Pre-2013 Flickr was a really fun place and I want to go back to there. So I love the initiative and direction here.
However, I lost the thread of the argument at the penultimate paragraph. If the “vast majority” of current free users will still qualify, why will this change the community in a significant way?
The users in the free tier are now given a hard ceiling of 1,000 photos, so it would seemingly dampen their future ambitions to use Flickr as a social stream or bulk archive.
I get that, but apparently they weren’t hitting that limit anyway. So is this a purely psychological tactic? That’s fascinating...kind of leveraging the psychology of an “unlimited” cellular plan but in reverse.
It might be psychological on Flickr's end too, as developers no longer have to propose new features that have the requirement of scaling with a high-resource-consuming free tier.
But that's my point — how is the resource consumption changing if hardly anybody is kicked out? Is there a tiny number of people storing a terabyte of photos each? But if the number of people is tiny, how can that be affecting the community feeling?
However, I lost the thread of the argument at the penultimate paragraph. If the “vast majority” of current free users will still qualify, why will this change the community in a significant way?