Hello
everyone,
I haven’t
posted here in quite a while, I know and I apologize about this. Going into “retirement
from active duty” is a big change, and many adjustments had to be made; others still
need to be. Additionally, we have had the painters at the house for weeks to
undertake major redecoration works which will only (and finally!) be finished
by the end of this week.
Also, those
who give me the pleasure of following what I post on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/d_robert/)
know that I have been away on photo trips, first to Sardinia for three weeks in
March and April, then to Scotland for ten days around the end of April. The
selection and processing of photos also take up quite a bit of time, as I like
to do things with care whenever I can. And now, I can afford this supreme
luxury: have and take TIME, and yet sometimes there hardly seems to be enough
of that…!
Anyway, I
was on the subject of Flickr, which is the only “social” thing I do online, as
I do not appreciate the so-called “social media” and do not wish to be present
there —the sole exception being, possibly, Instagram because it is
predominantly photo-related (or so they tell me), but then it seems so
complicated uploading things to their platform from a desktop computer that I
have given up. Would you believe a “social medium” centered on photography,
that would only accept uploads from the worst cameras that exist nowadays
(i.e., cell phones), and not from the best cameras, unless you find a way to
make Instagram believe that the desktop computer on which you have carefully
processed your photos, with its high quality, calibrated monitor and its suite
of sophisticated and powerful retouching software… is actually a cell phone?
Me, I
cannot believe nor understand it. But such is life. When Instagram come to
their senses one day (maybe) and accept uploads from computers, I will
reconsider, but I don’t wish to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to
cheat my way into uploading nice photographs instead of the crappy smartphone
snapshots they willingly accept.
What was I
saying? Ah! yes, Flickr. My main concern there is to post good quality photos
—well, the kind I regard as being
good quality, based on my “National Geographic-like” standards. Do I get many
views? A fair amount, yes. Would I undertake efforts to increase those views
using “popularity schemes”? Certainly not. I belong to the groups I like (and
know) on Flickr, I’m sure I’m missing quite a few that would be of interest,
but I don’t intend to do anything else or more than post to those groups I
belong to, and which I update from time to time, in particular when I discover
that a group had a sole admin who has suddenly lost interest and left their
group to turn into an uncurated photo dump, which is frankly stupid and
disrespectful for the loyal contributors to that group.
So,
basically I follow my own chosen path, welcoming those who are happy to tread
along with me for a while, but not making any efforts to gather followers.
Now, recently,
several of my photos have been selected to go into this thing that is called “Explore”. I have no clue how a photo gets there, but so many people talk about
it like the Holy Grail of Flickr that I went and had a look. It appears to be a
special gallery made up of recently uploaded photos selected by some mysterious
algorithm, and quite a few of those are really excellent indeed (some are also
pretty bad, but popular). Photos that are selected for the Explore gallery
immediately get thousands of views, and that’s how I spot that one of mine has
been so chosen. Plus, people tell you in comments and invite the photo to “In
Explore” groups.
Anyway,
this morning one of mine was selected, and among the people who “faved” it, I
noticed a strange user name (people are not mandated to use their actual names
on Flickr) that included a phrase about thanking people for x million views. This is a new ploy on
Flickr, and I have seen several cheesy types use it: if their user name is,
say, “Charlie”, they will change it into something like “Charlie thanks for 10
million views”. Of course, it’s not really about thanking people, as you have
guessed: it is solely about bragging about their 10 million views.
This is
cheap and mediocre, but so is most of the human race, unfortunately. Panem et circenses. Along the same
lines, the verb “share”, which expresses a wonderful concept, is one of the
most corrupted nowadays: most people do not want to actually “share” their
photos with you, they want to use them to show off and hope that you will
admire them. That’s what “sharing” truly means to most people nowadays.
And so,
there was this guy “faving” my Explored photo this morning, with a phrase thanking
people for x million views in his
user name, and since the number of views he boasted about was quite high, I
went to have a look at all the wonders he certainly had in his Flickr gallery…
Well, he only had about 200 pictures, most of them ugly snapshots, quite a few
of them politically oriented against terror and condemning terror attacks
—nothing wrong with that, of course, but the photographic quality simply wasn’t
there.
I was
puzzled. How could someone with such a meager and mediocre portfolio have
attracted so many views? I quickly understood: the guy is following 18,700
other people on Flickr, and as most people return the favor when someone
follows them (I don’t necessarily), he also has 18,400 followers…!
That’s the
trick! When you have thousands and thousands of followers (which you have
induced into following you simply because you have followed them first, doesn’t
matter if you never go again to look at their photos!), statistically it will
snowball into millions of views, just because SOME of them will occasionally
click on one of your photos…
So, now you
know: you want millions of views on Flickr, doesn’t matter if your portfolio is
shitty, just stoop to following everyone in sight, watch most of them follow
you in return, and behold the counter of views going up…
Life is
great, decidedly!
