Online communities

Online communities

Caterina Fake has written an excellent commentary on the social evolution of online communities. For those who don’t know her, she co-founded flickr and has been involved in a lot of behind the scenes work in many online communities.

I’ve been involved with many online communities over many years as well and am still involved with many, some big, some small collections of people who hang out in comment threads. There’s something about this kind of connection that works for me, even with the issues of trolls and such. The fact that people are connecting is simply astounding to me and I’ve never taken it for granted.

What happens after Yahoo acquires you

What happens after Yahoo acquires you

But in 2008, co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield both left the company. In 2009, many engineers from the service were laid off or left on their own.

Meanwhile, Facebook kept taking a growing share of photo traffic. Yahoo’s top executives barely mentioned Flickr publicly (and few of them actually have a public Flickr account). Decision-making at Flickr slowed because of bureaucracy.

Fascinating article and comment thread. I highly recommend reading it, whether or not you’re involved with flickr.

I can think of at least twenty of my contacts on flickr who are high end photographers who have left flickr for Facebook. I wouldn’t go that way if I left flickr but the fact that they did is meaningful.