly searchable.
"That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn't give a shit about
that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to
monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social
networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users."
EDIT: Source - https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
We’re designing a new set of tools to address the challenges with CSS but continue to allow communities to express their identities. These tools will allow moderators to select customization options for key areas of their subreddit across platforms. For example, header images and flair colors will be rendered correctly on desktop and mobile.
We know great things happen when we give users as much flexibility as possible. The menu of options we’ll provide for customization is still being determined. Our starting point is to replicate as many of the existing uses that already exist, and to expand beyond as we evolve.
Sounds like they're trying to keep the same flexibility as the existing CSS options, which is a bit different than removing styling.
On the other hand, there are a lot of concerns with the approach Reddit is taking: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
* break the batch uploadr in an effort to quickly release the new UI: check
* don't respond to features in Google Photos people care about: check
Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked. They concurrently had the new UI and the old one, but most damning of all as another user mentioned was the impossible miserable sign in process.
After exhausting those two options it sends you to the yahoo help website. The first page asks for your yahoo email address. I don't have a yahoo email address and one was never associated with my flickr that I am aware of.
I've tried but have no clue how I can access my own photos again. I'm a customer just sitting here begging to use their service again and they don't want me to.
This might help things if you mentioned it to them...
I know a bank that purposely reduce their Internet banking security. To cater for specific elderly customers who constantly forget their password. They are not going to force their customers to walk into the bank everytime.
These accounts are at a risk of getting hacked. It's called a tradeoff. As a bank, do you want customers or not? Do you like money or not?
As for the Yahoo situation. If they gave a shit about customer service: they can accept copies of drivers licence/passport signed off by a justice of peace.
> It's your (or your parents') responsibility to remember password or security answer, don't blame customer service for that.
It is, but it's customer service's job to help out the customers. Elderly people aren't known for great memory. It's got to be expected that people in general might not remember to update the account when they change a phone number, and might not remember the security answer that they provided years ago.
Yahoo on the other hand basically tells you "go fuck yourself." I literally had a Yahoo agent curse me on the phone after I asked for the supervisor. And then she hung up. I gave up on recovering my parents' yahoo account. Yahoo deserves the demise it suffered. Unlike the big 5, its processes are kludgy, even when it comes to customer service and people stuff. Good riddance.
They made their service unusable for years as explained in the article and in many comments here. It's not uncommon to change email address over a period of year, and that's for places where we tend to keep addresses around China is a totally different approach. With the lack of option to recover access to your account you are now locked out of your data. This would not happen with other third party service provider hosting your data.
But as always do have backupS and do not rely on third party for your data. Host it yourself and have a copy on those services. At least if you care about the data.
You don't know your password, don't know the associated phone number, and can't check the associated email. You're lacking every credential required for access, so WTF do you expect them to do that wouldn't also be a huge security loophole?
If you can call and get access, then anybody could call and get access, so they're erring on the right side here as far as I'm concerned.
Yahoo's handling of flickr push user away for years. do you remember the password of that email account you have not used for 5 years ? good not try to log in and discover that this address has been deleted or reclaimed by hotmail for being inactive.
Do you still have the phone number you had in 2005 ? chances are you have changed several times.
I don't even know most of my current passwords, I never give my phone number for privacy reason (still have about 2-3 telemarketers calls a day for having given it a few times in the past) and I usually can't check the associated email because I don't even remember which temporary email address service I used to register with your service to protect myself from the spam and reselling of my address.
I've learned a lot since the 90's and I trust the web services for exploiting, reselling any piece of info I may give them so everything is single use or fake, it has proven very effective at keeping annoyances at a very low level.
Funny that you would mention a potential security issue when yahoo's credentials and user data has been breached, twice.
By the time GPhotos launched, was there anybody still invested in the rotting carcass of Flickr? I bought Flickr Pro almost 10 years ago and immediately regretted my decision when they broke some blog-integration thing I relied on.
Did you have a specific act in mind when you linked this to Mayer? They bought Flickr in 2005 and it's hard to think of anything positive which happened in the 5 years before she was involved.
That was it for me. After this I couldn't login because of a combination of Yahoo's convoluted username+password requirements and their broken password recovery process. I gave up after multiple attempts over a couple of years. I mentally filed 'Yahoo' under 'corporate dysfunction'.
yep. fta:
> Yahoo's RegID solution turned out to be a nightmare for the existing community.
It was such a pain for me to have to recover my old and never-used Yahoo account that I just quit using Flickr. Just like that.
I have close to 11,000 items personal photos and videos in there (60GB), and it is constantly growing, yet searchable. I also have a myriad of tools to back up my Flickr photos and metadata to Dropbox, which I do periodically.
People love to nitpick about it, but I still find Flickr enormously useful, and have been paying for Pro for nearly a decade. I try to be proactive and open to alternative photo services, but migrating to something else at this point seems like be a huge hassle.
I wish they didn't have old and new UI mixing though. Yahoo could definitely polish that.
I don't think much of him.
I'm not saying everything is great, only that it's far more common for something wrong to be explained by factors you aren't aware of than someone to be utterly unqualified to hold their job.
Second, if you're doing redesigns for major, major sites, there has to be some accountability.
You gotta understand why you are creating what you are creating to make it well. And that is perfectly reasonable to suggest an alternative route if you think it's better for the business and the users.
Smugmug?
If flickr wanted back in the game they'd have to jump in the mobile market and re-design their traditional web platform.
Flickr actually did the social aspect well with their communities. What they missed was transitioning this social component to mobile.
And the UI change around 2013 where they got rid of the grid layout and moved to some Pintrest collage / infinite scroll ostracized a lot of users.
Flickr could be made really useful if Yahoo provides a "make a photographer website" with Flickr backing as photo storage backend. Imagine I am looking for a wedding photographer nearby. I need to browse their work, want to know their rates, and even book time. Perhaps also an option to "sell my photo for use" and even a way to search for illegal usage of photo (it is a concern for many professional photographers).
Flickr had a relatively active blog that would showcase photos relative to special days (e.g. Pi Day photos). On top of that, there was Flickr Explore that could be thought of as the front page of interesting photos.
And in terms of communities, anyone could make a community. So if you were a plane spotter, you could start (and there are), communities dedicated to that. You live in Boston and want to have a Boston Photographers Group? Done! Wedding photographers? Here you go:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/weddingphoto/
https://www.flickr.com/groups/flickr_wedding_photojournalism...
There were plenty of communities on Flickr and that's one thing I feel like hasn't really filled the void. 500px and VSCO exist, but they're a bit too focused for most amateurs or casual photo snappers.
Flickr for many was this soup of personal vacation photos, along with people visually documenting their non-photographic hobbies, and photographic-focused photographers. Their photostream was the lifestream for many. I met a handful of friends from Flickr not because of photography, but because they seemed like interesting people.
Perhaps this also speaks of social media now--we're fluent with the medium and now carefully polish our online identities. But in this process of self-curation, we've lost what makes us real and interesting.
I do find flickr a useful place to upload my selected photos. I can display "slideshows" from there, share them with friends, etc. But, if flickr didn't exist, I'd easily enough find some other way to do the same thing whether self-hosted or otherwise.
The social part makes it all "oh, I was there too it was such a nice day, are you coming to my party next week?".... I'm guessing that's FB. Facebook = happysnap. Instagram = happiersnap.
This article is from 2012, and is off the mark. Flickr is still up and running, even if crammed with ads sending uBlock into a frenzy.
If anything, photographic collections and studies don't have the appeal they once had due to the trillions of images we see everywhere now. The eyesore of over-sharpened, over-saturated, too high dynamic ranged retina candy. Good photography now is back in the galleries where it should be...IMHO, the image resting on a print not emitting any light of its own. No blinding pixels, and hopefully matte paper, no glass.
What the parent says is that this, even if true, the above is totally irrelevant.
There's not much of a market for "photographers to showcase their work in isolation from other noise" or for "people to browse photos in specific categories and collections".
What there's actually a huge user base for that can be turned into ad money is casually sharing photos AMONG other stuff, with friends and relatives. Which is what Facebook offers.
This killed Flickr, except in the way you describe -- which nobody (as in: few millions of people) cares about.
I would venture that Avenue Q had a more accurate view of this (in the song "The Internet is for Porn").
When you invest in camera gear then study or explore photography, you will gravitate away from junk food image sharing platforms, and instead find places dedicated to skills, techniques and themed photography showcases and resources.
Nobody killed Flickr. It could use some interface and feature improvements, and probably some new administrators or project teams, but it's still there doing what it does. For what it's worth, I was never a big fan of Flickr due to the lack of control over how your gallery page could look and function.
No, but Facebook level businesses are.
>Random funny pics and cheeseburgers will always be greater markets, but that is irrelevant.
And so is Flickr in the context of the grandparent's comment.
>Nobody killed Flickr. It could use some interface and feature improvements, and probably some new administrators or project teams, but it's still there doing what it does.
Killing for a social medium, even more so a business-run social medium, is not about not being able to do "what it does".
It's about being unable to monetize it, it losing mind-share, people moving away, the action getting elsewhere etc.
Flickr users weren't obsessed with lens quality, they were obsessed with good looking pictures. Facebook spent 10 years (and maybe still) adding horrible jpeg compression to photos.
One of the reasons I hate posting on Facebook is that you can comment on every little thing, and frankly not everything warrants a comment thread. Despite what is warranted, some people cannot help themselves and write pointless things on just about any picture. Instead of just a nice posting of $PICTURE, I then have $UNWANTED_TEXT next to my picture, forever (unless I erase and repost the image but that will just trigger Facebook's "HEY WORLD, LOOK WHAT HE JUST POSTED" algorithms again).
Turns out people still like to snap pictures and post them online in 2017. And they don't care that much about quality.
If people cared about quality, vimeo would be bigger than youtube. It isn't.
Facebook certainly brought photo sharing to the masses, but most Flickr users were actually "a bunch of amateurs obsessed with lens quality", at least the active ones. Most of these didn't move their photography to Facebook but to other sites like 500px and later Instagram.
I agree with the article, Flickr died because Yahoo let it rot.
And then placed ads on the corpse.
To quote some execs I had a meeting with at Yahoo when we were acquired by them "we don't innovate: we copy what others do and make it better".
Not only is this an idiotic strategy, but it was one they consistently failed at. They never made anything better. I did point out at the time that I thought they were being delusional.
I left in 2005 because it was obvious the company didn't have any actual leadership. Just indecision and half measures. I left because I used none of the products anymore.
Yahoo handed the victory to Facebook.
Not to say all those people don't also post photos to Facebook, but saying Facebook killed Flickr is akin to saying Facebook killed Google Code and everyone is uploading their code to Facebook now.
Obviously that's a silly comparison, but my point is, for people using Flickr as intended, Facebook isn't really a substitute.
Facebook is not shutterstock or getty, photo is not their business, providing their useds with as little friction so they can be exposed to the customer's ads longer is their core business.
Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?
To that person, this paragraph conveys the insight that both code and coders aren't fungible. You'd be surprised how many non-techies believe that they are.
You used 2 sentences instead of 1. Why?
> Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?
I also found this amusing.
Generally I find them strong high quality photos.
I find Instagram is more of "I am here" kind of photos.
500px replaced Flickr as that for me.
I was a long-time Flickr user back in the day because the community aspect helped me become a better photographer. I got feedback from other photographers, and got inspiration from their stuff. Now that Flickr is a ghost town, that aspect is dead.
500px has been a great substitute (though it has some strange biases towards lots of Russian model photography) for that.
Of course, AOL switched it's focus away from dial up once it went unlimited shortly after so the entire acquisition did nothing but to make a valuable resource disappear.
AOL and Yahoo have been buying up companies, killing them, and then writing off the losses for years. This spans multiple management teams. It's inbred into the system.
It cracks me up that these two companies with years and years worth of fail between them, are somehow going to combine and become a winning organization.
Full Disclosure: I worked for a company purchased by AOL in the early 1990's, they immediately came in and ramped it up to about 120 people, and then killed it and fired everyone less than a year later.
That one was over an internal power struggle at AOL. One management team loved the idea, bought the company, and then lost political power. His replacement came in and killed everything his predecessor had been working on.
[1] https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866c...
I don't recall of Yahoo forcing any UX or integration objectives on Tumblr, other than to start monetizing which eventually included the use of Yahoo media sales agents.
Tumblr's product simply didn't keep up in the race for attention.
Src: https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/231885248-Adult...
Flickr is still bigger and more important than anything I'll ever be able to take credit for. Any random reader of this comment will almost certainly have to admit the same.
So Flickr is a hit with photo hobbyists, and general-interest snapshot-sharing happens elsewhere. Big deal. That only makes Flickr "dead" if you have a very narrow vision of what it means to run a business, of what it means to succeed.
I couldn't even sign up for a yahoo account because they required a mobile number. Am I the only one without one? I have to imagine they are missing out on a large chunk of people by requiring that but maybe not since Microsoft is the same way when you sign up for Azure.
Just tried again and they still require a valid mobile number (not google voice or skype).
What if someone wants to use random burner accounts to store gigabytes of child pornography?
That's a lot harder to achieve if they have to buy a burner mobile phone for each account, and each burner phone has the potential to be tracked to the point of sale to use video and other techniques to catch the predator.
Mobile number verification is a very cheap and powerful way to cut out the vast majority of bad actors.
Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose.
Sure.
Let's see, Facebook requires phone number verification:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Facebook is #1 most popular social network.
Okay, WhatsApp is #2 service: Requires Phone Number verification
Youtube, #3: No phone number verification, service is full of fake accounts, trolling, bigotry, and state propaganda and is seen as one of the worst communities in internet history
#4: Facebook Messenger: Phone Number Verification
#5: WeChat: Phone Number Verification
#6: QQ: Optional phone verification, but operated under am authoritarian government which strictly regulates user bases, use of networks, messages made, etc. (AKA they hire armies of people to manually monitor and police the service)
Perhaps I'm failing to see your point...?
I have hit a few roadblocks here and there, but end up saving 50% on my phone bill.
Anyways do you think it is a sound business practice to refuse minorities because they are minorities ? Long tail says otherwise.
After a few years of having my own internet access I got rid of the now irrelevant phone number, in the recent years it started to become a requirement for surveillance capitalism reasons and services that provide phone numbers for registration or verification started popping up right and left.
http://www.rferl.org/a/report-says-75-percent-of-worlds-popu...
Developers tend to try and include everyone but that is often a mistake -- the benefit rarely outweighs the cost.
While I'd normally agree I'm not sure that Yahoos decision making process should be the role model regarding optimizing user growth. Their lack of users was not a minor issue.
Calculation is "make mobile phone number optional and have most of the users refuse to give it away because they know better and miss profit opportunity or make it mandatory and risk having a few fringe users use worthless numbers", so optimal profit per user is the chosen way when the company is driven by maximizing their own profit (actually shareholders) and do not care about people, communities and such.
The good news is that it protects me from having a yahoo, google, facebook or any other accounts with stupid requirements to feed surveillance capitalism.
For anyone else who can't read it, here's a Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULA...
I'm not sure whether it's intentionally region blocked or if the site is just stupid.
* I still have my 1TB.
* I can still upload straight from Lightroom
* I can still share private photos with friends via URL, or make them public, or hotlink
Seems fine to me.
To me flickr died when it made it a pain to download pictures that were displayed right in front of me in my browser, breaking a basic web feature. Never came back.
Instead, they should have started with a very lightweight signup process and progressively deepened it as you were pulled back by activities you subscribed to.
Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough.
YUI and Pipes was great though!
Not sure if it's ever been fixed but everytime I would go on the App I couldn't find half of the features, like I can join groups, but how do I make one? I could see that I could have family to share pictures with, but how do I add them.
Also as many have said, requiring a Yahoo account is a drawback as well.
Maybe not well enough, but they were certainly early enough; see this press release from 2001 [1], where they were making mobile search available (in 2001, Y! was using Google for search, so don't freak out about that part)
As with many things Yahoo, they were there early, put in time and money, saw results that weren't great, so they backed off, and may have come back too late. PS, you can read old Yahoo! news releases to get good ideas for what to do today :)
[1] https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=17431...
It's not only yahoo, all the big contenders do this: they buy a smaller but growing or holding interesting/competing asset to kill it, or poach employees or tech. Microsoft and google are notoriously been doing this, this is standard procedure to maintain dominant position and try to mitigate the lack of internal innovation and creativity that comes with being dominant.
The cost of making solar panels began to decline sharply in 2007. Airbnb was conceived in 2007 and change.org started in 2007. GitHub, now the world’s largest open-source software sharing library, was opened in 2007. And in 2007 Intel for the first time introduced non-Silicon materials into its microchip transistors, thus extending the duration of Moore’s Law — the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years. As a result, the exponential growth in computing power continues to this day.
His talk was basically a rehash of everything he talks about here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in...
Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007. Back when developer conferences were more or less free (for attendees), it hosted the first conference I attended as a newly transplanted person to SF... the "Open Source CMS Summit"... I think I still have some of the stickers it handed out to promote some of its then-recent acquisitions the original article discusses. Yahoo! was kind of one of the first companies to really actively engage and enable external developers (those not employed by Yahoo) as collaborative partners who probably could have helped Yahoo keep its then competitive advantage. Mozilla did this a bit earlier, yes... but not as a publicly-traded company. So part of its demise was due to impatient investors, for sure; however, I think the article makes a good argument for the implications of ignorance when it comes to fostering community.
It's now ten years after this inflection point that Friedman talks about; and according to him, it's just getting started.
I know nothing about the company, but in ~2003 I remember associating yahoo with elderly people who didn't know how to use their computer. Granted, this could have been a side effect of doing tech support for a dial up ISP.
Was it ? In my own reality in 2000 yahoo was already irrelevant and had never managed to be awesome in any way. It was just another web portal that no one really cared about, sort of a less obnoxious AOL.
I am one of these old school guy who still want to believe in the power of the personal website, and so my main tool to convince people to pay me to photograph them for their wedding is still my photography website.
With Flickr and a plug-in like Justified Image Gallery for WordPress, I can use Flickr basically as the storage backend for all my pictures (and I still do). As I have dozens of thousands of pictures, it's useful.
As such, I don't care that much to have thousands of followers to tell me my photos look beautiful, I know they are. And I don't think personally that to have thousands of subscribers will bring me much more paying opportunities. To be contacted by big firms to do corporate photography requires to put the time and energy to build a much bigger following in the likes of the dozens and dozens of thousands of followers, something I'm just not interested in, I still have a day job after all...
But still, what I would have liked with Flickr would have rather be to go much higher end in the pro market. For example, I would have loved to be able to have the equivalent of my lightroom catalog online. I would have loved to be able to upload my raw photographs rather than only jpegs. That would have been a differentiating factor worth a lot to me. I don't care about having a Facebook bis or an instagram bis.
And I would have loved to be able to rsync or ftp my pictures, gosh, batch upload or processing is still a pain in the a.
It takes 9 seconds to finished load and always sends my computer fan on.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-mov...
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/85669833453010944...
Time to move my photos off, I suppose.
i know it is not very social a la instagram and all .. but it is really good to backup and store my photos and share them with family
i hope they dont close it
My problem hasn't been where to backup photos but how the heck to manage (and make use of) tens of thousands of photos. I mean, 50 years from now when each of us has several hundred thousand photos, what exactly are we going to do with them all? And our children and grandchildren? Those are going to be pretty big (and ever-increasing) photo albums. We need better ways of managing and making use of them. Apple has made good progress here with Moments and facial recognition and grouping by location, but all of that is siloed in Apple's infrastructure.
they randomly create compilations of your photos (if its enabled) and send you google plus updates like "do you remember that visit to [location] on [date]? we made an album for you!"
tagging is key now facebook has shown us it can automate tagging people at least with face recognition maybe it will be able to auto tag locations ... maybe it already does
so the solution will be a combination of
1- discipline, spend the time tagging your own photos (technology can help here by making this task more user friendly and easier)
2- be reasonable, dont take or save 10s of thousands of photos .. learn and accept to delete (again technology can help here by suggesting what to delete , offer you almost identical photos and suggest to delete some)
3- automated tagging
4- skimming, loading and browsing should be super fast to allow photo skimming
i dont see solution outside of those 4 elements two rely on you .. manual tagging and deleting (and they can be technology assisted) two rely on technology .. auto tagging and skimming
They'll probably be busy trying to find clean air, clean water, food and shelter scrambling to face the consequences of overpopulation in a climate changing world out of cheap oil more than looking at photos they don't care. You don't even look at your own photos from a few years ago.
The best for which purpose? Your descendants will probably not be looking at your pictures with the same ends in mind as you (if they are looking at all).
In the end, YOU are responsible for your own backups.