Surrealistic Fiction, Art and Photography

I have cleaned the Augean stables

nobody@flickr.com (The Brutal Regime / Joseph Dunphy) — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:02:57 -0700

The Brutal Regime / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

I just processed the entire queue. There are no images waiting to be approved.

The vast majority of them were clearly inappropriate, either because they weren't surrealistic or because they were adult images. Those made me kind of angry, because there is an 18+ companion group which was set up for such images. Why could they have not just submitted to that group, which would not have been put at risk for deletion by such content?

I already know the answer to that question, of course - they did that, because they do what they want. I've become well aware of that attitude over the years, and I'm tired of dealing with it. I could tell people that abstract art and abstract photos aren't surrealism, nor are nature photos or those Second Life shots that were crossposted to over 800 other groups. Maybe a third of the photos in that queue came from the same guy who kept doing that.

But I shouldn't have to, because the offending parties already knew this. This looked a lot like machine powered mass submission from people who just wanted hits and saw the groups as being nothing more than a means to that end. These were people who acted like my time, as a moderator, was worth nothing.

I've been dealing with people like that for years, and I'm tired of it. I've got things to do, things that really are worth my time, things that keep getting delayed because I keep dealing with the Internet and its BS. That is coming to an end. I'm about to lock the discussions and uploads for both this group and its adult companion. The other mods are free to reopen all of that if they want to, and are willing to process submissions, but given that the latest image in the pool was from last April, when I started and came from a mod, I don't think they're going to do that.

I might come back, someday, but I probably won't. This habit of using every group as a photo dump was become so widespread and so deeply ingrained, that I can't picture the experience of running a group on Flickr ever becoming a rewarding one, again. I had hoped to create a collection of communities, but in the end, my membership was mainly just here to spam, in this group and most of the others.

Enough is enough.

Reply to Why my bathtub is full

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:41:06 -0800

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

Usual requests to the new moderators: Please be gentle in you moderation. Please always place concern for the fairness with which you treat the individual member ahead of concern for the reactions of the membership in the aggregate. Please don't hesitate to tell me that you don't have time to moderate if you don't - I won't be hurt or anything absurd like that. Please do moderate with confidence, and know I've got your back.

Other groups will be bigger and more "successful"; that's not our goal on this group. Our goal is to create a community in which people can be creative in comfort. If we see somebody being ganged up on, and he's in the right, we side with him, even if we lose the rest of our membership by doing so. Why not? We're here for fun, right? Better to be at a small party with people one likes than a large one with people one doesn't, wouldn't you agree?

Why my bathtub is full

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:24:37 -0800

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

As three of you have just become bathtub fillers instead of being brightly colored power tools, I thought that I'd better explain the origin of the rank titles for this group. No, it is nothing as coarse as I suppose it might sound. It's just a reference to an old joke.

Q: "How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb"

A: "Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with multi-colored power tools."

Sigh

nobody@flickr.com (Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:06:32 -0700

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

I just had to delete 14 out of the 22 entries in the pool, and all for the same reason: nudity. Leaving the images in the pool would have been a TOS violation on my part, and put the group in danger of being deleted. We need to be careful about this. Please be sure to set the safety levels of your photos. As Zyrcster, a staff member at Flickr writes in this post to the Help Forum

"At any rate, if its showing breasts, set them to moderate."

We had photos in the pool showing more than that which were set to "safe", which puts the member's account at risk. If one is showing anything private below the waist, Flickr expects on to set the safety level for the image at "restricted".

But where else was there for the artist to post, one might ask? A reasonable question. I've created a new group, a companion to this one, on which mature content is welcome, which you will notice is linked to, from this group, and links back to it, and sent the artist an invitation to repost her work, there.

Please understand - I do not own Flickr. My own liberal views regarding certain subjects are ones that I am open about, so maybe somebody looking at my pages would conclude that I would overlook TOS violations on this point, but a group that gets deleted does nobody any good. Sometimes, I just have to do what I have to do, even if I'm not very happy about it.