Porn Flickr

It's well known that if you give somebody a tool, they will frequently use it in a way not originally intended. That is particularly true with software - I have users at work who word-process in Excel and Powerpoint, and present long complicated calculations, worked through by had and typed into Word.

Now, to me Flickr is for photo sharing, which means that I post photos of my own that I want people to see and, when I find other people's images interesting, link to them on my Flickr favorites page. I think that's what Flickr intended too.

But zapping round some of the collections, just clicking on pics I like and who posted them and their favourites, I find a huge proportion of people who appear never to have taken a photo, just using Flickr as a photo store, often for their porn collections. Porn will conquer all, as is well known on the internet. So Flickr's censorship campaign was pointless. But I understand their frustration in seeing their wonderful photo sharing site being used like that...