How Flickr polices 2.8 billion photos | Hacker News Reader

How Flickr polices 2.8 billion photos

sfgate.com

37 pointsbrowser4118 comments

Great article! What struck me was how difficult it is to automate such "policing" tasks and how much work is put in to keeping a community on track. I'm always trying to automate things but I guess in this case it's not so simple.

I was hoping for an insight into some cool algorithm they use, instead I get a piece of puffery.

"... I was hoping for an insight into some cool algorithm they use, instead I get a piece of puffery ..."

If you want to read about the precise, analytical technology that by and large has been solved - yesterdays news then try Cal Hendersons blog ~ http://iamcal.com/talks Hendo has some excellent talks on massive scaling, unicode filtering, how to build cheap & fast, etc. If you want to read about the messy, yet to be solved problems that could really use a technological hand this is the type of article you should be reading.

Once the most of the easier technical problems are solved you are left with the hard ones to solve ones. Well written stories like this one about those "messy, hard to predict humans" and their complex interactions in Web Apps as big as Flickr are unexplored territory. Read here for more on this thread:

- http://thomashawk.com/2008/10/use-swear-word-in-private-emai...

- http://digg.com/arts_culture/Potty_mouthery_deletion_at_Flic...

- http://yaniv.golan.name/blog/2008/09/22/you-may-or-may-not-b...

"The idea is to sell the stuff -- a clear violation of the company's no-commerce rule."

You can't post pictures of stuff to sell? That's what half of craigslist uses flickr for.

"To roam Flickr is to wander through crooked teeth, local politics, nesting osprey, birth, spaghetti, divorce and every other aspect of existence."

And wonderfully interesting it is, too. I've spent ages, on and off, refreshing http://www.flickr.com/photos just watching the world go by.

Note also http://www.flickrvision.com/ is also quite good for watching the world go by, in a slightly different way.

Killer article, thanks for posting...

a few thoughts:

this guy sounds like he comes from an english/journalism background.. heavy on the words, light on the substance.

there is virtue in brevity

tl;dr

Yeah, I liked the story (I'm a words guy) but was surprised people on here did, since most are anti-"words for words sake."

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