I feel like I’ve lost something. Flickr recently had a redesign but it doesn’t feel like home. It hasn’t for a number of years. Is it due to the design changes or the lack of a community feeling I lost there years ago?
I look around at the new photo sharing sites. 500px, Instagram, Google something something, Facebook (kinda). 500px isn’t home. It’s nicely designed but I don’t feel at home there. Instagram is fun but not home either. It’s a stream of photos by people I follow, which you could argue Flickr is too but Flickr used to have a sense of community that Instagram doesn’t appear to have. Also I look at Instagram with confusion. I don’t understand how someone can get 71,000 followers without posting cat photos constantly and without tagging. Are they bought? How do you even do that? I don’t understand Instagram in that way. Flickr you could sort of understand that people played a game of add to 1,000 groups and toy with tags to get into Explore. I see some people play that on Instagram with tags but when someone hasn’t done that but has a huge following I wonder. Then there’s Facebook. Facebook I keep at arms length. I don’t trust what they’re doing and again it doesn’t feel like home in the way that forums used to. Too high a noise to signal ratio perhaps?
But I definitely feel like I’ve lost something over the years. A sense of community, belonging, being part of something like a forum. Maybe I’ve been burned too much that I keep everything at arms length. Maybe the missing community is all my own doing. I dunno. What I do know is the Flickr redesign is nice, but it’s not home so I’ll probably only see it in passing on my way to Twitter. Maybe I’m simply tired of constantly social engaging on a dozen platforms, but thats another post for another day.
(Photo is supposed to suggest something about that ship having sailed)