Somethings that have irritated me about Flickr:
- Vague rules arbitrarily enforced. Take for example the their no "voyeur" photos. Candids are okay, but if it seems "creepy" they will delete your account, with no warning. So, what is the difference between street photography and voyeur photography? Street level shots are fine, but the same thing shot from a balcony is not? Swimsuits are okay, but underwear is not? They basically make up this and other standards as they go along.
- Friend of the admins seem to get a free pass to break the rules with no consequences.
- Deletion without warning. You are not given a chance to correct things. Your account, and all your picture, comment,s and posts are gone in a puff of smoke based on their arbitrary rules.
- If they disagree with your politics, they will delete your account. In one case someone was bad mouthing Obama's policies in the White House Photostream. The White House did not block the person, nor did they ask Flickr to take action. Flickr just disagreed with the guy and took it upon themselves delete his account.
- Flickr does not like the male form (or is anti-gay, you decide). The are fine with photos of women in swimsuits, but have deleted accounts having men in swimsuits.
- Flickr can not restore your account. In some of these cases, Flickr has admitted it was wrong and returned the account, but without any of the content. Flickr deletes without warning and can not return your account to the state it was in when it was deleted. Your thousand pictures you took weeks to upload? All the loving comments from friends and family? All those hours spent working on your photostream? Gone.
- Flickr tries to silence people blocks or deletes people who bring these issues up in the help forums when their friends are wrongly deleted.
To make matters worse, back in April Yahoo laid off several of the sites developers, but then hired more censors to enforce their rules.
If it wasn't for the communities I'm involved in, I would move to a different site without hesitation, but I do love the people in the communities.
Here Thomas Hawk discusses a new site to track Flickr abuses and to discuss some of the past abuses:
http://thomashawk.com/2009/08/someones-started-a-flickr-is-fascist-blog-accuses-flickr-of-anti-gay-censorship-policies.html
Hopefully Yahoo takes notice and can clean up the Flickr staff before it's time for me to renew, so I don't have to make a heart breaking decision.