p.giannakis
Pan Giannakis
I hope I am not opening a controversial discussion - I just wanted to voice my experience/frustration with photography in social media.
I jumped on the internet back wagon around 2002 - there was a website called "Usefilm.com" back then, I don't know how many of you were part of it - it was very popular back then and when that started sinking I jumped into photo.net for a while. I liked the photos and the reviews but I found some of its forums to range from snappy to toxic. I left photo.net and joined a smaller photoforum called "photopoints.com". I quite enjoyed being part of that community until Flickr appeared.
So around 2007 I joined Flickr, the promise of a wider audience and different groups really appealed to me. Around that time I joined RFF and those two where the main forums for photography on the internet for me.
Flickr has been a dead horse for me for the last decade or so. With a slow interface and groups that range from over-moderated to open playgrounds, I used it mostly as a storage space over the last few years. It has been Facebook and Instagram that rose to power and I joined both. Instagram is an interesting beast, I still post there but it didn't manage to grab my attention-it is just an endless stream of pictures.
Facebook groups on the other hand promised a lot but in my case, delivered little. Groups grew exponentially in members making it difficult to moderate. It also exposed a (fatal?) flaw: with the younger generation of photographer wanting to learn to shoot film, the groups are more geared towards posting than searching current content. With time there is a constant repetition of the same questions over and over again: how do I load film in a camera? Is this a film camera? My film says 400asa but my camera 200asa - will it work? After some time I just lost my willingness to help. I admire John Hermanson who still after all those years he is still replying to Olympus questions.
Now I have snoozed most of the Facebook groups as I felt spammed by mediocre pictures and endless questions. The arrival of AI made things worse for me, I stopped posting in any groups. I find myself returning more and more to RFF and one more photography forum I am member of. And one watch forum. It is my view that if you want to learn more about photography, it is smaller forums like this that you need to join and participate in. That's my view, you might disagree.
Thank you for listening to my rant and chronic disappointment with social media.
I jumped on the internet back wagon around 2002 - there was a website called "Usefilm.com" back then, I don't know how many of you were part of it - it was very popular back then and when that started sinking I jumped into photo.net for a while. I liked the photos and the reviews but I found some of its forums to range from snappy to toxic. I left photo.net and joined a smaller photoforum called "photopoints.com". I quite enjoyed being part of that community until Flickr appeared.
So around 2007 I joined Flickr, the promise of a wider audience and different groups really appealed to me. Around that time I joined RFF and those two where the main forums for photography on the internet for me.
Flickr has been a dead horse for me for the last decade or so. With a slow interface and groups that range from over-moderated to open playgrounds, I used it mostly as a storage space over the last few years. It has been Facebook and Instagram that rose to power and I joined both. Instagram is an interesting beast, I still post there but it didn't manage to grab my attention-it is just an endless stream of pictures.
Facebook groups on the other hand promised a lot but in my case, delivered little. Groups grew exponentially in members making it difficult to moderate. It also exposed a (fatal?) flaw: with the younger generation of photographer wanting to learn to shoot film, the groups are more geared towards posting than searching current content. With time there is a constant repetition of the same questions over and over again: how do I load film in a camera? Is this a film camera? My film says 400asa but my camera 200asa - will it work? After some time I just lost my willingness to help. I admire John Hermanson who still after all those years he is still replying to Olympus questions.
Now I have snoozed most of the Facebook groups as I felt spammed by mediocre pictures and endless questions. The arrival of AI made things worse for me, I stopped posting in any groups. I find myself returning more and more to RFF and one more photography forum I am member of. And one watch forum. It is my view that if you want to learn more about photography, it is smaller forums like this that you need to join and participate in. That's my view, you might disagree.
Thank you for listening to my rant and chronic disappointment with social media.
