>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?

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.

Absolutely. There's a huge trend of websites redesigning and shuffling around just for the sake of doing it, and in the rare cases where you can still access older interfaces (I'm thinking of GMail here) it's totally arguable that the old ones are better. If you have a service that works well, staying the same is nothing to be ashamed of.

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.

For me, flickr works because I can drag photos that I've processed in Lightroom to the jfriedl publishing service, hit publish, and they go up to flickr where I can share them or people can just stumble across them. I have no doubt the discoverability is better than if I put them on my own site and I do indeed have people contacting me from time to time to use a photo for something or other. (And doubtless, many uses that I don't know about.)

It's not a big thing but the very modest price, the low friction, and contributing to the commons in however small a way work for me.