flickr is now reaching a point of absurdity when it comes to performance. They are now paging photos with comments at 100 comments. Some photos have 300 comments. The comments are filled with images and they take sometimes 10-20 seconds to load the whole page. This reminds me of web pages in 1994 when the web was new and bandwidth was pencil lead thin.

So why not just do what other social sites have done and give the viewer some control over whether they see comments on photos, and, if they do, how they see them?

First fix and a huge savings for everyone involved would be to set a preference to not load comments when viewing photos, and load them on demand if desired. The page you load would then be a photo, its metadata, and a comment box. That would be zippy. You want to see the comments? Click on “view comments”. Duh.

Second fix and another big savings would be to offer different forms of comment viewing. For example, see the comment author’s name ony, or comment author and group. Comments could then be loaded in an ajaxian manner of requested.

Loading a hundred image-laden comments per page is a major pain in the arse for myself, other flickr users, and for flickr itself in terms of bandwidth and horsepower. Why not make these simple changes that other social sites have had for years now?