I'm determined to put this blog to some kind of use. It's webspace and I created it, so just as a matter of general principle, I intend to see it used. Maybe I'll be the only one posting. Maybe I'll find a few friends and invite them to join.
Where I am in doubt is the question of whether or not I'll be able to use this blog for what had been its intended purpose. My initial plan was to talk about the decisions I made while moderating my groups and some of the great work people had been posting to those groups. If real adults had been running and using the sites on which my groups were located, that would have been a fine plan. The drama which I'd have to address would have been infrequent, and I'd get to give a little boost to the traffic of some deserving artists and photographers. But this, so far, has not worked out.
People have shown up to my groups and, having agreed to abide by the rules, have ignored them, posting content that was clearly inappropriate. Almost without fail, these were people who submitted individual images to hundreds or thousands of groups. They didn't care about the groups to which they posted, they just wanted to post to as many as they could and, as I discovered, somebody had released software for automating the process, meaning that I had to sift through by hand what others were free to submit by machine. I also had some commercial spammers drop by to advertise their businesses, not all of which were family friendly, and after one of those visits, an already annoying incident took an interesting turn.
I flagged the spammer's content, and within minutes of my spam report, I got back a message from an anonymous employee (or bot) at Flickr warning me that I had better not post any more spam and threatening me with the possible deletion of my account. I replied, pointing out that I was the person reporting the spam, not the person who had posted it. All I got back was silence. When I tried to go to the help forum to report the problem, I discovered that somebody at Yahoo (Flickr's parent company) had banned me from the help forum, covering his own backside, I guess.
Ever since then, one by one, I've been shutting down my groups. They still exist, but in more and more of them, the settings have been changed so nobody can post anymore. There were a lot of bad experiences leading up to this, such as that of watching a pair of members of one group openly plan my murder. It was an imbecilic plan, as one would expect from a pair of people who would conspire to commit murder on a publicly visible page - they were going to kidnap me, and leave me stranded north of the arctic circle (where one of them did a lot of his shooting) where I would freeze to death - but it was still conspiracy to commit murder. I reported the incident to Flickr (huge mistake), and this same company that would go on to threaten me with the closure of my account (as I mentioned above) gave me nothing but a form letter response, telling me that if I didn't like what they were saying, that I shouldn't read it.
What the ... these guys were discussing my murder. How was "don't read" a solution to that problem, I asked. "Call the police if you're concerned", the company replied, but before I could, the felonious discussion had been removed from the page. Almost as if somebody at Flickr had decided to bury the evidence and engage in obstruction of justice. This is the management style I've come to expect out of those who run social networking sites - a perverse supporting of those who have violated the norms of civilized society at the expense of their reasonable, responsible neighbors.
I'm left with the question of why I should volunteer my time to run groups on the sites of those who treat me like dirt, adding to their bottom line while not doing anything for my own. Some people might say "I do it for my membership", but in the entire time I've worked as a moderator and as an admin, can you guess how many times I've heard the words "thank you" or anything like them? The answer is "once" - it was such a rare event that I can remember the exact moment. On the other hand, drama and attempts to abuse the system because somebody didn't get to break the rules - that was getting to be a daily event. I still remember the guy who tried to convince me that he was one of the other admins in one of my own groups. He wasn't.
At some point, one gets to say "I don't need this." I'm tempted to move my networking efforts from Flickr to another social media site for photography, but there aren't that many and they go out of business frequently, which under the circumstances, I don't find surprising at all. That being the case, I might not have any need for a moderation journal because I won't have much (if anything) left to moderate. As for the great work people have been posting to my groups, some of it was great, no doubt about that, but my attempts to create real communities failed completely. Not that I feel like a failure, because I maintain that this wasn't my fault. Almost the only groups on Flickr that I've seen take on any sort of real community life have been the conservative groups (at least until somebody at Flickr abused his power and deleted the accounts of the members), and the groups that cater to the trolls, something that I'm proud to say I never did. From the moment Flickr decided to allow for the unlimited crossposting of photos, the presence of the software I mentioned ensured that a sort of arms race would develop, leading users to either engage in mass crossposting themselves, or to just give up because their photos were scrolling out of view so quickly that hardly anybody would see them. As the would-be creators of community, we as admins were set up for failure from the beginning, our members seeing the groups as being nothing more than photo dumps. There was no engagement. there was just pointless compulsive activity, and a steady deterioration in quality, as one might expect when the level of tedium that one had to endure to get traffic kept on increasing. Eventually, the genuinely creative people started giving up, and what we got was large quantities of low grade cell phone photos, and nothing but trolling in our forums.
Maybe there will be another site under more sensible management, and if so, maybe Twitter or Myspace will buy it the next year and shut it down. At some point, one has to give oneself permission to learn from experience and say "this is hopeless, time to move on." Maybe, someday, I'll get a message from Flickr management saying "hey, we looked over our records and oops, our bad, please come back" - and if they do, maybe I will. But I seriously doubt that I'm going to get concern or even basic decency out of Flickr, so I expect that my groups will all eventually end up on hiatus - except for one, which has active moderators who are doing good things for the group. That one, I'll definitely keep going and who knows? Maybe I'll find other moderators, some of the weight will be lifted from my shoulders and being an administrator won't seem so bad any more. While we're at it, maybe Harvard will call me up and offer me tenure, and a sweet-tempered Kate Upton-lookalike with a Nobel prize in Physics will become my new live-in girlfriend. After which the Earth's axis will shift non-violently, putting my new home in Boston down in the tropics. Sure, why not?
But until that day comes (and it might not be for a while), I'm going to make alternative plans. What is this blog going to be about, if I phase out my efforts as a moderator? Maybe general goofiness? Culture jamming of some kind? Who knows. We'll find out. At this point, even I don't know.
