I've never posted anything to Flickr that I can remember though I do use the site for exactly the reasons the OP states. It is great to look up photographs from old lenses I am interested in, or for film types. Some of the old images from back in the day are really good too. Until Instagram it was the defacto place to put images. Of course everyone just dumps their over processed digital crap on there now, but that stuff can be avoided. Hopefully the people that posted all those old images haven't posted more than 1000.
It makes you wonder though what the internet will be like in twenty years or more. A lot of the early internet stuff is disappearing. Imagine if Flickr just up and disappeared. The chumbucket fiasco was a taste of what I mean. All of a sudden forums all across the internet were words only.
Agree. All this makes a lot of good sense, also comments from jtk (#34 and #35). Nothing in this world is free and in the end we pay for everything. Flickr stayed largely gratis for much longer than most but they too now want their due. this is reasonable - far more so than churnbucket with its dubious scheme to hold its users to ransom, which seems to have backfired, which pleases me no end. Bloodsuckers sting, but a good slug of bleach does them in.
Like PR James, I've never put anything on to Flickr (only in my password-protected web site, now temporarily disabled due to technical issues). I've used Flickr almost from the start, partly to read interesting photo blogs, mostly to follow links to the work of photographers I find on this and other photo sites.
As for Flickr, it probably reached its heyday in about 2009 once the bloom of the once-fresh digital photo wave had started to fade. Back in 2005 when we were mostly all new to digital photography Flickr was wildly exciting to me and full of, I thought, new, fresh, experimental creative photography. Fifteen years later it's mostly a big photo album full of digigrap party shots, baby pictures, cute things Pussy or Puppy did last weekend or the 1,894 images Bozo Bumpkins shot on his last Sunday walkabout in the Dandenongs on his way to the cake and coffee parlor in Monbulk or Healesville, and hasn't the nous to properly edit out all his crappy-happy snaps and keep only the best so he posted the lot. Nobody much cares (not even BB) cares to look at any of it but it fills up the 'net and eventually the universe...
For my cynicism I rejoice at seeing so many good photographers on Flickr and I like to look at their imagines, usually in my hotel room at night when I'm traveling in Asia. It's good entertainment, it's free and I learn new tips and tricks to improve my own image-making skills. So it's also useful.
The new owners of Flickr were upfront in announcing what they would do and they gave everyone time to delete or pony up a little money to keep them online. Those unwilling to cough up the cash can get around things by opening new accounts and doing a little work to delete and move or repost their images. If I had to, I would pay up for a while and start deleting and moving my pics to new addresses at my leisure.
So many cling to the belief that because it was free for so long, it isn't worth anything now. this is wrong, as thousands found out with the shipbucket saga. You would think they had learned from that fiasco and won't let it happen again with Flickr (and likely others in future), but human nature is so stubborn - and so blind.