As we at Ars have learned over the years, every time you alter anything about a site that has a strong community, you take a certain amount of heat from a small but loyal portion of users who don't want to see changes in something they love. So it is with some portions of the Flickr community, which is in an uproar over Flickr's decision to stick to its guns on a long-announced set of changes to the photo sharing site.
Opinions are split on the justification of Flickr users' fury: some think that the outraged users are making a mountain out of a molehill, while others can identify with these users' sense that they've been stripped of something valuable to them. I think they're both right, in the sense that when it comes to matters of identity, a "molehill" as small as a login ID (or a head scarf, or a foreskin) can mean everything.
A brief history of the Flickr flap
After Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in early 2005, the company initially stated that users would be able to keep their Flickr email-based login IDs, and that the ability to login with a Yahoo ID would simply be added onto the new service. This policy changed later in the year, when Flickr announced that holders of "Old Skool" (their spelling) Flickr accounts would have to acquire a Yahoo ID in order to log in to the site. Screams and strange popping sounds were reported throughout the country, as Flickr users' heads exploded instantly upon hearing news of the forced account migration.
The folks at Flickr who settled on the new mandatory Yahoo ID policy have recently justified it by pointing out that 95 percent of the Flickr user base is now signing in with a Yahoo ID. But in spite of the 2005 announcement there is a diehard, 5 percent core of Flickr users who apparently aren't interested in signing up with Yahoo. These so-called Old Skool Flickr users value their identity as members of an exclusive club of early adopters, and they're outraged at having the signal marker of this identity—a non-Yahoo login ID—stripped from them by the company. References to the Borg abound in reference to the forced Yahoo ID assimilation, and many Old Skool users have announced their intention to go elsewhere.
