alt Hacker NewsHey, owner & CEO here. Reading this now, but AMA.
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I think I asked Nathan B all of my important Flickr-post-your-aquistion questions at a 7CTOs event way back in 2019, but that was a lifetime ago. Do you make enough money off my Flickr Pro subscription to keep it going indefinitely? I'd rather pay you then funnel more cash to AWS or Google for cloud backups, but I'm not a professional photographer, so the actual SmugMug products aren't valuable for me and there's always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business.
Hey, long-time Flickr user who migrated to Google Photos for a somewhat specific use case. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/perardi)
I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7
And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.
Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.
FYI - I loved reading your blog posts ~20 years ago about how you were building your server infrastructure (hardware, dedicated, onprem, etc).
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
whats the current censorship level?
I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes.
Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think.
Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.
Hello. I just logged in for the first time in a while and it asked me to verify my age, despite the fact that my Flickr account is 22 years old. I've been paying for Flickr Pro as long as that has been possible, if I remember correctly, my Flickr user number was ~620. Surely, with an account that's 22 years old you don't need to hand my personal information to Peter Thiel?
To some degree I only still pay for it out of nostalgia for what it was. I stopped using it when it started trying to upload my entire camera roll every time I opened the mobile app - Flickr was never about storing all your photos on someone else's server, it was about curation and community. It somewhat lost that as phone photography got more popular, and instead of empowering users to do that directly on their phone, it presented itself as a mere backup utility. The app seems to be entirely non-functional now, no content loads at all for me. Flickr's failure to move with the rise mobile photography feels like its biggest misstep - age verification for an account that is 22 years old though might actually convince me to stop paying. I'm not using it, the mobile app is broken, and now it wants to hand my PII to a third party.
Have you considered offering free storage for freely licensed (cc-by & cc-by-sa) works?
I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.
Hey, it's Saturday night and I'm on Hacker News woot woot.
I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?
Just finished reading. Glad they captured what we're doing - photography & community - and what we're not - algorithmic feeds & privacy violations.
We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).
AMA.