Tag Spam

March 23, 2005 | 9 Comments

‘twas only a matter of time I suppose.

It looks like the “bad seeds” have gotten into Flickr. Today I came across this reference of someone using Flickr’s tagging features to spam.

It’s not too much of a surprise, but with all the hype surrounding folksonomies I wonder what this says about their long term application in public spaces. Are social software services going to have to adopt a more close minded approach to community? What does this mean for OurMedia, for example? They seem like they want to keep it pretty open, do they forget about user-generated tagging?

I sure hope not. Damn spam.

Filed under: News

Comments

1. Rob L. said:

Disappointing, yes; inevitable, also yes. I hate to sound too pessimistic, but I don’t think you can ever completely prevent this type of abuse in systems that are totally open and anonymous. You may be able to minimize it with the right system of checks and balances; maybe something similar to the “flag this listing” features on Craigslist would do it, but I don’t use that site enough to know how well that really works. Do you think we may see a trend towards closed systems with specifically limited max # of users? It’d be cliquey, but over time we may find it better to operate that way than to drown in the sea of spam.

Posted on March 23, 2005 09:32 PM | #

2. Kevin Tamura said:

What a shame. I wonder if it’s the same people that put together the fake Pepsi blog.

Posted on March 23, 2005 10:10 PM | #

3. nonperson said:

freakin’ people, they get real annoying sometimes…

ahem, sorry. yes, I agree fully. damn spam, do they not realize it’s stupid, moronic, and annoying? I wish that someday everyone who kills, spams, and telemarkets realizes just how wrong it is.

Posted on March 23, 2005 11:52 PM | #

4. MetaActive said:

Well just just checked out the flickr thing….a way of advertising thats it creative…heeee..

Posted on March 24, 2005 12:56 AM | #

5. Adrian said:

I always wondered what the fuss was about to be honest. Took it for granted people would start taking advantage of them. All it is is another implimentation of META tags, the Search Engines used to pay attention to them to learn what a page was about. Of course, they got spammed and stuffed with irrelevant stuff, and so SE’s turned off.

History repeating itself, only it’ll be people, rather than the Search Engines turning off from them.

Posted on March 24, 2005 01:30 AM | #

6. Tom said:

At least Flickr can get rid of nasty people pretty quickly. Allthough Technorati is different I would imagine it would be a lot harder to remove spammage from there.

Posted on March 24, 2005 05:06 AM | #

7. Tony said:

When I first saw this post, I was going to chime in and ask if it really was “spam” in the litteral sense of the word. Then, I realized that was just coming from the narrow perspective of how I use Flickr – which is to say that I use it to store and share some photos of my own, and don’t spend much time looking at others’ photos.

Whether or not it meets the litteral definition of spam, it has the same effect to those that look through images by keyword.

The assumption is that Flickr will “do something” about this, but is action actually expected or even warranted (within the mission/philosophy of Flickr)?

Posted on March 24, 2005 07:39 AM | #

8. Michael Watts said:

Unfortunately this seems to happen with pretty much anything community based that becomes reasonably popular… the more popular it becomes the more frequently it is exploited. It also seems that the more popular something becomes the more the commuity degrades as it fills with people who want to be a part of it because its the cool new thing, not because they actual appreciate the community and want to contribute in a positive way…

Posted on March 24, 2005 07:20 PM | #

9. Small Paul said:

I think a folksonomy is comparable to a Wiki, in that you’ve got lots of people doing a little bit of work to build something huge and very useful.

WikiPedia works because the effort put in by the good guys in creating good content and spotting/removing bad content far outweighs the effort put in by the bad guys.

Whether this would hold true for Flickr would entirely depend on the make-up of its user base, in terms of bad guys versus good guys. Does Flickr allow people to flag stuff as spam?

Posted on April 1, 2005 03:54 AM | #