Photoshopping Community @ Flickr

September 30, 2008 10:09 AM

"The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate -- I don't think it could sustain itself in the meantime. Anyway, I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own." —Ruling the global masses, one image at a time. The art of moderation as practiced by Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr.

Flickr's Community Guidelines

posted by Toekneesan (28 comments total)

"I'm a nice Canadian girl. I'd never even heard of a Dirty Sanchez when I started here, much less seen a photo of one."

Yahoo: AOL ReLoaded.
posted by benzenedream at 10:22 AM on September 30, 2008

If you had a bottle of "spirit of Flickr", what would it taste like? Vodka or absinthe?
posted by GuyZero at 10:25 AM on September 30, 2008

If you had a bottle of "spirit of Flickr", what would it taste like? Vodka or absinthe?

Boone's Farm
posted by kingbenny at 10:27 AM on September 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

"Selling stuff is bad. Selling stuff you've made is less bad. Swapping stuff is less bad. Swapping stuff you've found on the street is worse than swapping stuff you've made."

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called "Overthinking a Plate of Beans" and we'd love to have this added to our group!
posted by dhammond at 10:28 AM on September 30, 2008 [13 favorites]

Surely there are successful online communities where the nice, quiet reasonable voices defeat the loud angry ones on their own. Maybe Ravelry? Etsy? Help me out here, please, if you can.
posted by box at 10:30 AM on September 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

Mostly, though, Champ finds humanity, or at least Flickr's segment of it, remarkably inspiring.

I imagine the people who moderate Digg or Yahoo! Answers don't get the same thing.
posted by chorltonmeateater at 10:31 AM on September 30, 2008

I bet Digg and Yahoo! Answers moderators take one look at 4chan and feel infinitely better about their moderating gigs.
posted by educatedslacker at 10:33 AM on September 30, 2008 [2 favorites]

If you had a bottle of "spirit of Flickr", what would it taste like?

Unknown. You can't get the top off because it's child-proof and there are no directions printed on the lid.
posted by DU at 10:36 AM on September 30, 2008 [2 favorites]

Also, the nice, quiet, reasonable voices often defeat the loud, angry ones in the real world. See: 2004, November.
posted by DU at 10:37 AM on September 30, 2008

Even though lawyer-vexing is a fun and popular sport, I suspect Flickr's twee community guidelines should maybe possibly extend beyond "1. Be excellent to each other" and "2. Party on, dudes!"
posted by Spatch at 10:38 AM on September 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

Wild West cliches aside, total freedom at any entity like this would sink it in a storm of lawsuits, flame wars and gridlocked cacophony

This makes no sense to me. By the same logic, Google should have a moderation team that prunes their search results of anything that doesn't follow their TOS.

For the Internet to work, their has to be a basic infrastructure that everyone builds their own communities and content on. To me it seems silly to treat a site like Flickr or YouTube as a "community" where a normal top-down moderation structure can actually work. Image and video hosting, even with a load of Web 2.0 bells and whistles, is still just as much a part of the basic infrastructure of the web as search.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:40 AM on September 30, 2008

If you had a bottle of "spirit of Flickr", what would it taste like?

absolutely absinthe
posted by ericost at 10:44 AM on September 30, 2008

It would taste like flowers/leaves, dogs/kitties, overdone HDR and hot babes in quasi-arty shots. For the good stuff, you'll have to get to the bottom of the bottle, maybe let it sit upside down overnight.
posted by raysmj at 10:49 AM on September 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you had a bottle of "spirit of Flickr", what would it taste like?

Pepsi Pink'n'Blue
posted by mandal at 11:00 AM on September 30, 2008 [3 favorites]

The commerce thing makes no sense to me. For one, I know I've definitely seen users who have normal vacation/pet/vanity snapshots along with portfolios of their handmade work - they're obviously not using Flickr just to sell stuff, but taking advantage of the full sense of community (and yes, that community can also help them sell things). Are all the users in the CRAFT pool who sell things being penalized?

Secondly, uh, there's an even more obvious flaw. What about professional photographers? They can take a picture of a tree, or their cat, and one could still argue that they're using Flickr for commerce, because even if they're not selling a print of the tree/cat photo, it's still a sample of their work.
posted by bettafish at 11:04 AM on September 30, 2008

haha.

This Web site is blocked by SonicWALL

URL: http://hchamp.com/

Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Adult/Mature Content"
posted by felix at 11:17 AM on September 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

box, Ravelry's got a bajillion forums, each with a moderator or, for big ones, a team. Of course it's no 4chan, but no, the "on its own" part doesn't quite hold up.
posted by clavicle at 11:22 AM on September 30, 2008

The commercial prohibition is pretty strange. I guess I'm not sure about their motivation for it, either; I don't really think that a "commercial user" (whatever that would mean, given that it apparently includes people in Brazil selling used dishware) would use that much more bandwidth or storage than a purely personal user, and those are their only costs. And it's not like they have a "Commercial Account" or upgraded level of service that they're trying to push people into ... at best, all they'd succeed in doing is pushing someone off the site completely. It's kind of an odd stance, I guess.

Also, it doesn't seem to be totally clear whether they just want to stop people using Flickr (the website) for commercial purposes (e.g. people conducting sales using comments and descriptions), or if it's verboten to even put a photo of an item up and then link to that photo from a separate site where you're selling it.

If the latter is really against policy, there are probably a lot of craftspeople and Freecyclers and who knows who else in violation. (Although I'm not sure how they'd get caught, since when viewed from the Flickr page it's just a picture of some neat craft; it's only being sold or traded somewhere else, with the photo as part of the description.)

All their other policies seem like basic common sense, but that one seems odd. I'm not sure what they're trying to prohibit or protect against.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:27 AM on September 30, 2008

Self-regulation isn't impossible. It's just difficult because the tools don't exist (yet).
posted by amuseDetachment at 11:29 AM on September 30, 2008

Remember that whole mess they had with screenshots?
posted by smackfu at 11:47 AM on September 30, 2008

Flag it and move on, right?
posted by educatedslacker at 11:53 AM on September 30, 2008

On a related-ish note, it must be a fairly weird job to be the dude (or dudette) sitting in a cube at photobucket reviewing uploaded videos and images, looking for nudity.

I've always been mildly curious about the legal position the photo hosts put themselves in when their employees view what appear to be underage people in those photos or videos, or if they hold onto the images once they discover them. Weird business.
posted by maxwelton at 12:02 PM on September 30, 2008

haha.

This Web site is blocked by SonicWALL

URL: http://hchamp.com/

Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Adult/Mature Content"

It is pretty hilarious that a stupid site filter blocks one of the most benign websites on the planet.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:29 PM on September 30, 2008

"By the same logic, Google should have a moderation team that prunes their search results of anything that doesn't follow their TOS."

Um... Google actually does this.
posted by oddman at 2:02 PM on September 30, 2008

Heather Champ, Caterina Fake. What's up with Flickr and people with English language surnames?
posted by delmoi at 2:42 PM on September 30, 2008

I have started moderating myself here. I've cut way back (or at least tried to) on my quipyness because, frankly, I am getting really tired of reading other peoples quips when I want to read something interesting and substantive. Even if I have something I think is funny I now ask myself "Would it be fun to read 20 of these jokes" because that is at least how many there will be. I also sit out of a lot of threads because I am really sick of the same ideologues always being in the first 10 comments on every damn thread saying largely the same damn thing over and over and over regardless of what the thread is about. I don't want to be that person. Still I succumb more than I want to and haven't really contributed anything of value here in ages (maybe ever!).

I am getting metafilter melancholy now because the community has grown so large that the people I recognize in every thread are now people I think the site would be better off without. The reasonable posters with expertise and intelligence are drowned out because they post only when they have something worth saying so they never really get a noticeable voice on the site. I can't keep up and I've gotten to the point I don't really want to. Signal to noise has gotten out of whack here. I'd love some more methods to filter metafilter. Maybe a metametafilter with just the good stuff?

Moderation is a big issue with no clear solution.

To me it seems silly to treat a site like Flickr or YouTube as a "community" where a normal top-down moderation structure can actually work.

You need to check out some flickr groups. Take a look at the Birmimgham UK flickr group. They meet every month, photograph community events and each others weddings. Flickr is photo hosting if you want it to be. It is also much more than photo hosting if you want it to be. Youtube on the other hand is beyond me but then I am old and don't have a webcam.
posted by srboisvert at 2:55 PM on September 30, 2008 [3 favorites]

For the Internet to work, their has to be a basic infrastructure that everyone builds their own communities and content on. To me it seems silly to treat a site like Flickr or YouTube as a "community" where a normal top-down moderation structure can actually work. Image and video hosting, even with a load of Web 2.0 bells and whistles, is still just as much a part of the basic infrastructure of the web as search.

That would be nice, except as Viacom is determined to prove with YouTube, the world doesn't work that way. If you don't have rigid control over what content is displayed, you will be sued into oblivion. Napster was also a good example of this. Hosting whatever people want to put on your site is a guaranteed recipe for being shut down.

(I kind of agree that the ideal would be for this not to be true, but it is).
posted by wildcrdj at 4:56 PM on September 30, 2008

Flickr is the only thing on the web I pay for. Through the site I've met a lot of lovely, interesting people. It's helped me develop (apologies for the pun) as a photographer. It's a site where people comment "That's nice" instead of "That's crap". What's wrong with that?
posted by quarsan at 10:22 PM on September 30, 2008