I observed the following:

- People don’t take kindly to *any* critique or criticism of their shots. You pretty much waste your time making any comments beyond “awesome shot” and you hardly ever get anyone else critiquing your own. As far as Flickr being educational from the comments, it fails completely.

- Comments *are* a currency. People seem to have become addicts.

- It has quickly degenerated into mutual backslapping. I would say all of the “best photograph” groups serve no purpose other than to allow people to brown-nose each other. The pictures that get “awards” rarely ever earn them on actual photographic merits.

And the worst remains with the group invites, when a popular photo is followed by lots of little gifs- and not even decent quality ones, but awful, cheap-looking things.

Use of capitals throughout are also annoying, and forced comments made from adding a photo to a group that requires them- this is a reason why group rules can sometimes be bad. People are only commenting in order to stick with the commenting rules, making them pretty meaningless.

Maybe it helped if there were different levels of faving. Like ‘WOW / /GREAT / NICELY DONE / GOOD TRY’.

I try not to end up with tonns of faves. So I am faving only when a picture meets ‘certain criteria’, though I’m still not shure what these exactly are…

PS hope you like my comments on your pictures

I agree that perhaps the true measure of whether someone likes my photo is their ‘fave’ing it, although I wonder if it means any more about the quality of my work than the comments do… I doubt that. Popularity never never really was a measure of merit or effectiveness –even in a “photography community”, I say.
My own policy for faving is that I Rarely do… only for those images which are outstanding to me in a particular way or which exemplify a principle I like to stand for. So in my case, a fave IS a full-on Vote for your image… Whether for Your intended reason or not.

I have empathy with your choice. Some of my flickr friends are, indeed, often frustrated with the whole Explore/SecretAlgorithm workings, and they want the Exposure, they say, more than the inane comments, really… and there’s no arguing that Explore gets a exposure bump for them. I’m not sure to what end, but, they want it, so I don’t argue with them on that point, at all, anymore.

As for gaming the system… maybe that process worked for you… my friends have experiences/conclusions that seem to negate your method, really, for automatically getting into those first two pages of Explore.. . maybe it gets you into the 500 Interestingness “cream”, but Explore pages seem to be a different animal, in some ways, and the algorithm that determines it seems to shift every so often. That’s when I hear the wails of my friends. ;-/

That brings me to my reason for leaving commenting turned ON:
my flickrfriends.
I am glad I met them and I can say that it would have been less likely for me to have met them if it were not for comments. I know there’s flickr mail, and that’s a powerful option. To my way of thinking, though it’s like adding a “Do you Really Mean to Communicate?” hurdle to the point of my being on flickr… sharing of my images And myself.

I do my best to leave only comments that are honest feedback (Not Critique, usually).. often something about the photo that I notice as especially interesting to me or really makes the photo for me. Sometimes I comments specifically in the face of those who are finding fault with a photo I admire, or seem to be missing the point. I don’t mind the inane commments, though I am getting fewer, lately… but I like leaving the door open for others, who Also don’t have the kind of time I do for writing full emails, to leave a thoughtful or personally playful comment and to just keep in touch.

Now, I regularly have a skype conference call with a small group of flickr buddies and am always glad when that rolls around, since they are now treasured friends. I don’t have “enough” of those.

Why one man got fed up with comments on his photos……

I’ve noticed some of that at Flickr as well. I also dislike the gaming, but I don’t use that service enough to consider turning comments off. I’m still trying to decide whether to upgrade or just ditch Flickr. Haven’t made up my mind yet.