Thursday, May 30, 2013

Flak Continues At Flickr


There's little doubt after having read hundreds of comments of many ex Flickr Users on the recently deleted forum thread of nearly 30,000 comments (see below) that many Users had not been forewarned at all about the Flickr "Shockr" User interface and format changes . This would have given Users  a reasonable time for adjustments, or to export their work, records , family photo's etc somewhere  or otherwise back to their computers or other devices.

Yet the black shock Yahoo/Flickr tactics simply were not guided by good ethical practice. The simple truth is Flickr Users deserved better communications about changes well before they happened.  Bad managment ? Yes absolutely terrible.

Flickr staff closed down the "Help" forum thread which became reputationally dangerous for more of the internet-"press" to see,  when many of them anyway  were mostly standing on the Yahoo-fence and were simply being on-message in the media community where favours are done by not reporting the ground based User-experienced facts .  Well that is,  until the bottom-up Users bite back



Yet for all the deletion of the "Help" forum comments,  and now a replacement thread,  there's still been a large amount of Flickr Users throwing the towel in :



It's not just one Flickr User,  as above,  with a lot images to re-adjust storage for,  it's others with the same problem who have gone to ipernity.com which frankly offers more functionality than the good old Flickr did ..It offers music upolad , document upload and film upload,  as well as image upload.

There is a group : New Flickr Survivors with over 800 in it 

It's worth a look for those who like developing online community inside relaxed white space rather than the frenetic tumbles of images that Flickr.com has now become . Not that the new format does not suit some people. Apparently some like it . Fair enough. 

Flickr.com changes have been  a loss though and a no-win situation for many Flickr Users . Many did try to voice reasonable points but they were ignored by Flickr's Community Management Staff for days.  Many were accused of being "whingers or whiners" by some of the perverser Flickr pro-change members.  That has been echoed in other quarters by pro-yahoo bloggers who need to show that somehow ordinary folk who "whine"  are lesser-subcultures ....

This was just another injury to wounds,  symptomatic of badly managed change that happened without warnings for Flickr User's  personal adjustments .

Flickr-staff now are showing they hear people rather than being invisible .  Its very late "good practice" but maybe late is better than never ..In the new Forum with over 2000 Users mostly negative comments there is finally some better Flickr Staff communication .


UW 

No comments: