At Portland Bill Lighthouse

At Portland Bill Lighthouse
Originally uploaded by Miss Aniela.

I'm going to have a little rant to start 2008 off ;)

I'm starting to dislike what I see going on in Flickr.
Those awards groups. Up to now, I've not had a problem with them. I'd occasionally post one of my own images into the 4 Aces or get invited into A Big Fave, and receive 3 or 4 comments from people who sign off with the group logo. Nowadays, judging by what I see in my Comments I've Made page, it seems comments are not necessary, just the icon alone! And a whole friggin bunch of them, at that! I personally have avoided posting into groups where I know I'll just get a string of stupid pictures, but of course not everyone does the same.

A saw a stream yesterday, with 1 or 2 comments on most pics, but with one picture with 894 comments on it. 894! And what were these comments made up of? Strings of icons from possible every single Awards group on Flickr! The person for some reason had decided to plug that particular picture in dozens of groups to achieve that massive number, but why? It was certainly evidence of the power of posting to groups, and if Flickr is about plugging one's work (I know that alot of hard work goes into making one's work seen on Flickr) then perhaps no-one should criticise people's posting efforts. Yet, taking the Heart Awards group as an example of one of the worst offenders, what possible meaning is there in twenty absent-mindedly-posted cartoon organs?

When one of my pics reaches 200 comments I think wow, people must like this one. And when I see a pic on Quizz or Rebekka's stream with an even higher number I think wow, people must have loved that pic! And still love it, to be continuing to aggregate the number of comments. Yet unfortunately on other people's streams, where you expect to see people's personal reactions to the image, you get blindly spewed logos that are too often not accompanied with actual human words. Bah humbug...

There are other things that annoy me but let's not mention them at the moment... probably best never to mention them.. :-P

P.S. After writing this, I reassure inviter-type people that I do like invites into groups. But inviting me to into something like the Heart Awards group will be futile... it's not the invites as such, but the icons posted from the group that are more of a problem..

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