February 12th, 2009

I know I haven’t posted a lot lately. Or, actually, in the last two years. But, while coming back and suddenly ranting like a lunatic might seem a tad gauche, I’m going to do it anyway.

I have to admit that, until recently, I was quite fond of Flickr. It was a simple, clean interface that did exactly what it was supposed to do with, minus the “video” thing, wasn’t cluttered with too much feature creep.

But this week I’ve seen a ridiculous, out of control side to Flickr that I never expected to see.

Someone I know had her account set to “moderate” by Flickr due to a user complaint and the way Flickr handled it was preposterously juvenile. And doing a little bit of reading to find out why they’ve done this, I found that it’s actually pretty common for Flickr staff to be petty and juvenile.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I have no problems with tagging images as NSFW. It’s in the best interest of Flickr’s users that the site stay off of corporate block lists because of public-accessible NSFW content.

No, what I have issue with is how Flickr goes about dealing with problems with customer content. Flickr handles questionable material with an extremely heavy hand, often outright deleting acounts without warning and without offering users any kind of remediation. This is where I have a serious issues with their policies.

Rarely do I agree with people who rant that a company is destroying itself by annoying users. Usually those kinds of complaints are from people who believe that companies owe them something just for being customers of theirs and their complaints are more entitlement than actual complaint.

This time, however, I firmly believe Flickr is heading toward self-destruction. Here’s five points where I think Flickr’s gone horribly, horribly wrong:

1. Flickr can, and will, terminate your account without any explanation - Although the story of Shéhérazade is an extreme case, and Shéhérazade herself has been abusive of staff in the Flickr forums, the case still stands as an example of the problems with Flickr’s way of dealing with things. Here you have a user who’s been shut down in the past and was asking for help from Flickr’s staff to avoid being shut down again, when along comes a Flickr staffer who jumps the gun and shuts her down preemptively. Seriously, read the original story. Why is someone who is actually asking for help from Flickr being punished for doing so? And as far as the accusation that some of her photos were not her own, why was Shéhérazade not given the option to defend herself? What possible justification could Flickr have for deleting first?

   More importantly, can I copy an image from your account to mine, then flag your image and report it as stolen and have your account deleted without you having a chance to defend yourself? Yes, the Flickr staff is telling us, yes I can.

2. Flickr offers no explanation or help for customers looking to get out of the Flickr doghouse - If you do somehow manage to get a notification from Flickr instead of being deleted outright, don’t expect any help from Flickr as to why you’re being warned or even what you need to do to avoid such warnings in the future. Allow me to cite from Flickr’s form letter which it sends out to people who’ve been moderated:

   To demonstrate that you understand what content in your photostream is not appropriate for the “safe” areas of the Flickr site, we ask that you moderate all the public, private, and friends/family content in your photostream within the Flickr Community Guidelines.

   In other words, you have to guess what you did wrong and if you don’t know then Flickr is not going to waste its time explaining it to you. You have to “demonstrate” that you’ve suddenly developed a sense of what’s decent and pure that’s identical to that of the Flickr staff. And if you can’t do that then tough nuts to you.

   This isn’t a business way of doing things, it’s an elementary school teacher way of dealing with problems. Flickr is basically sending its users to the corner to “think about what they did” and expecting them to use their psychic powers to come up with the answer. They’re acting like a petulant high school girlfriend and expecting you to know how you’ve offended them without any clues.

   The first notification a user receives that they’ve broken the rules reads

   Use your common sense about whether or not your content is suitable for a global, public audience. If the answer is no, you need to filter it from public view.

   And this vague tut-tutting is all the information you get about why you’re being warned. There’s no identification as to which images are in violation contained in the email. None at all. It’s assumed that you already know which images are in violation because it’s assumed you did it on purpose.

   Flickr is starting with the assumption that you have a flagrant disregard for their policies.

   Now, at this point I should point out that you can ask for a “review” of your account if you’ve had your account status changed instead of being outright deleted. Don’t expect that review to be informative, however, as you’ll most likely get this:

   Examples of content in your photostream that needs to be moderated:

   Examples. Not a list of which images were part of the original complaint, not a list of images in your stream that are in violation, just one or two examples of what could be considered in violation. As I said, Flickr assumes you already know which images of yours are naughty.

   I know, you’re thinking, “but Steve, Flickr doesn’t have the time to go through your account and let you know each and every image that’s in violation!” Which is a great argument except that, as we’ve already seen, they’re going to review each and every image in your account if you ask to get un-moderated.

   The notification continues:

   You should also know that if we receive another report about your content or conduct, it’s very likely we’ll terminate your account.

   Two complaints and you’re done. No review, no options for you. If two people don’t like you, you’re done.

3. Flickr staff gets defensive when customers complain - Google for Flickr and you’ll find lots of pages accusing them of “censorship”, which is absolutely retarded. Flickr is not a government agency. But read a little deeper and you’ll find links into Flickr’s Help Forum. Read it and be alarmed at the number of times “Heather” gets fed up with a thread and closes it for no other reason than she doesn’t like the direction its headed. She actually seems incapable of not getting defensive when Flickr is accused of impropriety. Heather completely fails to understand that, when people are argumentative with them, they’re argumentative because Flickr has destroyed months, sometimes years of work and connections on the part of users, users who in many cases have paid Flickr to keep their content. Many photographers use Flickr as a sample portfolio. Having that work at risk of being removed without a trace and without recourse on the part of the customer puts a lot of people on edge. Heather, rather than address these concerns, bristles at them and takes her Flickr ball and goes home.

4. Flickr’s terms of use are maleable, and become whatever the staff needs them to be - Read Flickr’s Community Guidelines. Notice anything missing? It’s the definitions of what’s acceptable and what’s not. The Guidelines uses phrases like “If you would hesitate to show your photos or videos to a child, your mum, or Uncle Bob, that means it needs to be filtered.” That’s a pretty broad stroke. My Uncle Bob drinks and watches wrestling and “Trailer Park Boys”. Your mum goes to church and believes that “stem cells” means “dead babies”. By not defining “unacceptable”, Flickr has left themselves the out of manufacturing violations to use to support their actions.

   In fact, Flickr’s own application of its made-up rules has been shown to vary from month-to-month and week-to-week. Photos that were included in Flickr’s own Explore by Flickr staffers have later been marked inappropriate by other Flickr staffers.

5. Certain Flickr staff have been shown to be heavy handed in their application of the rules, yet Flickr defends them - Poke around complaints about Flickr long enough and you’ll find that an overwhelming majority of complaints centering around Flickr over-moderating accounts involve one name - Terrence. But don’t mention this in the Flickr Help Forum. Dig up threads in the Help Forum that name names and you’ll find a lot of people saying “My account was deleted by [NAME REMOVED BY STAFF]!” In other words, Heather is, again, getting defensive and removing Terrence’ name just because she doesn’t like that people are pointing out that is he who is behind a majority of account closures and moderations. In one Flickr help thread where someone accused Terrence of acting out of line, Heather responded with an extremely defensive, “Don’t accuse Flickr staff of going rogue!”

   Well, Heather, if Terrence hasn’t “gone rogue” and started applying the rules with puritan zeal then the person he’s getting his orders from certainly has. Is it you?

Sadly, there’s not much in the way of an alternative to Flickr. Yes, there are photo hosting websites, but none of them have developed the access and following that Flickr has. They’re using this as leverage against their own users. Play our mind games or we won’t let you play at all.

Of course, there are a lot of Flickr users who say “I’ve never had a problem with them”. Neither have I. But doesn’t it concern you that the first time you do have a problem with them is the time your account is deleted without warning?

Now, heavy-handed tactics from web sites is nothing new. I myself recently had a run-in with a division of the Gawker network in which it was pointed out to me by one of the editors that they’re Gawker and they’ll do whatever the hell they damn well please thank you very much. That’s not going to kill Gawker, their editors being dicks. It might cost them a few readers, but they’ll make them up fairly quickly.

But this tactic of Flickr’s, this punishing users first and then refusing to listen later, will hurt Flickr, and hurt them very quickly.

No, they’re not going to close because of this, but they’ll definitely lose a large portion of their high-quality contributors, contributors who are providing Flickr with the material that brings people to their site. See, unlike Gawker, Flickr feeds on user contribution, and driving users away, especially those who are giving you the content that gets hits, is not going to help them. No, this won’t be the literal end of Flickr, but they’re going to lose huge portions of their market.

And if there’s anything Yahoo should be intimately familiar with, it’s the impact of losing market share.