There have been several incidents at the shrine that is the world’s best loved and most popular photosharing site. From humble beginnings at the endearingly named Ludicorp, based in Canada, where the founders delighted in making and improving the Game Never Ending (gne is still in many of Flickr’s urls), the site grew exponentially as the digital photography evolution took a fevered hold among the moneyed computer owning geekocracies of the westernised, developed (sic) world.
When Flickr was bought up by the mighty Yahoo a couple of years ago, many users were vocally perturbed, asking for assurances that if things were to change, it would be for the better. Amid news stories of Fake and Butterfield wandering off into the sunset with wheelbarrows full of dollars, it seemed likely that these things would come to pass:
- greater stability: more servers mean fewer outages, fewer ‘Flickr is having a massage’ messages, or none at all
- increased Americanisation: moving the operation to silicone valley and the associated publicity would bring a deluge of new users from the subcontinent, and with it a change to the open, libertarian Canadian outlook of the place. Expect rednecks, and trolling, basically.
- a degradation of the service: people’s experiences of Geocities, eGroups, and other services bought up by Yahoo.
- advertising. Everywhere.
That much of this has come to pass is not in dispute. Flickr carries prominent Nikon adverts on people’s photopages, and promotes other Yahoo services like Upcoming and delic.io.us. More worryingly, it allows Ford Motors and Ben & Gerrys to engage in aggressive product promotion across the site, even allowing spam-type messages from sellers not in a user’s contact list. That this has gone largely unremarked upon, is astonishing, especially when Flickr has regularly and summarily deleted the accounts of users who in all innocence, link say, a set of camera photos to an eBay listing, or some handmade earrings to their own website.
And yes, there is text advertising on every single page. If you’re a paid account holder, and you’re logged in, you don’t see it, but the overwhelming bulk of users do see it. On your page. It is everywhere, blatantly breaking one of Flickr’s earliest promises.
So, to some of the more recent brouhahas.
1. Changing the urls of our photos
As a response to the everyday bleatings of the moral consumers crying ‘help: somebody stole my photo!’ Flickr decided to make the urls of the individual photos different, depending on their privacy category or permissions. So if you have a photo ’stolen’, you can make it private and the url will disappear from the page of the ‘thief’.
Just to note here, we are not talking about burglars breaking into people’s homes at night having seen a photo on Flickr, and grabbing a large print off the wall, or of people jemmying open desks and filing cabinets to steal negatives. No. We are talking here about people who are vociferously objecting to their tiny jpgs being used on another site (usually via a bit of deft code wrangling using the open API).
These are the same people, by and large, who luxuriate when Schmap or whomever, asks. I suppose they just don’t like not being asked, which is fair enough, but we are seriously not talking ‘theft’ here, are we?
The net effect of this change from a dynamic to a fixed set of different urls for our photos, for me, and probably for many other bloggers, is to make Flickr unusable for blogging photos for other websites. Overnight, Flickr changed the way it coded its content, our content, my photographs. This change was announced without warning, resulting in broken links all over my blogs.
That the service could offer one-button blogging, but then change urls in this adhoc manner, and without warning, made it unusable as a photohost for blogs. Basically, they introduced one feature which broke another. I would link to the help forum where I raised this issue, but tbh there is nothing there worth reading, unless you’re interested in seeing an ugly pile-on against the question, and no reply from staff. No brouhaha there, then.
2. Rebekka
She is one of Flickr’s stars. Comments streams on her photos which regularly run into hundreds, lovely landscapes and portraits from Iceland, and since she’s been around from the early days, she’s had time to garner lots and lots of attention, including winning a job shooting a car advertisement from her exposure on Flickr.
Someone had de facto been stealing her photographs, and publishing them on calendars and printed posters, for sale. That is a materially different matter to people copying a link, and really quite serious. Flickr, however, didn’t seem to think so.
When Rebekka posted about the theft in her own account, understandably it attracted a lot of commentary, some of which was very hostile towards the thieves, which it turned out were relatively easy to identify. So an un-named drone deleted the photograph, with all its comments. No warning, no explanation.
Nobody wrote to Rebekka asking her to remove the offending comments. Nobody wrote to the offending commenters. The photograph was summarily removed. Many days later, Stewart offered an apology. It was a mistake, apparently. We all make mistakes.
We are so very often being told that Flickr is staffed by awfully nice people, just like you and me, who make mistakes from time to time. So if a very high profile, high traffic photographer can have her photograph/s removed without warning or explanation, that isn’t a policy failure, or a sacking offence, or a failure to have a real set of practical options for staff, should this ’stealing’ thing, either real or imagined, occur? No?
3. Thomas Hawk
Thomas wrote about the Rebekka treatment here, and interestingly, you can see the deleted photograph that isn’t there, in the post.
To contextualise this: I like TH. We have had two abortive attempts at adminning groups together, both of which went haywire after some heavyweight sabotage, but that’s another story. He can be a bit of a dick, like the time he tried to buy a very expensive top of the range camera from a bucket shop, to save himself a couple of dollars, and the time he invaded someone’s wedding and took pictures of them, even though they’d politely declined his attentions.
But I do like him, his cheerful openness and I applaud his efforts against censorship and his general articulacy. So when he started Zooomr, a competitor site, nobody was at all suprised that he wandered around Flickr talking about it.
Full disclosure notwithstanding (he started each of his many posts by saying he’s COE of Zooomr), people started the usual pile-on that the redneck, trollish majority of the forum users on the likes of Flickr Central enjoy. Basically, I feel that the man was hounded off the site by a mob mentality and a growing, overt unease from the management that they didn’t want to see any more of him.
The final straw came when he found that staff had been removing his comments from various forums. Again, without warning or explanation. Thomas is a prolific photographer, his streetscapes of his beloved SF are stylish and popular, and his advocacy of Flickr over the years has been considerable and emphatic. There must have been other things that happened, things about which we know nothing, but it’s best to read his own accounts, on the front of his Flickr homepage here.
Read and be amazed. So that is two extremely high profile and prolific Flickr users, that we know about, that have been treated badly by a service they pay for. And the issue that Thomas protested about must vocally, is the subject of the following point…
4. Internationalisation.
Whoopee, Flickr’s team went around the world posting photos of the lovely opening parties, and hopping on and off aeroplanes, all to celebrate: internationalisation! The site had been syndicated or devolved, localised. Offices have been opened in a series of countries, and now it’s possible to use the site in a number of languages.
But what they didn’t say, is the net result of this internationalisation is that users in Germany, ( and surrounding German-speaking countries like Austria and Switzerland) and Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea, might not be able to see many of their own photos. And soon after, this appeared in the Terms of Use (TOU) of these users:
“If you are using a Yahoo-ID from Singapore, Germany, Hong-Kong or Korea you will not be able to deactivate safe search by reason of the Terms of Service in these countries”
Again, in what has now become familiar behaviour from Flickr, no warning and no explanation. And several weeks have passed and still no explanation, although there has been lots and lots of speculation, with German users being particularly angry and vocal.
The general disgust about NIPSA (photos or groups or whole accounts designated by staff as not available in public safe areas) and its consquences for many users, and the move to (largely) user-managed safe filters, meant that apparently Flickr cannot within its current set-up, ensure that children, for instance, cannot see pr0n. But then we don’t actually know that this is the case. We haven’t been told, apparently because IANAL (I am not a lawyer), although presumably a company as large as Yahoo must employ more than a couple of legal eagles? No?
Germans, Chinese, Koreans, Hong Kongers, Singaporeans, were not consulted about whether they wanted this internationalisation, or their photos to be hosted from severs in their home countries, nor were they given notice. Pictures just disappeared. And no, it wasn’t just pr0n. Photos of cats and dogs, artwork, anything basically that hadn’t been approved as ’safe’, whether mistakenly or otherwise, simply couldn’t be seen, even by the account holders.
Censorship? I don’t know whether it’s censorship, according to a strict technical or legal definition it might not be, but that is certainly the net effect. Liberal Germans, whose culture readily accepts nudity and the liberal public display of unclothedness, and whose members have a significant body of work on Flickr, were and still are understandably outraged.
And has there been an apology? No, not really. We who protest this silliness have, however, been told to go away.
In what will be one of my last posts in a Flickr forum, I wrote:
“The unavoidable crux of the matter for us ‘users’, ‘providers of content’, ‘community’ whatever, is that the chief buck-stop for the moment, aka Stewart pro- user, has admitted that he knew in advance that this was/is wrong and bad and he knew that in advance, and that whilst they jollied around the world partying and blogging how marvellous is this new feature, they decided, made that decision, to block thousands or millions of photos. They did that. As an absolute.
And it took 5, 7, 10, however many days later for them to break silence and admit that is what they did.
And here we still remain, weeks later, in I Am Not A Lawyer land, where nobody from the staff says anything of portent, except to bleat and cry somewhat about pitchforks, and hey, if you don’t like it here, please go somewhere else. Really.
So some went off to the French-run Ipernity with their photos, and discovered blogging and chat features and customised homepages. So far it is a delightful, small community of mostly Europeans, many exiles from Utata, a few from my own contact list. No doubt there will be more. It’s one of the more productive side effects of this whole debacle, but there are plenty of other places to go.
5. A grim dictatorship of show-offs
When my real life friend Savvo described Flickr thus, I was pretty shocked that he could be so scathing. Flickr elicits the kind of attachments that make criticism of any kind seem well, just wrong. Brand loyalty combined with a personal pride in one’s own content: a killer combination for retaining an emotively committed user base.
But you know, he is right.
Show-offs? Yes that would be us. We all live to have people see our photographs. That views count is extremely seductive. And the comments, and the faves, and ooooh getting a photo on Explore! See what I mean?
It’s all too easy to get caught up in a frenzy of praise and counter-praise. Someone who regularly says ‘wow’ underneath one of your mediocre landscapes is definitely going to get reciprocal visits, even though they might only be posting drunken cameraphone photos. So what’s wrong with that? Nothing at all.
It’s the ‘grim dictatorship’ part that is problematic. And there are lots and lots of examples of ordinary, nice human beings turning into thread blocking, comment deleting mini dictators, when they are given the tools. And my oh my does Flickr give them the tools. Micro managing a small group of links to photographs, a sub set of a subset of a thing on the internet, must give people a real buzz. Micro managing content meanly and meaninglessly as an attempt to create order, or as a subjective judgement about quality, is prevalent endemic. Everywhere you look people are pruning and preening, banning and bullying, sniping and snarking.
All of this is what will in the following months, be seen to be the tipping points that cause Flickr to not be cool any more. Flickr has truly jumped the shark. But it is the bullying, the controllingness of the grim dictatorship, not the url changes, not the censorship, that was absolutely the final straw for me.
I’ll be clearing the decks over the next few weeks. Already more than 2 thousand photos have been reduced to just over 800, and the rest will be easy to chop, after a few words with people who are holding guest passes. I will be around from time to time to see the shift in some of the readership from the Man in The White suit group on Flickr, to our own collaboratively run weblog, hosted on one of our own servers, with contributions from UK film users. We might also get something similar going for the Angels of the North group, although tbh I’m not holding my breath.
So: Goodbye Fluckr (eloquently mis-typed by a German pro- user). You won’t be missed.
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2 Comments
I like how you call it FluckR sometimes that names suits it perfectly. Nice well thought out post too. Martin :-)
Sad that something that started out so useful has degenerated so much. I think that this is the way of the Web, though, and that it will be the successors to the likes of F that will finally do it right.
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