Comment by pythonic_hell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pythonic_hell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

- reduce freeloading

- increase price for paid accounts

- focus on serving paid customers

> un-sustainable

— the orange website

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 :-)

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.")

> 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?

You build an app that will create your backups for you using your free image sharing account. Or maybe instead of backups it's for big filetransfers, or sharing somewhat secret documents.

The main point is to make use of the effective endless storage, rather than to store things hidden in plain sight.

I remember also back when GMail first became available to people by invitation, and at the time the amount of storage you were given, while not as impressive by today’s standards, was pretty significant at the time. And someone created a system to allow you to backup files from your computer onto your GMail. I wonder if that system inspired Google to build Google Drive.

Here’s an article from the time, and an excerpt from said article:

> As many of you know, Gmail is Google's free web mail service that gives you 2+ Gigs of free storage for your email and attachments. Now that is a lot of storage; actually more storage than most people really need. So what can we do with all that extra storage you may be wondering? What if I told you that we could use all this extra storage to act as an online hard drive for you to store files?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/how-to-use-gmail-...

And the original page, which is still around too.

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

> GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.

Windows XP. Good times :)

If Google did take inspiration from it when later creating Google Drive then maybe that’s even where they took the name for Google Drive from.

Speaking of Google, storage space, and that time period, here’s a comic strip I remember from back then :)

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/669.html

People were clamoring for Google to make Google Drive in the same way people were clamoring for Apple to make the iPhone.

I don't see how your conclusion follows from the text you quoted

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.

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.

They said. I never had a single picture removed, going back to 2005.

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.

I couldn't upload more pictures starting more recently, until I was a Pro subscriber again.

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.

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.

Founded by the same people who turned a failed video game into Slack.

Discord was an internal comm system for a game studio too

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)

Video games now seem to have a lot of the same driving power in tech that porn used to.

Instagram was also originally a video game that had a photo sharing feature

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/insta...

I heard Tinder was originally going to be a coupon app before they pivoted.

Twitter was a side project that took over the office.

While booting one of the original cofounders, Noah, who had the Twitter alpha code on his laptop at the time. Ruthless.

Noah then formed a new startup; Olo, a white label delivery platform for restaurants. It’s publicly-traded and worth $3B!

https://www.olo.com/

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/olo/

He made it out! You made my day. Nah. My month! The backstabbing and minimizing and rewriting of history that happened with him and Twitter is such a trigger for me lol.

Edit: Unfortunately, that’s a different Noah Glass. Olo was founded in 2005. Noah was working for Odeo in 2005-2006. We can only imagine what the other cofounders would’ve done to Olo based on how he was thrown out of Odeo/Twitter.

Oh no! It’s actually not the same Noah Glass, even though I’ve thought so for years, damn.

Thanks for pointing that out.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not sure one could do it in the UK for the equivalent of $60. Does that cost include backups?

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.

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

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