I’ve been writing a lot about flickr lately, mainly because their attitude seems to have changed from a folksy community run by cool people to corporate storefront run by people who want you to think they’re the same folks as always and the fact that they’re shilling for the whims of the parent company is irrelevant. It sucks. Their attitude sucks. The people on there, save for a few I correspond with, suck. The whole damn site has hit the toilet particular with the folks who love flickr and pounce on you anytime you dare criticize the great overlords dictating the show.

There’s very little room to be unhappy with anything including the forced switchover today. That’s right, today is the day that if you don’t switch to a login with a Yahoo! account, you can no longer log into flickr until you do so. Why? Well, according to Stewart, it wasn’t foisted upon them by Yahoo! corporate; they decided to do it so it would be easier to make flickr “better” (so far making flickr better has included exciting new features like limiting tags on photos and limiting the number of contacts you can have).

If you ever have to wonder where that attitude of “flickr can do no wrong, we’re really just nice guys and our corporate owners aren’t pulling the strings” comes from, well, look no further than Stewart Butterfield… I came across this post in a thread today with a great moneyshot in it:

And we do work very hard and in good faith try to do the best possible job and make the right decisions. Personally, if I ever felt we were being forced by highers-up to do something bad or wrong (which has never happened, by the way), I’d fight it. And if I didn’t win, I’d leave. Life is big and I have plenty of options: I’m not going to burn chunks of my life doing things I think are wrong. With that, a few points:

First, I am an employee of Yahoo! Inc., as is everyone else who works on Flickr. We work out of Yahoo! offices and go to the dentist on Yahoo! health plans. My boss is a Yahoo! employee and so are the people who, for example, replace failed hard drives in our data centers or do our budget forecasting.

This has been true for nearly two years, and it hasn’t been kept secret. If you have philosophical, moral, political or aesthetic reasons that prohibit you from using Yahoo! products or services in good conscience, then you shouldn’t use Flickr. Flickr is a Yahoo! product. There are plenty of other options out there, and some of them are even good

If you don’t like it, leave.

Nice one, Stewart. Yeah, you haven’t changed one bit. It’s just the same old flickr, only instead of being run by Ludicorp, it’s being run by a gigantic failure of a company.

Thomas and Kristopher just can’t finish Zooomr Mk III fast enough for my tastes. Today is launch day, and frankly if you would rather be a part of a service where it doesn’t take 5 years to give you one new feature, you may want to jump on in and give it a go. I know I will. After all, I don’t like flickr and their new “attitude” anymore, so I think I’ll follow Stewart’s advice and just not use flickr.

I really wish things would’ve turned out differently, but maybe this is for the best. You know, getting out before Yahoo! decided flickr wasn’t making enough money and Stewart and the rest of them started telling us how the flash ads, adwords, and other “monetization” features that would have to be implemented were for the best and not forced on them by Yahoo!.

It’s only a matter of time.

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