When I used it, all I remember is that 90% of comments were sparkling banners saying "YOUR PHOTO HAS BEEN AWARTED BEST FLICKR OCEAN SUNSET AWARD MAY 2010! CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR GROUP! JOIN JOIN JOIN!" to the point where it interfered with anyone trying to have an actual conversation.
Which was a shame because outside of the enormous volume of spam they had a pretty good thing going.
I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy?
OTOH I have no idea if they're profitable or not.
It's fashionable to bash on flickr because it's "languished" and, one redesign aside, hasn't moved a whole lot in a long time. I've certainly taken casual swipes at them myself.
However, the truth is that--while I can imagine some features I'd like--it works pretty well and has a lot of great photography. At the end of the day, it's entirely possible that I wouldn't like it if they were constantly taking the site in new directions because social or mobile or big data or whatever the current hype is.
I haven't been putting any of my photography online for a couple of years now (aside from sharing to friends on Facebook), but the thought had cross my mind recently. It's a tossup between hosting them on my own site or going somewhere else where it can be "social" and more importantly, more broadly visible.
Flickr decided for a long time to not prioritize the best photo display possible and limited photo size and wouldn't offer things like black backgrounds.
And now I may get an infinite less number views, I don't have to deal with the comments, and photography is no longer associated with gamification (when do I post this for the most views to hit explore, etc).
Flickr has a bit of a "look" to what is popular, and while I'm big on good photo processing and the history of the dark room, what makes it today is often too processed, too HDR, and so on, and playing the "game" is not something I'm interested in.
In the early days of Flickr, people DID look more at all the photos in groups they posted to, and that was pretty great.
Getting more people into photography is great though - just shouldn't be about numbers.
But (much like Reddit) the smaller communities were a lot more sane. And (much like Reddit) it was easy to create new communities - groups with memberships in the dozens or hundreds were infinitely better and actually useful for getting feedback and sharing your work with people who gave a damn.
So, the mass groups were pretty shit, but there is a thriving mass of smaller communities there that are quite pleasant and useful. (Again, much like Reddit!) - and competing services largely haven't cloned this or offered an alternative.
500px doesn't do small niche communities - there isn't really a concept of a "community" besides "the whole userbase", and as a result commentary on photos there is exactly like the big Flickr groups - all noise.
Smugmug targets specifically portfolio hosting and presentation, which it does very well, but it has minimal social components.
The only service - oddly enough - that seems to have attracted small photography communities is Google+. Weird.
