Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff

http://nolancaudill.com/2012/01/30/the-front-line/

by alexleavitt • 14 years ago

203 106 14 years ago

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.

ja273• 14 years ago

It's the only Yahoo product I've spent a dime on. In fact, except for Netflix, I've spent more on Flickr than any other online service and I'm a cheap bastard.

That said, I did downgrade and stop paying them last year.

ja273• 14 years ago

I guess I should say that the reason I gave up on them is because of their layoffs and stagnation. I lost faith in their ability to survive.

haunted2• 14 years ago

You've summed up the alternatives pretty well. I wanted to move from Flickr to 500px, but I feel like my Hipstamatic snapshots simply don't belong there, considering the caliber of talent on display there. I ended up settling for Instagram, even though I'm not too big on it.

sp3324• 14 years ago

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.)

msbarnett7• 14 years ago

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.

mahyarm2• 14 years ago

Does it choke on uploading your entire photo collection at once? I bought a flickr pro subscription, but getting my photo collection up on there reliably was like pulling teeth.

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?

joebadmo2• 14 years ago

Why recommend a Flickr replacement that has all of the same potential pitfalls of Flickr? In this context (HN) in particular, OpenPhoto seems like the best alternative: http://theopenphotoproject.org/

dxbydt• 14 years ago

Shameless plug: We've been using smugmug for the past 8 years. My wife's an amateur photographer, & she's been posting a daily ( a jpg shot the day before) every single day for the past 7 years. With zero marketing, we've sold over 20,000$ worth of merchandise ( photographs, photos on greeting cards, photobooks etc) & gifted free smugmug accounts to few dozen photographers. Amazing, amazing website, cannot recommend them strongly enough. They also do RAW & HD Video. They do phototours & have monthly photo contests with hefty prizes ( we won a few - a $5000 prize on a self portrait), strong smugmug communities in several cities. Downside - no adult content. http://vandanaphotography.com

sern• 14 years ago

I've never been able to take them seriously with Comic Sans in their logo.

webwanderings• 14 years ago

Flickr is not the only last Yahoo product, people still use Yahoogroups (I do) and it seems to be working...on autopilot may be!

eftpotrm2• 14 years ago

Flickr is good, I agree (speaking as someone with two separate personal pro accounts) but I think Yahoo has more in the arsenal than that.

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.

ilamont• 14 years ago

Long-time Yahoo mail user here (it's actually hard for me to admit this; I've noticed in software/tech circles that Yahoo increasingly has a stigma attached to it, not unlike AOL in '90s.)

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.

mtjl79• 14 years ago

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.

unreal37• 14 years ago

Do you think it has anything to do with flickr being a "mature" product, with very little new risky development going on? When a product doesn't change much from month-to-month or year-to-year, perhaps senior support staff are no longer needed? Just a thought.

minimax• 14 years ago

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.

Volscio• 14 years ago

Flickr deadpool?

ja273• 14 years ago

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

chrismealy• 14 years ago

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

jlarocco• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

I'd go further and advise people not to trust any online service as the only storage for their photos. I can understand using a service like Flickr as your offsite backup solution in case of HDD failure, house fire, or whatever, but why on earth wouldn't you also keep local copies even if you thought the online service had a bright future? Disk space is incredibly cheap.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

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.

martey• 14 years ago

The essay explicitly seems to suggest that are not Tier 1 support: "Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members."

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.

Isofarro• 14 years ago

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.

wpietri• 14 years ago

> In-house Tier-1 support is a luxury they can't afford.

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.

aresant• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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...

bradly• 14 years ago

I had the exact same experience. At my last startup webuilds a social publishing tool used by multiple fortune 500 companies. We tried to get a commercial API for months, but never heard anything back. We sent email, filed support tickets, but nothing. Eventually we gave up and the companies we serviced ended up just publishing pictures to Facebook and Twitter instead.

lkrubner• 14 years ago

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.

bad_user4• 14 years ago

I had the same experience with LinkedIn - sent them an email that I want access to their API and in return I received nothing.

tha-dude• 14 years ago

As far as Yahoo's search API (BOSS) is concerned, their product management has been helpful and straightforward to communicate with. They allowed us to bend the TOS our way and approved a special use case.

iskander• 14 years ago

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?

haunted2• 14 years ago

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.

justincormack2• 14 years ago

Or it is a cash cow and we are funding the rest of the crappy empire. Time to stop subscribing I think.

leoedin• 14 years ago

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.

georgieporgie• 14 years ago

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.

aristus• 14 years ago

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

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

> Salt of the earth.

What does this expression mean?

mixmastamyk• 14 years ago

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

dmethvin• 14 years ago

> 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.

isaacbowen2• 14 years ago

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.

latchkey2• 14 years ago

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.

isaacbowen2• 14 years ago

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.

danso2• 14 years ago

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.

danso2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

koevet• 14 years ago

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,

arctangent• 14 years ago

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...

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

four12• 14 years ago

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.

alecco• 14 years ago

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

chucklarge• 14 years ago

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

earl• 14 years ago

chuck: fyi, your email address is not public. You have to copy it into the about area if you want other users to be able to see it. Other than that, AFAIK HN has no way to contact users.

timcederman• 14 years ago

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).

geneticmaterial• 14 years ago

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

Drbble• 14 years ago

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.

X-Istence• 14 years ago

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

monkeypizza• 14 years ago

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.

hellweaver666• 14 years ago

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.

Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Support Staff

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