MetaChat - The damn flickr intrestingness formula is pissing me off

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25 April 2006

The damn flickr intrestingness formula is pissing me off Three people tagged some of their photos as 'veishea', after a local holiday. Anyway, mine appear near the bottom of the list when sorted by 'interestingness' even though the other pictures are mostly just foreground-only flash shots that wouldn't be interesting to anyone who didn't know the people.→[More:]

It's clear that interestingness is cumulative and the metrics are not divided by the time the photo was up. Sorting my old pictures by interestingness causes them to ordered mostly oldest - newest. Anyway I'm posting this here in a vain attempt to drive up traffic to my pics and hopefully their interestingness as well.

post by: delmoi at: 01:40 | 4 comments

This has been a question I've wanted to ask for some time. What is "interesting," and how does it compute? Is it user-influenced? People I know here list me as interests, but I don't know how to reciprocate. It's not obvious. WTF?

posted by mudpuppie 25 April | 02:27

According to this: it's

There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

When I sort my own photos by 'interestingness' I get really old pics first. I'm thinking a lot of photos have a 'zero' or 'unknown' score. I don't see how a photo with like 4 or 5 views can be more interesting then one with 114. Maybe a click from the log on page is worth far more then one from an external site, or one from people searching on a specific tag, or from a user profile?

Anyway apparently they consider it their secret sauce.

posted by delmoi 25 April | 02:33

Flickr is like high school. There are the popular kids, whose popularity is not merit-based, but is self-reinforcing, then there are all the other people who are doing worth while things and not getting noticed.

Be patient. . .graduate. . .you'll find those popular kids were not so cool afterall.

posted by danf 25 April | 10:18

So delmoi . . .link a photo of yours here that you think is underappreciated. . .I'll click on it. . .and write a raving comment about it. Unless I hate it.

*smile*

posted by danf 25 April | 11:01

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