Why I Won’t Follow You On Flickr

  • You use one of the default icons. It shows me you don’t care enough to make the effort to set yourself apart individually, so you probably don’t care about your craft.
  • You have less than 100 photos. This one is arbitrary on my part, as I’m sure there are a lot of people with great photos that have less than 100 shared on Flickr, but I like to follow people that have a deep portfolio, as it shows their committed to their craft.
  • Your comments are “award” comments. Sorry, not only am I going to not follow you, but I’m going to block you.
  • Your comments on every photo are exactly the same or some variation of the same thing, i.e. “Greatly seen”, “Great capture”, “Nice tones”.
  • Your username has “SEO” in it. It seems there are a lot of accounts that just plain state in their username that they’re trying to game the system.
  • Your photos are not really photos, but Tumblr-esque images with “inspirational” quotes or are otherwise obviously not original content.
  • You have obnoxious watermarks. Seriously, get over yourself.
  • Every fifth photo in your photostream is a screencap of your Flickr stats. No one cares if you have had over 2,000,000 views…you just look conceited and smug.
  • You send me messages to join a group. Or you send me a message asking me to visit your photostream or look at some crappy photo.
  • Your photos aren’t compelling (another arbitrary one on my part).
  • January 31, 2014