I know that it’s like comparing apples and oranges but I’ve been thinking of this issue quite a while now and although I have more questions than answers I thought it would be nice to put my unstructured thoughts here and hope for an interesting input.
Although both completely open to all, and there’s virtually no barrier to entry on both YouTube and Flickr (apart from indecency issues), it is fair to say that when it comes to beauty and aesthetic experience, Flickr is by far superior to YouTube.
Let me give you a quick random example. Search LIFE on both of them and this is what you get on YouTube:
And this is what you get from Flickr.
The point I’m trying to make is that YouTube has no equivalent to Flickr’s interestingness. I’ll get back to this point later but let me raise some points on the differences between still photos and videos.
- Traditionally, photography as a form of art always had this intrinsic aesthetic qualities and purpose, while video-art (back in the 60s-70s) was more about self-expression, anti-establishment, anti-aesthetics etc.
- We consume / experience video and stills in a completely different ways, historically and culturally, collectively and personally. For example, one might say that pictures, by their very stillness are somewhat narrower in their purpose and functionality.
- We therefore have different expectations altogether from video and still, e.g. while we expect a photo to be beautiful or enchanting, we expect video to be funny or amazing, to name but a few examples). Again, from purely aesthetic point of view, we expect more from photography.
- From a User-Generated-Content perspective, it is obviously easier to produce a high quality photo than a video. Mainstream technology enables users to produce pretty amazing photos and as far as I can tell there is no equivalent video software to Photoshop.
But beyond all that, and pardon me for discussing the differences between video and still in the most superficial manner, it is that interestingness (beautifulness? f**king-amazingness?) functionality of Flickr that makes it so aesthetically superior. Now, I’m sure that proportionally there is as much junk (or completely un-interesting) photos on Flickr as there are low-quality videos on YouTube, but it’s this subtle, (amazing I should say)implicitly generated interestingness that miraculously manages to separate the wheat from chaff and to provide us almost immediately with access to the most beautiful photos out there (and there are over 230 millions ‘out there’).
I tried to understand how exactly this works and I learned that:
“Interestingness relies on the natural activity on and traversal through the Flickr site. Its implementation is subtle, and a photos interestingness score depends on putting a number of factors in a blender: the number of views, the number of times a photo has been favourite (and by whom), the number of comments on a photo etc.â€
In YouTube, on the other hand, the system of rating is more explicit and while there are similar criteria (top rated, top favourites, most discussed, most viewed, most linked) none of these enables you to find the best quality videos out there - and not only from aesthetic point of view. Surely, there are amazing things on YouTube, but it is harder and harder to find them. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that there are, I believe, more professional photographers in Flickr’s communities than there are professional directors on YouTube?
Whatever the reasons, and I’d love to hear some other opinions, my take is that YouTube doesn’t give the users the tools to generate and find the most beautiful or the best quality or the most enchanting videos as Flickr does and so from a user experience point of view, (my own of course) exploring Flickr is much more enjoyable than exploring YouTube.
And lastly, all these musings made me realise that YouTube has a much stronger viral element to it while Flickr has a stronger community and self-exploration allure to it (think when was the last time you’ve fwd a link with a photo from Flickr as oppose to YouTube link)
…..Apple and oranges???
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