So, the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to clean up my flickr account. Retagging, resorting, etc.
I’ve gotten to where I really hate flickr, and I’d totally move to some other site if it didn’t mean basically killing most of the photos on my website for several months time. It’s not even the annoying yahoo! redesigns I hate, it’s the culture. What used to be a nice, supportive photography community has turned into 90% fetishists and pervs.
ALL of my non-convention/costume photos are private now because of this. It really doesn’t matter to me what somebody is into, but don’t drag me into it. I don’t want to know what you think of me, and I don’t to see my photo “faved” next to extremely NSFW photos. And that’s pretty much all flickr is now. I’d make ALL of my photos private if it didn’t mean then no one from my site could see them.
Back when I first started on flickr… 2005-2006ish, I was much more lenient about people adding my photos to favourites, and the kind of comments I let people post. Going through some of my old photos and seeing these comments grossed me out, so I started deleting them. In fact, I decided to delete MOST comments – because commenting plays into “interestingness” on flickr and thus makes them easier to find. And I don’t want my photos to be easy to find. I also severely culled my tags down to the absolute basics of only what I use, so I lessened my search hits in that way, too.
But the problem still remained with favourites. There’s no way to stop someone from “faving” a photo unless you completely block them. No way to delete a fav. And here my photo is spread in 30-40 people’s “favourites” and 75% of the time next to stuff I don’t want to be next to. How in world can I fix that short of deleting the photo?
I found a way. If I turn the photo to “private” – and then, back to “public” – it removes my photo from everyone who is favourited it. It does, of course, hurt the people who have legitimately “liked” my photo, but at this point I’m just done with it all. I’ve been going through and turning everything out of my “popular” section private, deleting comments, and turning back to public. Also removing from every single group. Minimizing.
So that’s where I’m at. After going through all this I’m really not in a good head space. The comments are grossing me out and annoying me left and right, and it’s bleeding over into everything else. This is why I shouldn’t let stuff like this sit, these kind of comments and stuff are bad mojo.