Two years ago, flickr was bought out by Yahoo. Apparently flickr was running low on cash, and in danger of shutting down, and sold out for something around $30 or $40 million (too cheap!).
Last year, the original flickr log in was disabled, and everyone had to sign up for a Yahoo account to continue using the site.
A couple of months ago, flickr brought in filters: essentially a rating system. Your photos would be rated “Safe”, “Moderate”, or “Restricted.” This allows users to filter out images they might not want to see, and while it caused a huge stink, was a pretty good idea overall, imho.
For example, this photo appeared on the explorer page and one nutter kicked up a huge stink about kids seeing such images. Personally, I think it’s “Safe”, but if it’s set to “Moderate” and he, and schools, keep their filters set to “Safe” (aka PG 5), everything goes on swimmingly. (Except that flickr doesn’t even tell you that there’s a photo missing if you’re stuck on the default “Safe” setting.) A better example might be Merkley??? He took this shot, which is one of my favorites, but most of the rest of his photostream might raise eyebrows if they popped up on my screen at work.
A few days ago, flickr implemented localization, so you can now get flickr in English, traditional Chinese, French, Italian, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. However, at the same time, flickr imposed the “Safe” filter setting on all users in Germany, Singapore, Korea, and Hong Kong; or rather, all users with Yahoo domains in Germany, Singapore, Korea, and Hong Kong. (Which means that German-speaking flickr users in Austria, or Switzerland are also blocked. I suppose anyone from those 4 places, living anywhere, is similarly screwed. Anyone with a Yahoo.com (US) registration living in those 4 places is off the hook.)
The reasons for this in Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong is official censorship. But that’s not a problem in Germany. In Germany, flickr (more likely Yahoo’s lawyers in the US) took a look at one goofy ruling–being appealed–and decided that an internet provider is responsible for EVERYTHING posted, worried that flickr’s German staff might end up thrown in jail if any German kiddies were exposed to explicit images uploaded to the site (flickr-hoo’s been unable to come up with an effective, efficient age verification system), and imposed nation wide (more accurately .de-domain wide) censorship.
Outrageous as that is–and a large number of German users are telling flickr to just yank the language support if that’s the way it’s going to be–flickr staff were (apparently) muzzled by Yahoo’s legal department, and said essentially NOTHING for something like 8 hours, then went silent again for another 24 hours, and the silent treatment became as large an issue as the initial ‘censorship’.
That’s when the protest REALLY took off, and the site was flooded with protest images (I’ve posted a few).
Now, 4 days later, there’s still no resolution, no redress, no real explanation from flickr.
Which sucks, because it’s by far the best photo site around, and they’re shooting themselves in the foot. That, or Yahoo’s getting it’s hand in, and inadvertently doing to flickr what it did to Geocities.
Anyways, this seems to be the result of incompetence, or corporate short-sightedness, more than anything else, but on top of a brutally mishandled episode involving the theft of _rebekka’s photos (named the web’s best photographer by the Wall Street Journal), flickr-hoo’s dug itself a massive hole.