Sarah Stierch:
While I support the use of technology, I also fear that people put so much trust into
this technology they aren't aware of the lame content being uploaded. They love to
reiterate that if the "bot approves it" it's okay and fine to be on Commons,
but so much content that is pornographic in nature is often uploaded, bot approved, then
the Flickr account is deleted. This is a rather broken approval process or system, IMHO.
Myself:
My problem with Flickrbot is that it encourages the transfer of images without editing.
So many Flickr images could be improved even with minimal Photoshop skill, or even a few
juducious crops. There are very few of the many Flickr images I've transferred that I
didn't do a little work on.
Sarah again:
I have said this before, and I'll say it again: Automation is good to a point.
It's destructive to the community in many ways though: it removes personality and
human touch, it removes human connection, empathy and awareness from work, and it has this
surreal ability to have people fully trust it. That's something that really disturbs
me, and I think it's one reason why we have a hard time retaining editors. Everything
is automated.
Myself:
I do wonder if automating some tasks cost us a few editors ... as opposed to how it
worked in the real world, editors who specialized in these things, who may not have felt
up to any editorial task involving extensive writing or rewriting or image creation were
certainly welcome to stay, but just didn't find anywhere else they could fit in when
the bots took over.
Daniel Case