Flickr now censoring all moderate and restricted photos from Germany.
14 June 2007, lunch time
Are Flickr users the whiniest group of people on the Internet? Right now there is a Flickr uprising because if you are in Germany photos that have been marked “unsafe” are being censored, regardless of what your preferences are. People are bitching and moaning about their rights to freedom of speech being trampled by that most evil of companies Flickr. (Maybe these people are using a different Flickr than I have been?) People need to get over themselves. This isn’t some freedom of speech issue: If you want to post a photo of your naked ass online, you can do so — is someone compelling you to do it on Flickr? Worse still, the way people are bitching and moaning is to spam Flickr with these “stop censoring us” images. If you actually want to protest this decision, spamming Flickr isn’t the way to do it: leave Flickr, tell your friends to leave Flickr, and then laugh at Yahoo for loosing you and your friends as a valuable customer. There is a part of me that doesn’t want to use Flickr because it’s user base is so damn annoying. People don’t even know what’s going on, but they instantly bust out their pitch forks and start bitching about censorship.
Oh, and it wouldn’t be an official Flickr scandal if Thomas Hawk didn’t post about how Flickr sucks. For a guy that claims he loves Flickr so damn much he certainly loves to get his hate on. What a wanker.
Update: I shit you not, someone just posted a photo of the gates to Auschwitz in the lets all bitch about Flickr thread, because, you know, this scandal is exactly the same as the fucking Holocaust.
Update: Heather Champ responds on page 16 of the thread. Apparently at issue are German age verification laws. Because the German version of Flickr is being operated by Yahoo Germany, they are subject to these laws, apparently.
[ed. I made this link into a full post because I was so annoyed.]
I think if I just stopped reading the groups I’d be OK, but a part of me likes following all this drama. There are so many dumb people on the Internet. It is mind blowing.
by ramanan on June 14 2007, 2:13 pm #
I would give these people their money back if they promised to never come back. I’m sure it’d be worth saving their staff some aggravation.
by ramanan on June 14 2007, 5:01 pm #