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Flickr Contacts by Striatic

I’m being added more and more often to people’s Flickr contact lists. Normally, this is awesome news! People love my photos! Unfortunately, I’m finding that a lot of these people are what I call “serial adders.”

Serial adders have always been a minor irritation on social networking websites. They are the kind of people who have 90,000 friends on MySpace, but only read their own page. They aren’t concerned with anyone else’s content, just improving the exposure of their own and bragging about how many ‘friends’ they have.

Serial adders on Flickr seem to expect a reciprocal ‘add’ after they’ve added you. I’ve had more than a couple get mad at me for not providing it. After using the web for long enough, you start to expect a certain amount of outrageous behaviour. You learn to shrug it off.

I’ve been noticing that the problem of serial adders seems to be getting worse lately on photography communities like Flickr. Out of a dozen friend requests I receive, eight to ten of them will be people I’d classify as serial adders.

Characteristics of a Serial Adder

• They won’t leave any comments on your photos or favourite anything.
• They will have one of those irritating badges in their profile advertising how many contacts they have; it’ll be at least four digits long.
• Their photographs will be mediocre, but each one is submitted to dozens of communities.
• Sometimes they’ll be ballsy enough to send you a ‘wut? y didnt u ad me?’ email sounding upset if you ignore them.

Adding contacts and getting exposure for your shots is one thing, but some of these people take it too far. This behaviour borders on what I’d consider spam tactics.

Thomas Hawk recommended always adding someone back if they add you as a contact in his post Top Ten Tips for Getting Attention on Flickr. Tip #9 talks about how this should be expected behaviour and it doesn’t hurt anyone.

I think over-networking the contacts list in this way will hurt the usefulness of the feature. It will make it meaningless. You can’t get exposure by being on someone’s contact list if they’ve got 30,000 contacts! Who’s going to dig through that and look for you?

I add people as contacts all the time, but I only add someone if I like their photography enough to favourite or comment on a photo and check their stream regularly. Sometimes I’ll add someone prominent, such as Violet Blue or Warren Ellis, without any comment love.

If you’ve taken the time to comment on one of my photos and add me, I will make the effort to head over to your Flickr and return the compliment. I see it as basic Internet etiquette, but serial adders aren’t concerned with being polite. They just want attention.

Has anyone else noticed these serial adders cropping up on Flickr lately? Do you add them back? Do you care? Sound off in the comments!

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