Flickr forever
blog.flickr.net
blog.flickr.net
From what I understand, free users now only get to store 50 photos. Any more, and they're at risk of being deleted. I've been with Flickr since 2006-2007; this is an extremely surprising move.
Flickr at least allows NSFW work, which is an essential part of culture. That invites all sorts off problems, obviously, and restricting it to pro accounts sounds like a fair compromise. It's better than the Facebook empire, again, with its Disneyland vision of human life.
Flickr has, to this day, an API that lets you do almost everything at scale. I've used it quite a bit and my free account never ran into any usage limits. Compare to twitter, where you can barely start without a credit card on file. Or Instagram, where API is a four-letter word.
I joined Flickr then they gave everyone 1Tb for pictures, I became paying customer, but when I saw people leaving Flickr and my groups getting empty days after the announcement, I left too.
For some reason in mid-2016, Flickr locked my account. I mean, a hard lock. Couldn't login, public photostream was "account locked", the whole thing. My photostream was pictures of airplanes, random street photos, and general middling-quality randomness. Nothing NSFW, political, or otherwise.
I contacted Flickr support and after a few days finally made it through to an email exchange with what I assume was a live person. They said that the account was under a "support lockout" and there was nothing they could do to release it. No reason given, just a "support lockout". That was the last I heard from them, ever. They stopped responding to any emails or other support requests.
Sad, really, as I enjoyed some of the groups there.
Imagine if Reddit said NSFW content will stay, but you need to have Reddit premium to access it.
This move seems like common sense to me. The question you’re asking is really whether you can view this kind of content without a paid account.
I don't know, I still feel saddened about alot of yahoo changing for the worst. Geocities, Search and the groups and group rings were some of the best features of it.
But guess that's what happens with social media companies. Community changed forever and what remains has to be super generic and bleak to survive.
It was def geared towards a younger audience. I made many a friend from Answers onto Messenger/email penpal, it was a great funnel from one Yahoo service to another - back in the heyday Yahoo really was a walled garden that "didn't" feel like a walled garden, many services to tie you in the ecosystem but it didn't feel as insidious as adtech/google is today.
If anything, it was a great learning curve and introduction to General computing as you still had to be somewhat technical - flickr, know how to edit photos, metadata, and more. Geocities, html, css, design photos, psd html templates, etc.
The User Experience was quite the limitation, and I'm sure looking back via rose tinted glasses makes it seem glamours, but it's really something concerning when you remove all friction and barriers and allow Everyone to participate.
On StackOverflow, people are generally nice, but ask a very newb question and not with a mentor and you'll have a bad experience. The other fun one was Expert Sex Change, - no wait, Experts-Exchange. The later was great for technical questions if you knew to scroll down past the paywall.
tl;dr it was good in the beginning, around 2010-11 yahoo answers really went down, alongside most of Yahoo but was probably because it was so successful.
> Photographers have long faced bans and deletion from nearly every online photography community for creating or sharing the “wrong” type of art. We’re rolling out changes to Flickr that welcome all photographers to discover, share, and interact with photography, period. Photographers who craft and create work that might be considered risqué by some will have a safe place online to interact with one another, share mutual interests, and put their art into the world without the fear of it being removed or them being banned entirely from the communities they love.
....isn't in conflict with their stated rules page on restricted content? Here's just some stuff from their guidelines.
> Don’t use hate speech. Flickr has a zero-tolerance policy towards attacking a person or group based on, but is not limited to, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.
How do you resolve this contradiction? It must be suffocating for you to participate here.
But sure, yeah, Nazis can fuck right off, agreed.
HN is pretty liberal in terms of the discussion
it allows to take place and the breadth of ideas
and viewpoints it allows to propagate
I suggest browsing with showdead on to see how much crap gets silently removed from HN by the mods.
Offtopic remarks are mercilessly downvoted into oblivion by the community.
To be clear, I think the HN mods do a fantastic job. I think HN is one of the clearest examples of why strong and talented moderation is essential for high-quality discussions. Their work goes largely unheralded because they maintain a low profile, in multiple ways.
>see how much crap gets silently removed from HN by the mods.
Consistent with what I've said.
>Offtopic remarks are mercilessly downvoted into oblivion by the community.
Consistent with what I've said.
This is not a counter argument to allowing a breadth of discussion.
How does one allow NSFW "art" but not let their platform turn into just another cheap porn site? Flickr seems to be taking a stab at answering that. Time will tell if they are successful, but I hope they are.
And yet, any time any community enforces any sort of moderation or community guidelines, an enormous wailing and gnashing of teeth in the HN comments. Funny that.
HN has one of the internet's best communities, but it is also possibly the least self-aware community I've ever known.
I find it bizarre that my comment is being attacked for its venue, when HN has never claimed to be the type of venue which I and GP are criticizing for their doublespeak and hypocrisy.
But yes, this is one reason I generally like HN. I can be as unorthodox or devil's advocatey as I like and generally have a decent convo.
Besides, the benefit of requiring pro accounts is that it includes identification of uploaders. They can delegate their content policy to the respective jurisdictions and authorities.
We know they're going to have a line about what they'll host. Just say what it is and save yourself the headache later on.
We know they're going to have a line about
what they'll host. Just say what it is and save
yourself the headache later on.
The first change relates to restricted and
moderate content. (You might call it NSFW, or
explicit, or other terms, but we’ve gone ahead
and defined them for Flickr here.)
Full community guidelines here: https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines/
No, but thanks for the talking down to. I have no problem with them having limits, it's - at the very least - a practical necessity to running their business. Furthermore, for what their business and product are I don't much care what level of control they want to exert.
I mean uncomfortable art. The kind of things that don't fall into their existing categories of "safe to hang in an office", "MPAA R risque" or "fucking".
No, but thanks for the talking down to
The kind of things that don't fall into
their existing categories of "safe to hang
in an office", "MPAA R risque" or "fucking".
Have you ever run a community, or attempted to create or enforce community guidelines? Coming up with comprehensive rules to cover the spectrum of human expression is an absolutely intractable problem.
What about photos of casualties of war? What about historical photos that feature Nazi symbols? What about photos of lynchings? What about art based around those things, particularly when it's steeped in so many layers of irony and subtext that it's impossible to tell whether or not they're actually endorsing evil, protesting it, or something else?
No. I'd just prefer they don't lie in their marketing. Because it always gets walked back to "Well obviously that blanket statement had all the exceptions that were obvious to me at the time but convenient to ignore. Plus all the exceptions we've discovered in the meantime."
>Have you ever run a community
Yeah, but it was a community back in the old phpBB and IRC days of the internet.
I have not been in charge of cooperate communication to a product userbase I've branded a "community."
I didn't find myself having to talk out of both sides of my mouth to merge lofty marketing proclamations with the hard "if"s and "buts" of reality. Because we talked about community standards, it wasn't a decision of what worked for our business handed down from on high. It was what we as a group were comfortable with. What personal tastes are fine to be violated regularly in front of your face? What things they were willing to tolerate if it was contained in a different sub-forum? What can't be there at all etc...
I'm honestly confused - what's twofaced about Flickr's approach?
I just sort of assume any host of user-created content will have some restrictions, so it doesn't feel to me like they are "talking out of both sides" of their mouth when they announce/implement such restrictions.
I may be completely missing what you're reacting to, though, apologies if I'm being dense.
E.g. if you have 100 private photos from 2014, those are still private, but starting today you won't be able to set any other photos as private until you're below the 50 photo threshold.
As we begin to roll out these changes officially, we’ll be communicating directly with free account holders who are affected, including sharing timelines, details, and resources to make sure your account stays in good standing.
suggests to me that they won't be grandfathered in (i.e., will be deleted), as otherwise existing free account holders wouldn't be affected
now it seems they are choosing to be more nude/porn friendly.. kudos. So what happens if you are a pro user for 3 months and part of several nude communities and then you cancel your pro / paying for it? Any nude photos you've uploaded become history?
If I remember correctly flicker actually had a good export option, so that's a plus.
There are some other things you all could do to make it more attractive.. tip jars seem to the way of the currents. mixin a little patreon like functionality with some penthouse promos and such I guess.
I wonder if there could be a way to keep contacts/groups if you leave flikr - like an @flickerrefugees address on a matrix server ID kind of thing.
People are tired of creating connections to have them destroyed from random and changing winds of (often unequal) moderation policies - so give them a place to meet and share that does not also try to silo and keep from connecting even when the meeting place is cancelled. - Then I think you can get your $7 / month no problem.
I was using the horrible Flickr interface to share photos with family. I had about 1500 photos with them, all family. They announced that they were going to cut off access for non-paying customers to anything over 1000 photos. I promptly moved and have no intention of ever going back.
The fact that they weren't capable of implementing the restriction for years, just threatening it, gives them less credibility than if they'd been able to do what they said.
[1]https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/340-billionaires-have-...
> But we’ve been lax in truly defining a space for these photographers, until now. To support these creators, and ensure that their communities continue to thrive, the ability to share restricted and moderate content will be reserved for Flickr Pro members.
What do they mean by "moderate content"? I assume "restricted content" means porn, but the "restricted and moderate content" pairing doesn't make sense if you interpret "moderate" in a straightforward way.
So, reading between the lines, are they reacting to that PornHub fracas from a few years ago by requiring people who upload porn to flicker to identify themselves and pay for the extra moderation effort involved with that?
>The first change relates to restricted and moderate content. (You might call it NSFW, or explicit, or other terms, but we’ve gone ahead and defined them for Flickr here[1].)
[1] https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404064374164-S...
> * Safe - Acceptable to a global, public audience
> * Moderate - Partial nudity, like bare breasts and bottoms
> * Restricted - full-frontal nudity and sexual acts; photos only–videos cannot contain restricted content and are deleted if reported
Regarding this announcement, I think it's perfectly reasonable. But I may be biased since I've been a paying Flickr user since 2005.
No, it prevents free users from accessing restricted content.
Then came the "upload 1000 vacation photos at a whack" people, and general mismanagement. It lost its brand value and cachet, and has been clunking along trying to recapture the magic.
Eventually all "space hungary" platforms like YouTube or Instagram will limit free offers in future. Which is not bad thing. Decentralised, self-hosted solutions would be more practical and big tech control free.