Thoughts on Vernissage

Introduction

After being on Vernissage.photos for little over four months, I thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts on the platform and concept. The easiest way to do this, is by mentioning what I like and what I think could be done to improve the user-experience.

The reason I’m sharing my thoughts is that I like the initiative a lot and I think the only way that a community driven site can flourish is when it has an active community. Active, in a sense that we not only post our photos, but also work together towards what we as a community consider important, nice, useful, unnecessary features, rather than leaving everything up to @mczachurski@vernissage.photos, our – obviously wonderfully creative – developer, designer, administrator, troubleshooter, programmer, etc… He is, after all, only one person and without input he is also a one-man band.

On one hand, I see a steadily growing stream of images that gives me hope, on the other hand there is also the steady growth in profiles that I want to mute because of the garbage they produce. One could argue that is my problem, but every click on an image to click through to the profile has a price. For one thing, I feel I’m wasting my time. For another, those clicks mess with the statistics. Imagine everybody clicks on an image only to block the profile - the image shows up as trending because of all the clicks. That is bad, because it is a way to reward garbage profiles.

I hope this brain-dump leads to an open dialogue about the quality and the future of Vernissage. Not in any way is it my intention to kick people in the mental nuts. It is my hope that people who enjoy photography and are in favour of a more open and less broken internet care enough about Vernissage to engage in a healthy, grown-up conversation.

Disclaimer

About the mobile app, I have nothing to say. Simply because I don’t use it. Call me old-fashioned, but I honestly really don’t see the point in watching photos shot with a more than decent camera that produces images with quite a lot of megapixels and then watch the result on a tiny phone. I am not a stamp collector, so I use the web site.

What I like

• The interface: it is easy to switch between the different feeds. No jumping to hoops and loops, just a click or – fantastic – a key-combination.

• The diversity: the categories make it easy to discover other people’s work.

• The speed: browsing – even on my mid-2011 machine with a 2024 browser – is a pleasure. Only one time I had it crashing on me while browsing, but that was probably more related to the sheer idiotic amount of tabs I had opened in a different browser window.

• The monthly news. I like to read what Marcin has done, is up to and all that jazz.

• That Vernissage is actively being developed.

What I don’t like

• Choosing the correct category when uploading: the dropdown list becomes unreadable because the text behind it bleeds through. May be due to my ancient browser.

• A quirk in the search function that stops hashtag search results from being turned into useful URLs. (I’ll create an issue for that)

• Content, that I consider irrelevant, rude or offensive.

  • Porn. One of the things about any site on the internet where one can post content, is that there are always people that try to flood the zone with porn. There are people who do not know the difference between an artful photograph of a nude person and ugliness.

  • Ads for porn. Yes, fansly attention whores on my timeline piss me off.

  • Screenshots: like from games, podcasts, bus-tickets, payment slips and such. What is the relation to photography?

  • Political posters, statements, cartoons, promotions for software and other paraphernalia. Yes, they can be important, even funny, relevant to a specific person or group, but… Do they belong on a platform that is not just about sharing photos, but about building connections and fostering creativity in a decentralised environment? I honestly think there are other channels for that.

  • The lack of filtering options; I understand that such a feature would make the software more complicated, heavier, and thus more expensive to run and maintain. Especially since Vernissage pulls in posts of other Fediverse instances, things can get messy quickly.

Conclusion

I think Vernissage has potential to grow. It has shown that since its conception. I believe that in order to grow in a healthy way, some form of moderation has to be implemented. We need ways to avoid certain people pulling every bit of quality down to their pathetic level of existence. If I offend someone by writing this, so be it. I was online when the most advanced systems we had were the BBS and the newsgroups. The power of those platforms was for a large part strong moderation, based on a simple set of basic rules. You know, the days that BOFH was still around and sys-admins actually read his ramblings, and when RTFM actually meant something. Admittedly, the internet population was a lot smaller then, and different as well.

We all (should) know that every time somebody creates something nice, there will be people trying to break it or at least nastify it. Enshittification of the internet, the way I see it, is not just defined by the deliberate actions of big-tech and big-business as in Cory Doctorow’s definition, but also by the intentions of very toxic elements in the user-base.

Last week, when I was about to become a Vernissage sponsor, I hesitated and started wondering why. Shortly after I started writing down my thoughts, it became clear to me. I would like to sponsor the platform, but I refuse to sponsor people whose purpose in life is to post pornographic crap and spread their mind-numbing ugly emptiness.

A few days ago, of the first ten images on my global feed, were blurred images of ugly crap-shots of someone’s (washed or unwashed, I really could not care less) genitals. No thanks.

Maybe manual moderation is an option, maybe every platform needs a set of ground rules that people who join have to agree with and adhere to. Maybe both. As a long-time internet citizen, for a long time, I have believed in self-regulation. I am no longer sure that I still do.

If you read all the way to this point: thank you.

I’ll be looking forward to your comments on photog.social.