A Bot is a Bot
COMMENT: Of Bots and Bad Pandas
After trying to log in to Flickr numerous times without success earlier today, I gave up. Too many Bad Pandas. No point posting photos if half the people can't get on to see them. I don't know why this platform is the only one we know that goes down so regularly. Looking at the Help Forum this is a worldwide problem. But that happens to be the least of our problems on Flickr.
There is something more important existentially that goes on every single day on everyone's page that far too many people are turning a blind eye to. I'm talking about bot use. For those who still live in a prelapsarian social media world, bots are either (1) pieces of internet code written specifically to trawl the pages of Flickr faving and in some cases commenting (generically) in order to garner reciprocal visits - you can buy them, or (2) humans behaving in a bot-like manner, simply faving and following as many people as possible in the hope of achieving the same goals - inflated views, faves and followers. Frankly I'm sick of it.
So much so that I will block any person I see that exhibits this bot-like tendency. My list of blocks is hundreds long. Of course this has seen a falloff in my own view numbers. We don't seriously think that all those views of our old photos are real do we? If say you post 3 photos a day and each of them gets 500 views in 24 hours and your total view count for the day is 5,000. I would argue a good percentage of all those extra 3,500 views are in fact unblocked bots.
Opponents of bots on social media platforms (and Flickr is by no means the worst here) estimate that up to 50 percent of all traffic on these sites is bot-driven. Now bots are easy to understand when the corruption of monetarization comes into play. That is not the case on Flickr. But ego is. And it seems to me that ego will drive some people to do very bad things to attract attention to themselves.
Have you ever wondered why that awful out of focus picture of the Grand Canyon has attracted 65,000 views and 1,500 faves? Well very likely this person is using a massive bot. And many people fave unthinkingly. Go to the Activities Feed and press the fave star and you don't even need to visit a person's page. You can fave thousands in an hour or two doing that. But what a hollow feeling. And what does it do for the photography community?
Explore is another area rife with gaming strategies. How many times do you see the usual suspects turn up on a person's page with "Congrats on Explore"? That's the only time they'll visit your page by the way (that's if you're lucky enough to ever get Explored because it seems only magic accounts do every 16-19 days). These are a group of people who fave (or by proxy their bot does) every one of the 500 Explored photos each day, in the belief it will garner them more "followers" (how I hate that word - CONTACTS is so much better). So if you have been in the habit of doing that there is an excellent chance I will have blocked you.
Of course the most dangerous bots of all are the ones pretending to comment. People think they are real, but AI is very clever now. And one in particular has been at the centre of attention during this week. Banned by Flickr after being clearly outed by a "bot catcher". He gets banned, and then the whistleblower gets banned too for exposing the biggest bot commenter on Flickr. All this ended up with the whistleblower rightly being restored, but also the return of the bot user. Some of you will have followed proceedings very closely.
Frankly I've advocated for a long time for view counts to be discontinued. Thousands of views do not make a good photograph. Social media has been bad for photography in that regard. It's made photographers complacent, and even worse, made them conform to particular styles or genres that "succeed" - as if that matters. Photography is an individual art and everyone is unique.
Always remember that not another soul saw Vivian Maier's photographs before she died. And I dare say you rarely see photographs on Flickr even half as good as the ones she spent a lifetime taking.
So if you feel like I do about the integrity of Flickr and bot use, please join us at this group:
....don't like bot-comments/faves? Join us, post your photos there.
Please post it to the Anti-Bots and Anti-Fake group.
* A final point. Mr Ed was a talking horse and not a bot user.
A Bot is a Bot
COMMENT: Of Bots and Bad Pandas
After trying to log in to Flickr numerous times without success earlier today, I gave up. Too many Bad Pandas. No point posting photos if half the people can't get on to see them. I don't know why this platform is the only one we know that goes down so regularly. Looking at the Help Forum this is a worldwide problem. But that happens to be the least of our problems on Flickr.
There is something more important existentially that goes on every single day on everyone's page that far too many people are turning a blind eye to. I'm talking about bot use. For those who still live in a prelapsarian social media world, bots are either (1) pieces of internet code written specifically to trawl the pages of Flickr faving and in some cases commenting (generically) in order to garner reciprocal visits - you can buy them, or (2) humans behaving in a bot-like manner, simply faving and following as many people as possible in the hope of achieving the same goals - inflated views, faves and followers. Frankly I'm sick of it.
So much so that I will block any person I see that exhibits this bot-like tendency. My list of blocks is hundreds long. Of course this has seen a falloff in my own view numbers. We don't seriously think that all those views of our old photos are real do we? If say you post 3 photos a day and each of them gets 500 views in 24 hours and your total view count for the day is 5,000. I would argue a good percentage of all those extra 3,500 views are in fact unblocked bots.
Opponents of bots on social media platforms (and Flickr is by no means the worst here) estimate that up to 50 percent of all traffic on these sites is bot-driven. Now bots are easy to understand when the corruption of monetarization comes into play. That is not the case on Flickr. But ego is. And it seems to me that ego will drive some people to do very bad things to attract attention to themselves.
Have you ever wondered why that awful out of focus picture of the Grand Canyon has attracted 65,000 views and 1,500 faves? Well very likely this person is using a massive bot. And many people fave unthinkingly. Go to the Activities Feed and press the fave star and you don't even need to visit a person's page. You can fave thousands in an hour or two doing that. But what a hollow feeling. And what does it do for the photography community?
Explore is another area rife with gaming strategies. How many times do you see the usual suspects turn up on a person's page with "Congrats on Explore"? That's the only time they'll visit your page by the way (that's if you're lucky enough to ever get Explored because it seems only magic accounts do every 16-19 days). These are a group of people who fave (or by proxy their bot does) every one of the 500 Explored photos each day, in the belief it will garner them more "followers" (how I hate that word - CONTACTS is so much better). So if you have been in the habit of doing that there is an excellent chance I will have blocked you.
Of course the most dangerous bots of all are the ones pretending to comment. People think they are real, but AI is very clever now. And one in particular has been at the centre of attention during this week. Banned by Flickr after being clearly outed by a "bot catcher". He gets banned, and then the whistleblower gets banned too for exposing the biggest bot commenter on Flickr. All this ended up with the whistleblower rightly being restored, but also the return of the bot user. Some of you will have followed proceedings very closely.
Frankly I've advocated for a long time for view counts to be discontinued. Thousands of views do not make a good photograph. Social media has been bad for photography in that regard. It's made photographers complacent, and even worse, made them conform to particular styles or genres that "succeed" - as if that matters. Photography is an individual art and everyone is unique.
Always remember that not another soul saw Vivian Maier's photographs before she died. And I dare say you rarely see photographs on Flickr even half as good as the ones she spent a lifetime taking.
So if you feel like I do about the integrity of Flickr and bot use, please join us at this group:
....don't like bot-comments/faves? Join us, post your photos there.
Please post it to the Anti-Bots and Anti-Fake group.
* A final point. Mr Ed was a talking horse and not a bot user.