I’ve had my moments where I’ve flipped off flickr and been angry with them. Truthfully, I think their community is mostly good, but in a lot of cases is more or less a high school do over for the artsy kids who got their lunch money jacked.

I’ve met some great people on flickr. I’ve made a few friends and I’ve even learned a lot. The groups (when you find a good one that isn’t just a pissing contest) are a ton of fun. I can go on and on and on. I even got to see parts of the city I live in that I had never seen before.

That being said, it’s time to go.

A few weeks ago, flickr decided they were going to limit your contacts to 3,000 and limit tags to 75 per photo. On first blush, you would think “3,000 contacts? Who has that many?” That really isn’t the point. Nor is the point, “Why would you need 75 tags on one photo?” The point is there are some people who do. My friend Thomas Hawk did. He has thousands of contacts he watches and for a lot of them he’s reciprocating links.

After much cajoling, flickr got the message that people were displeased and modified this new requirement ever-so-slightly. They won’t count reciprocal links toward your contact limit. Whoopdeedoo flickr. That really isn’t the point, though.

Aside from the fact that these limits seem arbitrary, it gets right to the heart of what people don’t like about the new Yahooized flickr. Instead of “getting” social media / social networks, they seem to be buying their way into it so they can mould it to their comfort.

The whole point of digg, del.icio.us, flickr, zooomr, and all the other great social sites that we all use on a day to day basis is exactly that. Social. It’s that warm fuzzy feeling when you wake up in the morning, flip on flickr, and see a whole bunch of photos from one of your contacts’ photos there waiting for you. You share interests, which is why you are sharing photos. Or you may even enjoy someone’s body of work, which is another reason to share photos.

You’re starting to get the picture.

Yahoo’s limits seem artificial for flickr. I can’t think of one practical reason for the 75 tag limit. If you want to say it lessens server load, I’ll laugh. Server load is not an issue for flickr or it would crumble under the weight of serving millions upon millions of photos every day while at the same time allowing them to be blogged elsewhere on flickr’s dime. Yahoo has bandwidth and servers galore, folks.

Yahoo also has a desperate need to log you into Yahoo, which is why they’ve finally announced they’re going to be locking you out of flickr unless you merge your old account with your Yahoo account. I’m already not liking where this is going, and it gets progressively worse from there because if you have a private account for sharing with family, and a public account for participating in the service, you now have to have multiple Yahoo accounts to do that.

By now you see how this gets exponentially worse as the possibilities unfold, and these aren’t hypotheticals; they’re real. People are having these issues as we speak, and are beginning to look for alternatives.

And frankly I don’t blame them.

flickr used to be folksy and comfy. Now it feels like Yahoo: cold, impersonal, and disinterested. Whereas the attitude used to be “good idea, we’ll try that,” it seems now to be more of a “this is how we do it, but you’ll love it if you just shut up and adapt.” Is that the way to run a site that’s supposedly one big happy family and community? I certainly think not, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

They even changed the mobile site to an utter disaster and then required a Yahoo login to get to it.

Gee guys, thanks.

What burns me most is that I like flickr. A lot. I’ve tried a lot of services that didn’t measure up for one reason or another. The closest I can come to flickr is Zooomr, but (no disrespect intended to those guys) it just “feels” slow. Tabblo was cool because it had a flickr migrator and page layout features, but the problem was that the stupid thing only imported 24 of my 500 photos and left them at small sizes. No one has the UI down the way flickr does. That’s a fact.

But I’m no longer willing to sit around and watch Yahoo destroy flickr because it’s a loss leader. I don’t like what’s happened over there. I didn’t, for example, appreciate Stewart’s shit attitude when Thomas caught a yahoo employee redhanded editing the Wikipedia entry for Zooomr.

That’s the company flickr is a part of now.

Flickr is doing these crappy things all in the name of making things better. If Yahoo is so out of touch that they think mangling a service that so many people have come to love is a good thing in any way, then they’re truly a company I want no part of in any way.

I’ve already moved my photos to Smugmug. I’ll leave whatever is on flickr right where it is, but I won’t be renewing my pro membership this year. Hopefully lots of other people follow me. You don’t send a message to these folks by hanging around and dealing with stuff you don’t like.

Technorati Tags: flickr, yahoo, disaster