Apparently Yahoo/Flickr Deleted NYCTreeman’s Account

Apparently Yahoo/Flickr Deleted NYCTreeman’s account. I’m not sure exactly what he did. I heard it had something to do with him posting or hotlinking some sort of a cartoon in an inline group discussion thread. Something about a cartoon of a woman and an elephant or something.

I’m continuously amazed that Flickr will so quickly, easily and ruthlessly destroy accounts that involve in many cases thousands of hours of work without so much as batting an eye. The deletion system is irrevocable and frequently no warnings are issued when they take this irreversible action — that’s wrong — unfortunately it is entirely consistent with the disdain that Yahoo Management and Staff seem to hold for their users. No wonder the entire web is buzzing talking about Yahoo being taken over and sold for scraps.

Users should be respected. They should be cherished and valued as customers. Having a monopoly in the photo sharing space ought not give Yahoo license to abuse their users.

Any company that is involved with social networking ought to treat their users and their user’s data with fairness and respect. Permanently destroying user data without warning over minor infractions is not fairness and respect. I suspect NYCTreeman probably did post a distasteful cartoon in an adult (18+) members only forum. But instead of just nuking all of his photos and wiping him off the face of flickr, maybe a better thing to have done might have been to simply ask him to remove whatever cartoon that Flickr found so offensive.

Here is a link to the Flickr Help Forum thread (where I’ve still been banned for over a year now for daring to criticize flickr in public) regarding this unfair practice and NYCTreeman’s account deletion.

I suspect that by the time you get to it it very well may already be locked — Flickr/Yahoo usually thinks it’s a good idea to lock down conversations that end up being critical of them.