Comments on: Why I turned off comments at Flickr

By: marie

marie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:17:20 +0000

Hmm…well i never get comments even though i have lot’s of contacts…and i comment on lot’s of peoples photo’s and don’t get any back…and i only leave comments when i genuinely really like the photo…and honestly i didn’t think my photo’s are too bad!

By: Raoul

Raoul — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:11:25 +0000

Amen to that, cbn! But this sort of thing plagues photo sharing sites everywhere, although Flickr is most prone to it since it’s the biggest. What I detest most of all are the damned ugly graphics (some animated) that people post in the comments to get you to join their (backslapping and brown-nosing) groups. *Blech*

By: cbn

cbn — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:04:52 +0000

I spent a year on Flickr. Eventually I just placed an explanation that I would no longer be posting pictures and that people should instead go to my website. I only ever made comments on other peoples pictures when I thought they were relevant and as such I suffered the ultimate fate of having good pictures with no comments while I’d see countless rubbish pictures elsewhere with “awesome shot” etc. It made me wonder why I’d bothered to upload stuff.

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.

By: How I handle contacts at Flickr

How I handle contacts at Flickr — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:03:44 +0000

[...] It’s not me. I wouldn’t be true to myself if I did that. This is also why I chose to disable comments on all my photos. They’d gotten to be a [...]

By: ComeAcross » Choosing between Flickr, Zooomr and Picasa Web

ComeAcross » Choosing between Flickr, Zooomr and Picasa Web — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:21:23 +0000

[...] Why I turned off comments at Flickr [...]

By: Andrew Jalali

Andrew Jalali — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:50:39 +0000

I completely agree. I too have recently noticed the fall in quality of flickr comments.

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.

By: DAVE

DAVE — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 19:20:40 +0000

Yes boring comments indeed but when a world renowned photographer stops by your photoblog and leaves some appreciative comments, that makes your day. Such as it did with me on an old photoblog I once had.