Waller Street [ 1 | 365 ]
I posted my last photographs on Instagram the other day, and included some text regarding that decision. So far, only a few people have commented (two of whom I know in real life thanks to Flickr), which doesn't surprise me in the least. It's indicative of the site's soul, I guess, or perhaps more accurately, its lack of soul. Scrolling and tapping the heart button (or not) is the norm, which I wouldn't really consider interaction. I rarely have gotten comments there in the ten years or more I've used the site. As I've complained before, Instagram has never come close to replicating the "social" media site Flickr was in its heyday, although I suspect it never was intended to be, and it most certainly was not after Facebook purchased it.
This morning, I decided to scroll through my contacts' photos with the plan of commenting on some in order to get back in the habit of doing so, rather than merely clicking on the star-favourite button à la Instagram. The very first image in my feed was a beautiful photograph taken of a church on a foggy, snowy morning with a quadcopter, so I clicked on it to comment. What I found, however, was pretty much what took a lot of joy out of Flickr many years ago. Nearly all of the comments appear to be bot-like, and include links to groups where the commenters either saw the image or were promoting. To the right are all the groups (twenty-six as I write this) to which the photographer had added the photograph. I typed out a comment that I wanted to leave, but chose not to.
Flickr screenshot
When Flickr was probably at its height (for me, anyway), someone got the great idea—and by great, I mean NOT great—of creating awards for "outstanding" photography or some such on the site. I don't recall now how exactly what went down, but I believe a group was created and others could nominate your photo(s) for what was called the Flicky awards. In the discussion section of the group, a template was posted which you could copy and paste into the comments of photos you wanted to nominate, and the template included HTML code which added flashy, obnoxious animated GIFs (pronounced JIFFs, by the way... hahaha!) to the comments, and soon these ugly things were all over the place. It SO diminished the Flickr experience. I recall, though, that the person who created the "awards" disappeared from the site, along with the stupid-ass Flickys. Nonetheless, the posting of templated comments to photographs continued unabated.
Also at about the same time, Flickr had been sold to Yahoo! and in what was probably an effort to monetize the site for that company, a feature known as Explore, was created to highlight photographs that had become popular. Many people (including yours truly) gamed the system in order to get our photographs into Explore, although for me and a handful of friends, it was the satisfaction of gaming of the algorithm we were after. Regardless, as people's photos began appearing on the Explore page, comments were flooded yet again with templated comments that were accompanied either by an obnoxious glittery GIF or some other sort of unrelated image as a matter of giving congratulations for having appeared on the Explore pages.
And so, my first attempt to dive back into Flickr hasn't yielded much joy, but I will persist.
Aquatic Cove [ 3 | 365 ]
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Note: Most of what I've claimed here is based on my memory from close to twenty years ago, as well as after a rather lengthy hiatus from Flickr.
