Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff
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nolancaudill.com
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.
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.
That said, I did downgrade and stop paying them last year.
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.
A. General Terms
13. User ContentThat has got be one of the most stupid 'clarifications' I've ever seen in an EULA. Have these people ever been to a museum? Think of just about any act or scene that is "obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually suggestive" and I can guarantee you I can find a photo, painting or sculpture depicting more or less just that hanging proudly on display in some "public museum where minors visit".
There's no value for me in paying money for a service which requires I lock up my photographs like Fort Knox merely because they contain skin. Your friend's mileage may vary.
(this is the relevant section from their TOS: "By using any Interactive Areas, you agree not to post, upload to, transmit, distribute, store, create or otherwise publish through the Site any of the following:
Any photograph, video, message, data, information, text, music, sound, graphics, code or other material ("Content") that is unlawful, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, suggestive, harassing, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory, fraudulent or otherwise objectionable or harmful, including without limitation photographs or other Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit;")
edit: It's also not hard to find them discussing their policy, like the customer reps on their public blog: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/01/31/the-dark-side-of-the...
"I’m afraid if you’re a nude photographer, SmugMug isn’t the place for you. We’re a family safe site, and we will ask you to take down any photos that violate our terms of use."
"Our nudity policy is pretty simple and written in plain English. You can see it in our TOS. The summary line is as follows: “we prohibit the uploading and display of photographs or other Media portraying explicit nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit, for example. If your photos would only be suited for adult sites, adult magazines, or R-rated movies, they are not suitable for Smugmug.” We do enforce this rule to the best of our ability."
With Flickr going downhill, what should I switch from SmugMug to?
No geotagging, not even API access, makes the use cases somewhat limited. But what is there is impressive, and the general caliber of work on 500px is higher than Smugmug, and a lot higher than Flickr.
I do find the discoverability features somewhat annoying due to the userbase they bootstrapped with. With Flickr Explore you'll find some puzzlingly banal photos making it to the top. With 500px's "most popular" galleries you'll just find a lot of nudes. It's like nothing else on that site gets any hope of rising to the top if it doesn't slip a nipple.
It can be a great adjunct to a Flickr replacement, but unless the usage patterns change radically, it won't be that replacement itself.
> With 500px's "most popular" galleries you'll
> just find a lot of nudes. It's like nothing
> else on that site gets any hope of rising to
> the top if it doesn't slip a nipple.
Smugmug also doesn't support RAW/DNG uploads, which makes using it as a photo backup and sharing service unattractive.
Do smugmug staff also look at your private photographs?
Once the photos are uploaded, well, that's another story. Photo management was never at the top of the work queue, I guess.
And overnight I ended up uploading ~ 7000 fullres pictures on Flickr. It didn't complain.
2. All of Smugmug's users are paying customers (even if it's less than $4/mo).
Like, I don't need special software to store photos on S3. I don't need special software to hand links to files on S3 out to others, or display the files on my own site in galleries I build myself.
Presumably, then OpenPhoto lets me collect said photos into galleries and hosts the gallery bits? If so, why doesn't the word gallery appear anywhere on their site? Why isn't there any way to explore the galleries that they are hosting right now? Do I have to create an account to even see them? Would people I want to share with need to? Why aren't there some screenshots of what these galleries look like? Does the absence of all of this information mean that it doesn't actually handle the gallery bits? If that's the case, what does it do?
Their website is like a case-study in what not to do. It looks great, but at no point does it clearly communicate to me what it is their product does.
Though, I probably should have given this link instead: http://openphoto.me/
My understanding is that the OpenPhoto Project is the open source project, and that site is aimed at developers. OpenPhoto.me is at least partly aimed at users. It explains it a little better.
I will also take this opportunity to plug a piece I wrote for the Atlantic tech blog that explains a bit more about OpenPhoto: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-st...
Thanks!
Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.
Intellectually I had a fairly good idea that that was what was on offer, from reading through the high-level info and the REST API, but there's really nothing that spells that out in a concrete way for non-developer end-users. It's great that I can host photos on my own storage and that the code is on github and that the API is well-documented and hey it got started on Kickstarter!
But where's the beef? What do I get in a tangible way for signing up? Which leads us into...
> Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).
Yeah, I got there pretty quickly, but I didn't want to sign up until I knew what I was signing up for in a concrete sense. Freedom, Peace-of-Mind if OpenPhoto goes away, etc, are all good and noble things, but I don't want to create an account until I can see tangibles: what do the galleries look like, and how do they feel to browse around in? What kinds of customizations are available? That's the sort of information I'd expect to find in your Overview page[1], but there's almost nothing concrete to be found there. http://openphoto.me/ [2] is slightly better, once I was pointed to it, but only insofar as there are two tiny thumbnails which appear to show something of the user experience.
Flickr and 500px have sold me over the years because I could hit 'Explore' or 'Popular Photos' straight from their landing page and experience exactly what signing up would get me in terms of what the site feels like to use, what the community is like and how it functions, etc. One of my big concerns as a user of one of these sites boils down to: if I take photos of someone, and use this site to display the photos, and send links to that person, what will that person's experience be, and is that an experience I want to associate myself with?
Neither http://theopenphotoproject.org/ nor http://openphoto.me/ offer me a way to really answer that question for myself, so neither site makes me want to sign up, however nice hosting on my own back-end might sound.
[1] Incidentally, "3) RELAX, ORGANIZE AND SHARE YOUR PHOTOS (REQUIRED)" comes off to me as a lot more ominous than its probably intended. It sounds like it requires me to share all of my photos with the internet, privacy be damned. Maybe needs a rethink of the verbiage?
[2] The combo sign-up/request an invite form seems pretty confusing. After finally deciding from squinting at the thumbnails that I might want to at least click around inside, I started to fill it out before realizing I didn't have an invite, apparently required, and abandoned any thought of going further out of discouragement. Just my opinion, but I'd probably just have a request-an-invite form, and send invitees to a different private link via email. Realizing something is closed to me 3/4ths of the way through a form can be off-putting.
All suggestions in this post come from an engineer, not a UX expert. YMMV. Check local listings for details. You have been warned.
You're not the first person to say it needs screenshots of the product you're signing up for.
I actually agree on all points, but I'm also an engineer so I'll pass it by someone else :).
Thanks again.
http://photos.jaisenmathai.com/photos/list -- hosted version with my TLD - FTW :).
With a Flickr Pro account, for $2 per month you can upload an unlimited number of photos. Well, I'm sure there are limits, but I uploaded 8,000 full resolution pictures on it in only a couple of days and it didn't complain. Also my collection is growing like crazy ever since I became a father.
So the whole collection is like 32 GB. On Amazon S3 that would cost me $4.48 per month just for the storage. Managing it, like uploading new ones or deleting from it would also bring additional costs. I'm also starting to make movies, so I'm sure my collection will double in size pretty soon. So that would be $8.96 per month. And it won't stop there.
The only cheap alternative to Flickr would be Google's Picassa. You can purchase 80 GB of storage for $20 per year, or $1.6 per month. Also 1 TB of pictures would cost on Google $256 per year, while on S3 it would be $1720 per year.
Personally I'm not interested in showing off my work to the world. I'm only interested in storing those pictures somewhere in case I need a backup or in case I want to access them from a remote location. Flickr is great for both, too bad that Yahoo is killing it.
If you need extreme availability for highrez images then it's another problem out of scope
That's sort of the point though. $2/month is cheap but the actual cost is the 4 years you probably spent uploading and tagging photos only to have the service die.
Your options are continue using a service you don't like for a great price or start using something else and leave behind the 4 years of organization (which you need with 8,000 photos).
It's kinda like the free hit crack dealers give out. In the end it's not worth it. Trust me, I've been there in a previous life.
That being said, Amazon S3 isn't required. You can install it yourself and point it to your NAS.
And btw, I've been thinking about building something like OpenPhoto myself because I also don't like the lockin and I'm really glad that you've seen this need and did something about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
You're only looking at the cost side of the equation. The question isn't "what does good support cost," it's "does good support generate enough value that users will pay for it."
As somebody who has paid for Flickr premium for years, I signed up because they delivered a lot of value. That included innovative features and a great relationship with the community. Their feature flow has been weak for years; if they screw up the community relationship via shitty support, then I'm certainly done with them.
No matter how many MBAs try this approach, you can't cut your way to a better business.
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/
[2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-res...
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.
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.
What does this expression mean?
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?
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.
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.
"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?
I work for a local search engine in Switzerland - 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/ (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
> 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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
It's an MVP, but it works. Seemed apropos.
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.
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.
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.