In my most recent post about Flickr censoring my photos *again* even after the very same photos had been officially approved by Flickr (I’m still waiting for them to fix the rest, please un-censor me, kthxbye), I suggested that someone ought to “write an article called ‘The MySpacing of Flickr.” Well, my dear friend Thomas did just that, called The MySpacing of Flickr, Or: Revenge of the Spawn of Web 0.0, The Sucker Punch, and it’s *incredible*. Snip:
I suspect that some attention is given Violet’s Flickr stream, by Flickr, because her name is associated with the world of porn — she watches porn, she writes about porn, and therefore her artful erotic photos of implied nudity must be porn. Relying on Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity (”I know it when I see it”) works even better for Flickr than for the Supreme Court, because Flickr, like any corporation, owes it users nothing under the First Amendment. Its parent company, Yahoo, eliminated all user-generated chatrooms from Yahoo Chat because of objectionable content in user-generated rooms — not because of legal action or company morals, but because an investigation by a Houston TV station caused an advertiser panic. Yahoo’s chatroom closures were the 1890 Census of Web 1.0, the death-wail of a world gone mad, or at least as mad as human nature.
Clearly Web 2.0 isn’t going to let things go that far, and if it has to put the kibbosh on Violet’s panties and any other panties out there that might be on their way down… well, there’s no First Amendment in private industry.
Yahoo, like so many so-called Web 2.0 companies, seems unable to decide if it wants to be a consumer-based service that sees to the needs of its users and their creative communities, or something soft and gooey with no sharp edges, seams or pointy bits that allows its corporate overlords to avoid ever going out on a limb, mostly because it permits them to be so wishy-washy that they begin to resemble a lukewarm bowl of clam chowder without any clams… just the chowder, thank you, if no one objects that is?
Link.
Note: above photo by seventeenstars is not censored, when three identical photos (that are simply rotated upright) still are.
