Was there ever a community like, say, Reddit or Facebook Page. Flickr has become just professional photographer's closet. Unless you link the photo on FB/Instagram/Twitter, not that many people would go there to look for photos. Do you go there every time to find a photo? I do go there occasionally to look for open license photos to include in my presentations, but that's about it.
Flickr could be made really useful if Yahoo provides a "make a photographer website" with Flickr backing as photo storage backend. Imagine I am looking for a wedding photographer nearby. I need to browse their work, want to know their rates, and even book time. Perhaps also an option to "sell my photo for use" and even a way to search for illegal usage of photo (it is a concern for many professional photographers).
> Was there ever a community like, say, Reddit or Facebook Page. Flickr has become just professional photographer's closet.
Flickr had a relatively active blog that would showcase photos relative to special days (e.g. Pi Day photos). On top of that, there was Flickr Explore that could be thought of as the front page of interesting photos.
And in terms of communities, anyone could make a community. So if you were a plane spotter, you could start (and there are), communities dedicated to that. You live in Boston and want to have a Boston Photographers Group? Done! Wedding photographers? Here you go:
There were plenty of communities on Flickr and that's one thing I feel like hasn't really filled the void. 500px and VSCO exist, but they're a bit too focused for most amateurs or casual photo snappers.
Flickr for many was this soup of personal vacation photos, along with people visually documenting their non-photographic hobbies, and photographic-focused photographers. Their photostream was the lifestream for many. I met a handful of friends from Flickr not because of photography, but because they seemed like interesting people.
Perhaps this also speaks of social media now--we're fluent with the medium and now carefully polish our online identities. But in this process of self-curation, we've lost what makes us real and interesting.
Like you, I go to Flickr to look for Creative Commons licensed photos to use in presentations. (Which I do attribute.) For me, that's super-useful as I give a lot of presentations. But I mostly grew out of browsing for photos just because I want to look at interesting photos.
I do find flickr a useful place to upload my selected photos. I can display "slideshows" from there, share them with friends, etc. But, if flickr didn't exist, I'd easily enough find some other way to do the same thing whether self-hosted or otherwise.
Flickr could be made really useful if Yahoo provides a "make a photographer website" with Flickr backing as photo storage backend. Imagine I am looking for a wedding photographer nearby. I need to browse their work, want to know their rates, and even book time. Perhaps also an option to "sell my photo for use" and even a way to search for illegal usage of photo (it is a concern for many professional photographers).