Nobody Shares Photos Anymore

Photo sharing is becoming a dying art. People don’t share photos as they used to. What we see now, the photos shared on Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat Moments are a tiny fraction of their glorious past in the early days of the Internet.

One main reason is that people’s attention span has been reduced significantly, since the rise of TikTok. People across three generations are addicted to short videos. Playing videos on flights, in trains, on subways is emerging as a shockingly acceptable social behavior in China. Unlike texts or images, watching videos requires no mental effort. You just watch, passively. Wall·E of 2008 already depicted this then-futuristic scene perfectly. Video is eating the world of text and photo.

This wasn’t the case 20 years ago, when the Internet was a lot more interesting.

I remember in those days, after a trip I would routinely share an album of 40~60 photos with friends and family members. I wrote a caption for every photo to describe not only where and when the photo was taken, but also why it was taken and how I felt about it. I would even compose an acrostic, knowing with full confidence that some of my playful friends would pick up the cue and actually solve the puzzle.

Photo sharing then was a fun social game, or even a form of art. It was great story telling.

Flickr represents the pinnacle of this golden age of photo sharing. Its rich features from 2006 would put Instagram and RedNote of today to shame. It offers highly sophisticated functions that allow me to share individual photos as well as photo albums. I can assign different access levels to families, friends and everyone in the public domain. I can even collaborate with friends (on the same trip or event) to create a shared album collectively. Everyone, from casual web users to professional photographers, was using Flickr.

Flickr sold itself to Yahoo! in 2005. It started its inevitable downward spiral toward oblivion, as was the fate for most other Internet startups after acquisition by a giant Internet portal.

As the landmark iPhone 4 hit the market in 2010 and kicked off the age of mobile Internet, photos and videos exploded exponentially. It became too costly for any company to host a pure-play photo-sharing service. Even though the Internet industry went through an infrastructural change driven by the new superpower Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), which provides elastic computing power on demand, this transformation didn’t quite help the photo-sharing business. The law of economy of scale and diminishing marginal cost doesn’t apply for photo/data-sharing services. Consumers are not willing to pay enough to cover the rising storage costs.

Another deterrent for photo-sharing was the growing influence of social media giants and our escalating dependency on them. From Facebook, Google, Apple in the US, to WeChat and Alibaba in China, they want their users to spend time ONLY on their platforms and will do whatever it takes to prevent them from leaving their ecosystem. They own the data (photos) created by the users and don’t want competitors to be able to use those digital assets (the recent lawsuit between Strava vs Garmin provides an ironic footnote). Photos can only be shared with other users living in the same digital fortress and this social graph will no longer exist if users leave this fortress for another.

These companies have become very powerful. They relentlessly expand the boundary of their digital fortress and conveniently replace the original concept of “the Internet” with their own platform names. They own Turing winners and computer language inventors. They also own all our data, from chat history, blog articles, to photos and videos.

The open Internet where Flickr thrived 20 years ago and when everyone could talk to others freely, is long gone. We’re now all prisoners of some kind. Frankly, some of those prisons are quite comfortable. Once you figure out the basic routines, you can go pretty far in this sprawling empire and do many things.

Another reason for the death of a photographer is that it’s difficult to sell photos for profit. Serious photographers need to make money from their landscape or portrait shots. There used to be many stock photo sites that would act as marketplaces connecting buyers and sellers of high definition photos - stock photos. This liquor bottle photo hosted on Dreamstime brought me a consistent cash flow since 2015. This Pismo Beach photo has been my top earner by far. I think I shot them with a Leica.

That’s when I still cared to toy with SLR cameras and constantly tried to up my own game with each outing. In today’s world that’s dominated by generative AI images and videos, the road to cash flow has become a lot harder for hobbyist photographers. I’m surprised that Dreamstime actually still exists.

Despite all the odds, I refuse to surrender.

I think there could be a way to resurrect that past glory. There must be a way for independent content creators to thrive. AI has been a game-changer. It just needs to be used the right way.

I’ll explain how this is possible in my next post. Stay tuned.

Published in Digital Sovereignty Chronicle - Breaking down complex crypto concepts, exploring digital sovereignty, and sharing insights from the frontier of decentralized technology.