Why are random Chinese people following me on Flickr?
April 21, 2015 10:33 AM
I have an utterly unremarkable Flickr profile. I have no one image that has attracted any large amount of attention. I do, however, have followers in China. I get a new one every week or two. I cannot figure out why.
Followers are generally compound names of feel-good words like "happyfuncelebration"... today's newest follower is "chinaisthefinal". These followers do not post any comments on my photos. They don't share anything or try to contact me. There are no patterns I can see in the site or image stats that might explain their interest or how they found my specific Flickr profile. There has not yet been any clear pattern emerging from the photos the followers have posted on their own Flickr sites either - I mean, if I have a lot of cat photos and the Chinese followers ALSO post cat photos, that would be SOMETHING. But I see nothing in common. ("chinaisthefinal" has posted 1100 images, and it looks like 75% of them are pictures of meat or supermarket aisles. Literally, pictures of meat on the shelf in a market, over and over. 90% of my photos are of my son. You tell me where the connection is. I am at a loss.)
The followers don't hurt me at all, but it is maddening not to have any idea why my photos suddenly became popular in China. Especially as my posting to Flickr has decline dramatically in the past two years - the uptick in followers doesn't match my activity on the site. I am getting NEW followers with LESS activity, and NO new followers who aren't Chinese. I'm beginning to make up conspiracy theories like these guys are using my photo stream as an innocuous way to maintain contact with each other without the authorities knowing, and that the random pictures of meat or streets or people on their feeds all contain hidden messages... Am I the only one with random Chinese followers? Is Flickr being subverted to bypass the Great Firewall? Is my Flickr site a hotbed of rebellion? I don't have a clue and it is driving me nuts.
Followers are generally compound names of feel-good words like "happyfuncelebration"... today's newest follower is "chinaisthefinal". These followers do not post any comments on my photos. They don't share anything or try to contact me. There are no patterns I can see in the site or image stats that might explain their interest or how they found my specific Flickr profile. There has not yet been any clear pattern emerging from the photos the followers have posted on their own Flickr sites either - I mean, if I have a lot of cat photos and the Chinese followers ALSO post cat photos, that would be SOMETHING. But I see nothing in common. ("chinaisthefinal" has posted 1100 images, and it looks like 75% of them are pictures of meat or supermarket aisles. Literally, pictures of meat on the shelf in a market, over and over. 90% of my photos are of my son. You tell me where the connection is. I am at a loss.)
The followers don't hurt me at all, but it is maddening not to have any idea why my photos suddenly became popular in China. Especially as my posting to Flickr has decline dramatically in the past two years - the uptick in followers doesn't match my activity on the site. I am getting NEW followers with LESS activity, and NO new followers who aren't Chinese. I'm beginning to make up conspiracy theories like these guys are using my photo stream as an innocuous way to maintain contact with each other without the authorities knowing, and that the random pictures of meat or streets or people on their feeds all contain hidden messages... Am I the only one with random Chinese followers? Is Flickr being subverted to bypass the Great Firewall? Is my Flickr site a hotbed of rebellion? I don't have a clue and it is driving me nuts.
I usually chalk weird behavior like this up to possibly-malfunctioning bots.
posted by erst at 10:48 AM on April 21, 2015
posted by erst at 10:48 AM on April 21, 2015
This issue comes up on the Flickr Help Forum every few weeks. From discussions there it appears that two things are going on. First, Flickr quietly removed the non-reciprocal 3,000 follower limit several months ago. That essentially opened the doors to following tens of thousands of accounts. Flickr makes it extremely easy to follow people on their mobile app. You can follow hundreds of people per minute with very little effort. Perhaps more importantly, it appears that people are using IFTTT scripts to mass follow other accounts (and mass favorite images - there's one guy who has accumulated over 1.5 million favorites in only a year).
posted by plastic_animals at 11:45 AM on April 21, 2015
posted by plastic_animals at 11:45 AM on April 21, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by TravellingCari at 10:47 AM on April 21, 2015