> The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account.
> Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because:
> (1) The account was largely comprised of scans of book images, not photos.
> (2) The account was no longer being actively managed by Internet Archive.
> (3) The book images tended to show up in irrelevant search results of Flickr Commons photography.
While one can argue that scans != photos, 2 and 3 sound like lame excuses.
It sounds like maybe their was some discussion between the two organizations, but unless Flickr is blatantly lying I don’t see any reason to believe that the Internet Archive was wronged.
Point is: flickr should have enough space and whatnot to host all those images if it wanted. They decided to remove that content, because "it appears in search"?
Sounds more like it wasn't cool enough so they wanted it gone, found some reasonable reasons and that's it.
How so?
My take: Dead accounts of not-photos don't seem great for Flickr or its users.
FWIW, the 5 million book illustrations are still on Internet Archive somewhere (the key being "somewhere"). The loss of the metadata and organization is still a shame, of course. IA is a miracle, but can be intimidating compared to Flickr.
Even if that's the case, this kind of thing should be handled differently (e.g. keep the account, but do some custom thing to down-rank those images in searches or whatever).
That's not how the OP twitter thread presented it.
Because I think it's bad form to just up and delete data like this, especially something that's about archiving/preservation.
Has the Internet Archive actually made a statement about that? Some Flickr support person claimed they agreed to it in a support thread, but I can imagine a lot of scenarios where there might be an unacceptable amount of spin going on (e.g. Flickr made some unreasonable ultimatum, and IA chose to delete the account instead of accept).
> If this isn't sufficient rationale to delete data, what is?
That the data is truly unwanted.
What's that about? Is this meant to cast doubt on the reliability of the speaker?
> I can imagine a lot of scenarios where there might be an unacceptable amount of spin going on
Ok well, I am going to take Flickr's word as stated until I have reason to believe otherwise, I don't see any reason to speculate on arbitrary alternative scenarios, Flickr doesn't have a history of lying about support issues as far as I am aware.
> That the data is truly unwanted.
There's not really a way to reasonably assess if that's the case besides what the owner of the account communicates.
"The @internetarchive did not ask to take these off of Flickr's site. We do not have any power of them-- it is up to them.
The Images are still in the books that are hosted on https://t.co/NHtWm9GEQu
But I understand Flickr is interested in putting them back up."
https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511018079802720256
"To be clear, Flickr didn't delete this. Our friends at the Internet Archive did. It's their account. I don't know all the details, but I believe we've been collaborating with IA on ways to improve the Commons, and I think removing the Books account was part of that effort."