I think Flickr still has the chance to rescue itself. There are still some vibrant communities. Say you want to learn/discuss wedding photography, or maybe you want to learn about portraiture photography, or staged photography, there are very active and content rich communities.
What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities. Right now, there are a few sticking points:
-Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments.
-Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause.
-Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups.
-Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images.
-A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way.
LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience. Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy issues, etc.
What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities. Right now, there are a few sticking points:
-Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments.
-Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause.
-Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups.
-Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images.
-A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way.
LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience. Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy issues, etc.