Award Codes: The Scourge of Flickr
Flickr is almost, but not quite perfect as an image sharing service. No one else comes close to providing the range of features tuned for the needs of photographers, and Flickr Is No Ghost Town. Because I’m obsessed with photography, Flickr has become the online space where I spend the majority of my time over the past couple of years.
“Groups” are central to the Flickr experience — there’s a group for every photographic topic you can imagine. You can’t have a rich Flickr experience without joining and posting images to groups.
Back in the day, when the internet was more innocent and Flickr dominated the online imaging space, the company thought it would be a good idea to allow HTML in comments. Some group admin then decided to create an “Award Code” for their group — providing a chunk of HTML that users could paste into another user’s image’s comments field, instead of posting a genuine comment. So rather than saying something like “Excellent color palette, fluid composition. Love your work!,” people would instead just paste a chunk of HTML from their clipboard, saying something like “As seen in Widgets and Wompuses” or worse, a stupid embedded graphic with a picture of a trophy or a happy face, and a link back to the group.
And just like that, spam on Flickr was born. For reasons I can’t figure out, Flickr never clamped down on the practice, and now these stupid award codes litter millions of comment streams, making it hard to sort out real conversation from spammy self-promotion that has absolutely nothing to do with the photograph.
Some groups even require the use of Award Codes, making the situation transactional: “Sure you can post images in this group, but only if you advertise for us on other people’s comment streams.” It’s just gross. Other groups provide Award Codes but make them optional. Optional is better, but lots of people still use them, so the resulting spam is almost as bad.
“If you don’t like them, don’t invite them”
Some people say “If you don’t like Award Codes, don’t join groups that use them.” I don’t buy that response because:
- Most groups on Flickr provide an Award Code of some kind. Surely we can’t suggest that the way to avoid spam is to not use most groups?
- It is often difficult to tell whether an Award Code is optional or required. Sometimes the text says something like “Please use this code” — well what if I don’t? Am I violating the spirit of the group even if not the letter of the law?
- Sometimes, people post Award Codes from groups you don’t even belong to and didn’t post in! The spam chases you even if you did not “opt in” to it.
- The Flickr mobile app does not provide any way to access a Group’s rules or Award Code. Since most of my Flickr use is on iPad, I literally could not follow an Award Code rule even if I wanted to. It’s simply not possible.
- Gray area on this one: If you strongly believe (as I do) that spamming is unethical (“do unto others” and all that), then requiring Award Codes amounts to requiring people to act outside of their ethics. OK so don’t join those groups? But sometimes it’s the only group on the topic you’re interested in!
- It’s not just about you and the groups you join! You can be looking at a random image that is not yours, in a group you don’t belong to, and just want to join the conversation on it, and still find yourself faced with a wall of stupid trophy images and links to groups you don’t care about. The spam is everywhere on Flickr. This is not a “then don’t opt-in” question!
Regardless, the bottom line is that I feel strongly that the existence of Award Codes is unquestionably junking up the service and making it hard for new users to take the service seriously. It amounts to attention mongering, and it’s not a good look.
I can’t think of another social network that allows HTML in comments, in part for reasons just like this. If Flickr wants to allow people a way to acknowledge others’ work without typing actual words into the comment box, it would not be hard for them to build an Awards system outside of or parallel to the comments area. Nor would it be hard to provide a settings switch that would let users block entry of HTML into comments. Or to provide a tool to clear out the thousands of them that have accumulated on our images over the years.
I’ve seen people suggest that “All you have to do is delete them.” Really? Your answer to the suggestion that Flickr provide good spam moderation tools on their platform is “Do the same tedious thing manually, thousands of times per year?” Life’s too short. Just no.
After a fairly heated discussion Flickr Central about whether “Award Codes” are spam, and what do about them, I realized that not everyone felt the same way about them that I did. To try and take the temperature of Flickr users, I created a survey to round up public opinions about Award Codes. Just trying to gather as much data as possible over the next few months, hopefully with the intent of sharing it with Flickr (who should have done this ages ago, honestly).
The survey is here, and I’d love it if you could spend 5 minutes on it:
Yes, it requires a Google login, but that was the only way to prevent double-voting.
Please feel free to share the link with any Flickr users you know — the more data we can gather, the more useful the results will be. Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.
I’ll reveal the results in a couple of months.
I’m shacker on Flickr, if you want to connect.
