redfishingboat

Listen while you read: “I Don’t Wanna Hear It” - Minor Threat

You may or may not have seen the new Flickr Home page. You can read about it at the Flickr blog, or at Wired if you want an objective take. Like any update, there’s a handful of useful tweaks that will please some, and enrage a few. You should check it out. If’ you’re not seeing the new page, look at the bottom of the page for a link to turn it on.

Here’s my favorite tiny detail:

Flickr has long understood that people need a way to follow the responses to their own comments. So they’ve had a prominent way to see “Comments you’ve made.” This lets you see if anyone said “thanks for the nice words”, or “screw you, I like it underexposed”, or answered your burning question on how they got that heart-shaped bokeh. It was a great feature that encouraged a lot of back-and-forth, the sort of sticky social interaction pageviews that sites love.

The problem came if you commented on a picture that was destined for popularity. If you commented, and then a hundred other people commented, you’d see all the follow-up comments in perpetuity — comments that had nothing to do with you.  In fact, if you’re a jealous sort, they’d eventually start getting on your nerves. “Nice capture?” That’s a dumb comment. Or, hey why am I not getting all these great comments? Ah, please shut it off! And the way to do that was delete your own comment — a really anti-social solution for sure.

But, with the update tweaks to the Flickr home, they’ve offered a mute button for individual items. So you can stop seeing followups long after it’s clear that the original photographer is never gonna thank you or say hello or whatever, and you don’t want to be confronted with how popular they are while you suffer in obscurity. Here’s where the glorious mute button is hidden, under a mouse-over in the time-it-was-posted element:

Flickr blog: There’s No Place Like Home

Wired: Flickr Home Page Update Exposes Hidden Social Features