500px Stumbles Badly


After surging in popularity during the past year, the photo-hosting service 500px shot itself in the foot Wednesday when it launched a new format that is being uniformly panned by its viewers as being cumbersome and unfriendly. One long-time user commented, quite aptly, that 500px has "alienated its members," and the problem has been magnified by the site's defensive, sometimes curt responses to user complaints. They seem to have forgotten that many people paid $50 to participate as a premium member, only to find that the site abruptly changed its nature. Those people are entitled to voice an opinion. This brings to mind the ill-conceived Netflix decision to split its mail business into a separate group, which raised such a storm of protest that it eventually backed off after doing considerable damage to itself.

In a nutshell, 500px eliminated the Friends function, which was a very attractive feature to many users. Not only could you quickly see new postings by people you had named as friends, but you  
could just as easily see who had commented on your photos. The feedback, often by people whose opinions you valued, was priceless. People could also leave expanded, more personal messages on your Wall. Now both functions are gone, only to be replaced by a "Flow" feature that mostly shows what photos other members have commented on. It's a random feature, and sometimes it does show new postings by your old friends, but then abruptly it decides to show you something else. And it is so very, very slow. I thought Flickr was slow, but the new 500px format makes an art out of being slow.

There are other problems as well. Despite what 500px says, the sharpness of the photos seems to have dropped. The page also doesn't fit on the computer screen like before, forcing you to scroll back and forth. There is an incredible amount of repetition of images on Flow, and many are cropped in odd ways, such as only showing sky. To top it off, in an age when having a nude pop up on your screen at work can get you fired, images of nudes show up on Flow, regardless of whether you want them or not.

All in all, I think 500px bungled it, possibly because their success in the past year gave them swelled heads. Now they are acting foolishly in response to the protests, which aren't going to stop. They need to realize that their popularity can drop just as fast, if not faster, than it rose in the past year.