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Screenshot Accounts 'Delisted' on Flickr
An anonymous reader writes "Flickr and Second Life fans seem to have collided head-on over a little known policy on Flickr that 'delists' an account from public areas, including search, when more than half of your content is non-photographic in nature. Flickr stated that most people searching the site are looking for photographic content so the restriction is in place merely to keep the site focused on its original intent. From the article: 'As a result, many screenshots on Flickr are AWOL — at least as far as the general public is concerned. That's angering and confusing some of the people who carefully stage scenes in the popular virtual world and religiously post the results online.'"
It brings up a good point though, since cameras are moving away from film to memory cards and pixels: just what constitutes an image? If you go the route of thinking that it's something that has to be taken by a camera, that severely limits what we could call an image. If you believe an image is made up of a collection of pixels in some organized fashion, then the range of things we can call images is staggering (PDF files, fonts, screenshots, etc.).
Flickr's probably just trying to keep from being overwhelmed by non-photographic images, since if they allowed those as well, there servers might very well become choked with all manner of things.
`GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I can totally see Flickr's side of the issue, it was never intended to be another deviantart/imageshack/whatever. Free image hosts are a dime a dozen these days. And if you do really want to stay on flickr, upload enough random real-life photos to satisfy the more-than-half requirement.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
They do. Then they delist the virtual one from the search engine, because their site isn't meant to be for looking at some stranger's screenshots.
Also, this is not news; it was in the click-through agreement from way back, and people who actually draw their own pictures in photoshop or whatever have already hit the problem, had an argument with Flickr and lost once already.
If nerd X isn't allowed to post homemade hentai, I see no reason why they would let nerd Y post a 3rd-rate imitation of same in Second Life.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
While I appreciate that digital cameras have somewhat blurred the distinctions, I still feel that it's a hell of a stretch equating screenshots with photographs. Even a perfectly photo-realistic scene captured from a game wouldn't be a photograph to my mind; that would require pointing an actual, physical object at some other, actual physical objects and pressing a button (or even saying "take photograph!" for that matter). Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud.
I'm not arguing that purely digital representations aren't art, just that they're not photographs, in the same way that a painting or a sculpture isn't.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why?
It is not as if free blogs& image hosting are in short surply.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
There are quite a few options other than just flickr.
The free WWW account provided by your own ISP (or others) for instance?
Not very Web 2.0, but cheap as free and reliable.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.