new flickr - like it, lump it or neither

Flickr has updated its TOS and changed its layout to a dreadful infinite scrolling collage of all recent photographs - no room to breath - a diabolical mish-mash of images thrown together on a black background. It seems like they've done it just because the technology's available. A similar option is available with Blogger but crucially there's also the option not to use it and that's where flickr falls over. They've just imposed this bland banal blanket over everyone's photo stream - like it or lump it. I'm not really up for either.
I've been posting to Flickr since 2004 and have had all manner of intriguing photographic involvements with fellow photographers that has formed much of my current engagement with photography - 365 projects, guess where projects, critique one post one projects and so on, in fact here's the list of flickr groups I'm a member of:

I mostly post to them sporadically but there's still a quiet joy in being one of the 38 photographers who have posted one image to the Bollocks to James Elkins group whose only criteria is "‘Do you consider yourself, in any fashion, to be attempting works of photographic art?’ If so, post an example here and join us in saying, collectively, ‘Bollocks to James Elkins!’. A finger back to Elkin's snooty condemnation of the artlessness of flickr photographers.












Back in the early days there was a sense that flickr, the organisation, might actually listen to you and that we were somehow 'part of it'. Whereas now it's just the howling demands of corporatisation gorging on what once felt like all sorts of community.

I posted my last Flickr picture, a petulant doomed cry against the advancing wall of wealth creation, to the group 'New Flickr Layout Sucks' http://www.flickr.com/groups/new-flickr-layout-sucks/pool/with/8775254871/. I'm not sure what happens next and where to put my photographs online, but this blog post by photographer Andrew Newson http://andrewnewson.co.uk/blog/is-this-really-it/http://andrewnewson.co.uk/blog/is-this-really-it/ looks at some ways forward.