Back in 2006 or so when I last used Flickr, one of my biggest problems was spam and noise. One of the biggest annoyances was the constant comments from "award groups" that wanted you to join them, enticing you with some arbitrary "award", which consisted of some kind of gaudy badge.

To be honest, most of the Flickr groups seemed completely useless, full of HDR junk and asinine motivational stuff. Though I'm sure it's a bit like Reddit — the good communities are small and hidden.

Follower spam is another example of noise, and something Instagram is also rife with.

There are good dedicated groups with good curation. It takes a bit of lurking to find them. There are really good groups dedicated to specific genders of photography like Film only, or Documentary or Street Photography.

The good ones kept those gaudy things at arm's length. Some of these groups have a bit if an attitude at first, but as they get to know you and your dedication, they will warm up to you.

I forgot about those gaudy animated badges.

Social media does have tough challenges ahead, especially as bots/spam become more and more prevalent.

I would love to work on a bot-prevention team somewhere, but my background isn't in ML.

I like the idea of building a reputation system that accepts bots as first class citizens instead of imagining them as an inherent problem. Anyone who meaningfully contributes is good even if they are a bot, and anyone who doesn’t gets left behind. (Easier said than done but the approach to the problem is what’s fundamentally different.)

Reputation systems, if they try too hard, quickly reach a point where ambitious fakes are more successful at convincing the system than casual real users.

Case in point: Google visibility, if you are not Wikipedia no amount of quality content will get you above the link farms if you don't also follow the customary rites of pleasing the algorithm.

reddit (or some reddit users, it's hard to know) does this. There's a bot crawling around and whenever someone replies to a bot saying "good bot" or "bad bot" it updates a ranking.

(there's always a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/)

Bots can definitely contribute meaningfully in many ways. Mostly through organization (suggesting labels & other metadata, album creation, etc), spam filtering & rule enforcement (like reddit's automoderator), and even automatic editing (like some of the stuff Google Photos offers, like rotation suggestions and various automatic filters).

Custom moderator automation would be a very valuable tool, bots are terrible at beating bespoke solutions. Is there some open source Amazon lambda clone that community platforms could easily make available to their power users? Funneling automaton onto a platform runtime could be extremely helpful in distinguishing between good and bad automation.

Think of the bots on Reddit

The community _is_ the thing with Flickr. It's what we're most excited about. We'll work hard to play to those strengths.

Awesome. In retrospect, apologies if my initial post was glaringly obvious. I think many of us here are nostalgic for a revival of Flickr and a community outside Facebook & Reddit.