Weekend Humor isn’t meant to be taken seriously. So don’t–you cry baby!
In a move that stunned nearly everyone, Flickr became the Oprah of the online photography space when it gave everyone a free terabyte of space. The expansion did, however, cause some restructuring. Namely, the pro option is no more because professional photographers aren’t a thing. If you want no ads, you can pay $49.99, and if you want an extra terabyte and no ads, you can pay $499.99. What fun. There was blowback, however, in the form of kittens, food, and selfies to the point where Flickr said, “No mas.”
How would you spend a billion bytes? Some might stock up on films and music, while others install a bevy of new programs. If you’re 14-year-old Bridget Higgins, you spend a billion bytes on your face. She had heard about Flickr’s update from a photographer friend of hers who uses flickr to put up cool photos of his stuff taken with his Nikon Coolpix from the mid-2000s. When she learned the difference between mega, giga, and tera, she pounced on the redesigned service.
By the end of the day on Wednesday, Miss Higgins hit her limit of one terabyte with roughly 2,354,123 photos of her face. “This flickr thing is like so, so amazing because now I have a place to show the world my face,” Bridget told us over the phone. “My face is like so pretty, and now everyone will get to see it. My face is pretty, right? RIGHT?!” We hung up the phone after that.
Bridget was not the only one who took full advantage of the terabyte. There was a surge in cat photos as most single women, who list their felines as dependents, had a new outlet to show friends their pretty kitty. One woman in Yonkers had several 2 TB external hard drives full of photos of her 47 cats. We tried talking to her over the phone, but we couldn’t hear anything over the sound of hairballs and cats in heat.
With the surge in photos from non-photographers, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer decided to give Flickr back to the photographers and end the free terabyte offering. The new design will stay in place, but the $24.99 pro option is back on the table. “We realized that there are in fact professional photographers, and by opening the floodgates to everyone, we drowned out their work,” Ms. Mayer told us over the phone. “It was a silly move that we thought would encourage more sharing, but our servers were overloaded with absolute crap. To photographers everywhere, I’m sorry.”
At least we’re getting the pro badge back.
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