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by brianvan5155
3658 days ago
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Tumblr's founder is strongly involved in the product decisions there. Prior to the Yahoo! acquisition... there were still a ton of head-scratchers in product, marketing, and operations over there. Staffing rumors indicated the young founder built a very close team on the executive side & had a number of sympathetic early investors on the ownership side. These are not inherently evil people, but they were allowed to impose terrible, deep mistakes on the staff and users for a very long time. No one was in a position to stop the unforced errors, not for years. Which is why Yahoo! was a fitting acquirer. (The sale to Yahoo! probably prevented the platform from foundering) The core product is still extremely useful to the web (especially because it's free). The demand for such services, and a capital market that rewards any kind of operation as long as it's acquiring ~u s e r s i n t h e d e m o~ - it gives a very long runway to digital publishers like these. But 9-10 years is a long time to be around without a stable business model. And, as a very worrisome problem, you would not be able to persist your user data or your established URLs if the platform foundered. A shutdown of Tumblr would be a terrible single-day source of Internet linkrot. But, same for Flickr, which is a much more admirable (and longer-lasting) product run by capable people but faces the same existential threat. Sad, because Flickr should have been Facebook (eventually). |
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I don't know. Flickr is optimized around sharing photos (at full resolution if desired) to a broad audience. There is a largely optional community angle but a lot of us barely participate in that.
I have a short list of things that I wish flickr did better and there are doubtless things it could have evolved into without harming the store/display-photos use case. But, although it's been pretty stagnant I'm honestly not sure what more I really want it to do.
I agree it would be very unfortunate if flickr were to either shutdown or do something like turn off non-paid accounts. I find it a useful source of CC images and I am contacted from time to time by people wanting to use photos of mine.