a hitherto unknown segment of existence

The Front Line

Ex-Flickr engineer Nolan Caudill, on Yahoo’s breathtakingly bone-headed decision to lay off Flickr’s Customer Care (and anti-abuse) team yesterday:

After being a liaison between these two worlds long enough, you end up knowing more than anyone else on the team. When you have millions and millions of users that hit every button and link in combinations you would never dream of, then reporting the “interesting” outcomes of their explorations, these support agents become walking encyclopedias of the ins-and-outs of the site and with Flickr, there are odd edge cases waiting on every page. Having people on your team aware of everything the site does is huge. You literally can’t buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can.

I started trying to write my own take on this, but it makes me tired and sad and Nolan said it so well that any further efforts are really redundant.

The one thing I’ll add is this: almost 100% of the expertise in identifying and removing abusive behaviour on Flickr was kicked out the door yesterday. In addition to their invaluable role keeping the community happy, these folks also kept it safe.

With them gone, there will likely be 2 opposite trends at once. Firstly, the number of mistaken deletions of content will rise (as the folks now tasked with the job are less aware of the subtle differences between, say, horsing around between friends and creepy sex jokes from strangers). Secondly, however, the amount of spam and abuse will almost certainly increase, because the people most adept at spotting the patterns and nipping them in the bud are no longer on the ground.

Yahoo’s made some dumb mistakes in its time but this really, truly, was the dumbest of them all.