
How Yahoo Killed Flickr (2012) - uptown
https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet
======
eveningcoffee

      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."
    

It is kind of amazing that it did not occur to them that the users were the
one who created this index and would have continued to do so.

~~~
wmeredith
Agreed. The hubris in that statement is almost palpable. They're essentially
saying the didn't give a shit about the cause of the result they were buying.

~~~
devoply
Welcome to humanity. I doubt Facebook cares a lot of its users as well. They
are living off the network effects of an incumbent monopoly.

------
whistlerbrk
* make it impossible to sign in: check

* 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.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I want to use Flickr again but I don't have access to my Hotmail(!) account
anymore. I don't even recognize the area code for the number they have on file
for me.

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.

~~~
dchest
Sorry, but it doesn't seem to be their fault, it looks more like the usual
case where the user doesn't want to take responsibility for their actions and
blames customer support for it.

~~~
goldenkey
Yahoo has a really crummy recovery system compared to the big 5. If things
really go wrong, Google will let you recover your account provided authorized
forms of identification -- obviously forgery is an issue and Google is very
thorough with regard to this (like checking if the account is still being used
by the regular IPs or has gone inactive.)

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.

------
pwenzel
It's 2017 and I still use my Flickr account because I can't find an equivalent
service that maintains the level of photo metadata, privacy settings, and
archive capability that Flickr does.

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.

~~~
rhizome
If you want to know how it would feel if it was more consistent, the Flickr
(partial) redesign was done by the same guy who did the Chow(hound) most
recent redesign.

I don't think much of him.

~~~
acdha
I hesitate to question anyone's abilities before you know what constraints
they had to work under. Designers often get the blame for internal management
chaos, and a lot of executives feel qualified to make major design decisions.

~~~
user5994461
A dev and a designer require the same primary quality: being able to manage
the scope and the conflicting requests from the environment.

~~~
acdha
Well, yes, but they also have a job to do. If whoever is in charge mandates
something your options may be to do it or find another job, and not everyone
is financially comfortable walking away.

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.

~~~
user5994461
Relax. Noone is getting fired for asking what's the purpose of a feature.

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.

------
patrickaljord
Yahoo did not kill Flickr, Facebook did. Turned out the secret sauce to
putting photos on the internet was the social interaction with your friends,
not a bunch of photograph amateurs obsessed with lens quality (not that
there's anything wrong with that), but that's not what regular folks care
about and Facebook really took this aspect of the web by storm.

~~~
beedogs
I'd say Instagram did a better job of killing Flickr.

~~~
nxsynonym
Agree with this. Outside of the normal complaints wedged against Flickr,
people moved into a mobile-first world and left Flickr in the dust.

If flickr wanted back in the game they'd have to jump in the mobile market and
re-design their traditional web platform.

------
rs86
"Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the
code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to
follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come
art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something
brand new from nothing but an idea."

Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers
write stuff that add nothing?

~~~
paulcole
>Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers
write stuff that add nothing?

You used 2 sentences instead of 1. Why?

~~~
wmeredith
You took the words right out of my mouth :)

> Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?

I also found this amusing.

------
yesimahuman
Regardless of the missed huge opportunity here, I actually love Flickr the
product. It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography. That's
not nearly as big of a market as consumer and beyond, but I'm glad Flickr
exists as-is.

~~~
munificent
> It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography.

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.

------
papabrown
Way too many examples of this over the years. First one that I can remember
off the top of my head was AOL buying Global Network Navigator (GNN). Great
resource. AOL took their dial up subscribers and killed the website.

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.

------
roadbeats
Del.icio.us and Tumblr is also acquired and killed by Yahoo. Also Geocities,
like it's hard to serve some static files.

~~~
rubayeet
Del.icio.us was sold to AVOS systems. It changed hand a couple of more times
and now owned by an entity called 'Delicious Media'. In its current state, it
is almost non-functional. The bookmarklet for tagging links does not work, API
and RSS feed are deprecated. I knew it was time to get out when I found the
data export function to be broken. I wrote a scraper[1] to get my data out and
export to some other service.

[1]
[https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866c...](https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866cfd171)

~~~
dv_dt
Do any bookmarklets for tagging links work anywhere? It seems like most
services simple javascript bookmarklets were shut out by increasing security?
At least I know the bookmarklet that I used for pinboard became nonfunctional
in Firefox then Chrome for example.

~~~
Deimorz
The pinboard bookmarklet seems to work for me in Firefox on almost every site
except Github (where the CSP blocks it).

~~~
dv_dt
Well huh, so it does. Some maybe it was just a temporary gap that I fell
into..

------
Lagged2Death
I know that "killed" and "murdered" etc. are hyperbole, but I wonder if they
might be toxic, bad hyperbole.

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.

------
iamthepieman
Last time I tried to use Flickr was when they upped (or removed?) their
storage limit and I was looking for a way to move several old hard drives
worth of photos to the cloud.

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).

~~~
tommoor
People that have an internet connection but no phone number? I think you're in
the minority of the minority there.

~~~
detaro
Have none? Probably not that many (although Flickr probably is comparatively
interesting for a large part of that demographic). Willing to share with a
random service on the other hand...

~~~
criley2
It's a security measure which protects the unlimited storage feature, among
other things.

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.

~~~
bigbugbag
Phone number requirements is a very effective tool of surveillance and
surveillance capitalism but it's also incredibly effective at keeping
potential users out of your business.

Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for
verification purpose.

~~~
criley2
"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...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-
ranked-by-number-of-users/)

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...?

------
Nition
This link doesn't seem to work from Australia and New Zealand, it redirects to
[https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US) which is
just the main page.

For anyone else who can't read it, here's a Google cache version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULA...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULAztHYJ:gizmodo.com/5910223/how-
yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz)

I'm not sure whether it's intentionally region blocked or if the site is just
stupid.

~~~
bigbugbag
Gizmodo is stupid, and automatic redirect due to localization is even more
stupid.

------
tomc1985
How is flickr dead?

* 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.

~~~
Fangatafoa
Myspace isn't dead either. I mean I can log in and there are people on there
I'm sure.

~~~
petre
No it's just much like Detroit, only without criminality.

------
vermontdevil
Don't forget Yahoo Pipes. Another great idea killed by Yahoo.

------
EGreg
I think yahoo lost for a simple reason: it was really hard to make an account.
You had to fill out tons of forms.

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!

~~~
toast0
> Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough.

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...](https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=174311)

~~~
EGreg
I should have said smartphone apps

------
shawnee_
Recently heard a talk by Thomas Friedman about how the year 2007 was a really
interesting "inflection" year wrt all kinds of technology.

 _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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in-a-
hurricane.html)

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.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
_Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007_

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.

------
fizzychicken
I've had a Flickr pro account since 2006. I'm not that into photography, I use
it as a means to share pictures with extended family around the world. For
that purpose it does pretty much everything I need it to, I don't use any of
the 'social' aspects of it. What I do hate is having it tied to a yahoo
account which I don't use (other than signing in to flickr) and would rather
close, and that downloading a dump of all of my photos for my own backup is
not a simple task. If I could find something that would cost me the same
amount (30$USD ish per year) that offered the same level of privacy control I
would probably switch.

~~~
MrFoof
I believe Smugmug's basic plan may be what you're looking for. They've been
around for 15 years (and I believe some of the founder's articles have been on
HN), so should be in it for the long haul.

~~~
fizzychicken
I like what they are doing at that site and some of the options they have
available but the ability to use access controls only kicks in at the power
user level which is $70 per year and that's a key thing for me.

------
yannovitch
Well, I agree with lots of the points in the article, but I am one of the user
who never used Flickr for their social capabilities, all their groups which
could allow you to get discovered by pro photographs, or as a gallery, but
mainly for their unlimited storage and their (a bit horrible tbh) api.

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 __.

------
scosman
Note: this article is from 2012

------
narrowrail
It seems to me that the Yahoo! brand was perceived as destroyed, and simply
milked for as much short-term profit as was possible. Security was completely
sacrificed, and there was never any vision for building brand loyalty despite
having highly-loyal properties (e.g. tumblr/flickr/fantasysports/finance).
Long-term value is not built with short-term thinking.

~~~
emmelaich
Yeah, the Yahoo home page reminds me of the old advertisement laden Altavista
site.

It takes 9 seconds to finished load and always sends my computer fan on.

------
ChuckMcM
And the question remains, what becomes of Flickr in a post Verizon world?[1]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-
mov...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-moves-next-
for-flickr)

------
molecule
(2012)

~~~
spcelzrd
For those wondering why a five year old article is on HN today, you can thank
Taylor Swift:

[https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/85669833453010944...](https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/856698334530109440)

------
ceejayoz
On a related note, the iOS app has basically stopped working. Whatever APIs
are driving it behind the scenes seem to be up maybe one out of four days. The
rest of the time you just get a spinning icon.

Time to move my photos off, I suppose.

------
systems
i rely on flickr as my mobile photos backup should i be worried, and look for
alternatives

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

~~~
raamdev
Dropbox also has a pretty good mobile photos backup feature if you're a
Dropbox user.

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.

~~~
exodust
Why would your grandchildren want to view several thousands of your photos?
Just find the best ones, and backup to multiple locations. Print the best of
the best and make a physical album. Scribble some notes under the photos with
an actual pen. Your grandchildren will love it. By doing that you are giving
importance and meaning to the images, which otherwise would be absent in an
ocean of dropbox archives.

~~~
bigbugbag
Hwo would your grandchildren be able to view outdated digital file format that
no one knows how to use anymore ?

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.

------
archonics
The day I was forced to sign up for a yahoo account was the day they lost
me...after finally finding a crappy yahoo user id which was sooo much less
cool than my three letter initials flickr id I got when it was in beta, I
failed the recatpcha 4 times, cursed them a dozen times, and said goodbye
forever.

------
petre
Oh man, they put ads in between my photos. You would see some three photos
then an ad. That's when I removed all of my content, my account, everything
(try doing that on fb).

------
srott
I'm curious what was the story of Dabble DB, and why they killed it.

------
tedmiston
(2012)

------
kpennell
From the bloody knife pic to the snark...this article lost me at paragraph 1

~~~
zem
it was a very good article, but yes, the bloody knife pic was offputting

------
sverige
Now, can someone please tell me who is fucking up Photobucket? It has been
impossible for me to login to my account for a couple of months, even though I
know the credentials are correct. I've been using imagen.one instead, but
that's not what I would prefer.

