

Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff - alexleavitt
http://nolancaudill.com/2012/01/30/the-front-line/

======
dmethvin
> When sites get larger, both in members and staff, the gap tends to grow
> between the people that build the site and the people that use it.

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.

------
thomasgerbe
Why?

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.

~~~
sp332
I can strongly recommend Smugmug as a Flickr replacement. $40/year for
unlimited photo storage and bandwidth. They handle high-res photos at full
resolution, and their thumbnails are less fuzzy than Facebook. (Actually you
can change the amount of sharpening on a per-gallery basis, and the default is
a good start.)

~~~
msbarnett
Smugmug is only a viable replacement for Flickr if your content stays within
their absurdly strict and conservative acceptable content policy.

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.

~~~
gatlin
Maybe that's true for public photos; I know of a photographer who frequently
snaps shots of wild and crazy college-town happenings and from my inspection,
by your rules she should have been canned a few hundred times now.

~~~
sp332
I checked, it is in their Terms of Use <http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/terms>

    
    
      A. General Terms
      13. User Content

_a. User Content that is... obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually
suggestive... including without limitation Photos, Videos or other User
Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where
minors visit_

~~~
dagw
_nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit_

That 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".

------
ghshephard
Reading between the lines, it sounds like there is outsourcing of Flickr
customer support to (presumably lower paid) third-party (or possibly off-
shored)

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.

~~~
Isofarro
Yahoo has only two main approaches to dealing with user-generated content
moderation:

* 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.

------
arctangent
I was a very active participant in the GNE [1] project created by the Ludicorp
team before they went on to make Flickr and followed their progress closely
for a while. They sold to Yahoo for what would probably pass as a pittance
these days - I seem to recall a figure of $30m being mentioned.

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...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2147-stewart-butterfields-resignation-
letter)

[3] <http://www.glitch.com/>

------
iskander
Like several other people here, flickr is one of the few web services I pay
for. It's hard to imagine that it's not profitable. So why does Yahoo treat it
so poorly?

~~~
haunted
Maybe they simply don't consider it profitable enough?

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.

~~~
leoedin
If they'd innovated when they really were at the peak of photo sharing (2007
maybe), then they could have easily captured those markets. As it is,
_nothing_ about flickr has changed in 5 years. That's a generation in internet
terms. I couldn't find an exact number, but any user of Facebook knows that
they've had at least 3 or 4 major facelifts in that time, along with a number
of smaller component changes.

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.

~~~
_delirium
It's a bit cynical, but as a Flickr user I'm somewhat happy that it's stayed
the same over the past 5 years, because I'd give it a 90% chance that if Yahoo
_had_ initiated a major overhall, they would've screwed up something major
that I liked/used.

------
koevet
Flickr "added value" lies in its huge community of photographers, the forums,
the favorites and the comments. I could move my shots from Flickr to any other
service tomorrow but it will take a very long time to reboot the community.
This is actually very sad and I hope this does not mean the beginning of the
end for Flickr,

------
aristus
I used to sit next to those folks. Salt of the earth. WTF, Yahoo. They made
Flickr human.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> Salt of the earth.

What does this expression mean?

~~~
mixmastamyk
salt of the earth - noun, an individual or group considered as representative
of the best or noblest elements of society.

<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/salt+of+the+earth>

------
ja27
This post makes an important general point. Developers and management don't
appreciate and respect upper-tier support people nearly enough.

------
chrismealy
If you have photos on flickr, get them off NOW.

~~~
jlarocco
That was the first thing to pop into my mind.

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?

~~~
creativityhurts
You can export them with this Python script
<http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/> or with Bulkr (paid
version)

~~~
joelhooks
I paid the $30 for Bulkr Pro, and am currently grabbing all my photos for
migration to OpenPhoto (with my own s3 account).

~~~
jmathai
Just created this no more than 10 minutes ago :)

<https://github.com/openphoto/export-flickr>

~~~
pronoiac
There's only the header of a README there. Where's the utility?

~~~
jmathai
I was serious when I said I _just_ created it. We're working on a set of
export utilities and Flickr is the first. Expect something to be functional in
2 or so weeks.

------
mtjl79
It's called a "sandwich". It's the right move to make, emotions aside.

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.

~~~
minimax
If they were tech support, which is what it sounds like from the post, then
they would be at the bottom of the org chart, not in the middle. Not that that
excuses your stupid sandwich analogy, which is fucking stupid.

------
four12
I have looked at several other photo hosting services (Smugmug, Zenfolio,
500px, etc.) and while they all do a competent job at hosting photos, it is
the communities that have developed on Flickr that I would miss.

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.

------
chucklarge
Etsy would be very happy to hear from any of these folks. Reach out to us or
me.

~~~
timcederman
For other HN folks, why the interest from Etsy - I know of at least 2 ex-
Flickr folks who've gone to Etsy (including Kellan, Flickr's architect).

------
aresant
I would love to see a Flickr balance sheet.

"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?

~~~
harryf
A little story about Flickr...

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...

~~~
lkrubner
Interesting. We had a very similar experience with Technorati in 2007. We were
working on a system for controlling pingbacks based on the "authority" ranking
that the pinging site had, and we wanted to use the Technorati "authority"
rankings. We wrote to them many, many times, using the official contact page,
we offered to pay them, and then, we heard nothing. Getting desperate, we
tracked down the company email addresses of some of the people who work there,
and wrote to those. And we still heard nothing. We came back to the idea 3
months later and wrote again. And again we heard nothing. We came back to the
idea 5 months later, and wrote them again, and again we heard nothing. When a
company says "Commercial use of our API requires payment" and then you say "We
would be happy to pay, please send us an API key" and then they do nothing,
then you can tell that company has abandoned their API effort, but they've
forgotten to take it down. And that leads to frustration.

------
hellweaver666
I've been a Flickr Pro user for a number of years now, but this year I didn't
renew my subscription. The reason was that I realised, I didn't need all the
social crap that goes with Flickr. If I want to share photos for viewing with
my friends and Family it pretty much happens on Facebook now as they don't
'get' Flickr.

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.

------
monkeypizza
flickr has added almost nothing new in about 5 years. However, I use it more
than ever - with autopager it's incredible. I also wrote a greasemonkey script
which replaces the default size image with the large size image on page load
(and removes spaceball.gif). It's way better.

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.

------
danso
I'm a pretty big Flickr user, but out of all the online services I've used, it
is one of the most un-innovative. Very little has changed since I signed up
for Pro 2 years ago. Given Yahoo's other problems, this is only a sign for the
worse.

~~~
danso
For anyone in my predicament, here's a handy comparison guide I found while
looking for an alternative:

<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...

~~~
kmfrk
If you are looking to just host your own and don't feel the need to directly
interact in a community, OpenPhoto looks really interesting:
<http://theopenphotoproject.org/>.

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.

------
isaacbowen
So not to overtly threadjack, but I built <https://secure.fracken.com/> as a
lifeline for anyone who feels the need to jump ship from Flickr - sends
everything to Dropbox, first 100 photos are free, everything else is a flat
USD$1/batch.

It's an MVP, but it works. Seemed apropos.

~~~
latchkey
While I appreciate what you've done here, it doesn't solve the real problem
that I think that most people would have.

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.

~~~
isaacbowen
It exists solely for the transition - if Flickr's the only source for these
photos, then (assuming you have a sufficiently hefty Dropbox account) this
tool will at least get those files safely back in your hands. What you do with
them afterwards is of course up to you, but this wasn't intended to solve a
migration problem.

~~~
latchkey
Transition to what? What problem does this product solve?

~~~
brlewis
The photo-sharing site I made, OurDoings, will pull photos from a shared
Dropbox folder and delete them after posting, allowing you not to be limited
by your Dropbox quota. Hopefully someday lots of photo-sharing sites will have
this option.

------
X-Istence
I just re-upped my subscription for another two years. Hope I don't regret
that.

------
geneticmaterial
i really wish flickr would get bought off of yahoo by google. i enjoy its
interface.

~~~
Drbble
First thing Google would do is ruin the UI in the name of "unification" with
Plus.

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.

------
georgieporgie
I subscribed to Flickr for three or four years. I think it's the only Internet
service I've ever paid for. I stopped paying because I realized that 1) my
friends only check Facebook anyway and 2) they did _nothing_ to improve the
site or tools in the years I subscribed.

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.

------
Volscio
Flickr deadpool?

------
alecco
With webhosting at 10 bucks per month i don't see the need.

