>Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction loops too but that wasn't the main focus.
Though Flickr does exist (owned by SmugMug). No idea how their finances are. I expect so so.
You're right that community has gone away to a large degree. But I'm not sure how much power Flickr had to influence that other than becoming Instagram--which the prosumer crowd would mostly have hated.
Sometimes the mainstream crowd moves on from you and your choices are to more or less either let them or adapt in ways that aren't true to your vision.
Yes, in this case I don't know. Flickr originally was developed by Stuart Butterfeld (among others) and he for one went on to do another amazing job at Slack. So clearly product was awesome there. Personally for me flickr got super slow and crappy for me, and also deleted my dad's 40k photo archive w/no warning and ignored appeal messages from multiple people on BS charges (He'd scanned an old newspaper article mentioning his father which tripped an auto-copyright system). Prior to that it was the clear market leader. But it basically stopped ever being linked to or showing up later on. So I think Yahoo effectively sped up the decline. It's not clear whether something like insta would always have won. Or even whether instagram is actually even economically ideal right now.
Though Flickr does exist (owned by SmugMug). No idea how their finances are. I expect so so.
You're right that community has gone away to a large degree. But I'm not sure how much power Flickr had to influence that other than becoming Instagram--which the prosumer crowd would mostly have hated.
Sometimes the mainstream crowd moves on from you and your choices are to more or less either let them or adapt in ways that aren't true to your vision.